Crave Sydney honors Aboriginal past

SYDNEY - Thousands of people have been craving Sydney this month.

Crave Sydney is a new event that celebrates Sydney’s culture, and there are heaps of different events that entice all age groups.

To promote the month-long event, Tourism NSW started a major marketing campaign in August called “Taste the Suite Life.” The campaign promotes travel to Sydney and is being implemented in all regions of Australia, parts of New Zealand and Singapore.

In addition, an international public relations campaign has been created, and Tourism NSW is working with Vogue Entertaining + Travel, Sony, Pulse Rewards and many other companies.

There are seven different event categories for Crave Sydney: Art & About, Sydney International Food Festival, Breakfast on the Bridge, Darling Harbor Fiesta, Seven Bridges Walk, World’s Funniest Island and Sydney Harbour Island Hopping.  

Each category runs events throughout October, so each day is something new.   

“Art & About” kicked off the month and featured an Aboriginal smoking ceremony, and an indigenous art program running throughout the month lets people participate in workshops and make their own creations.  

On opening night, “Darling Harbour Fiesta” featured the Aterciopelados, an icon of Columbian music and featured other famous Latin bands for the next three days.

“Sydney International Food Festival” has already had an enormous barbeque, night
noodle markets and is closing the Sydney Harbor Bridge for a giant breakfast on Sunday.

With so many events, it is too hard to describe them all – but one thing is evident: Sydney has successfully developed its own unique culture.  

Indigenous Australians, or Aboriginals, were the only inhabitants of Australia until 1788 when Europeans made their first settlement of New South Wales.  

One of the main reasons for British settlement was because of the overcrowding of correctional facilities in Europe, leading to the desire to displace these people and create more room.  

Before the last transportation in 1868, more than 165,000 convicts were brought to Australia.  

The majority were from large English cities, such as the Cockneys from London, and people from Ireland or of Irish descent.  

The convicts were victims of petty crimes, usually poverty-induced theft, not felonies like murder. Combined with the significantly larger number of immigrants that came to Australia for the gold rush, the population reached almost two million nearly a century later.

These people took over the land, disregarding Aboriginal settlements and treated them as inferiors.  

Aboriginals were degraded, captured and killed, and it would be a long time before the relationship between Australians and Aboriginals would be mended.

Because the new settlers of Australia originated mostly from people who were either brought here by force or for money, there was no initial sense of culture or national pride. Events like Crave Sydney display how far Australia has come from its primary state.

The emphasis placed on the Aboriginals, as celebrated by “Art & About,” shows that Australians still care about bridging the gap with the Aboriginals and have not forgotten who was here before them.  

Australia was originally influenced by Anglo-Celtic Western culture, but is now a multicultural society and was recently ranked as second highest in the world for quality of life.