Kombumerri Country: The First Nations Heritage of the Gold Coast

The Gold Coast, one of Australia's fastest-growing and most commercially developed coastal cities, stands on the traditional country of the Kombumerri people and the broader Yugambeh language group whose connection to the coastal and the hinterland country of the current Gold Coast, Tweed Shire, and Logan areas spans more than 40,000 years of the unbroken occupation that the archaeological and the cultural evidence documents as one of the world's most enduring human relationships to a place. The Kombumerri people's traditional country, encompassing the Broadwater, the coastal dunes, the hinterland ranges, and the river systems that the Nerang River, the Coomera River, and the Tweed River create as the ecological and the cultural landscape of the Yugambeh country, provided the food resources, the spiritual places, and the community connections that the traditional life maintained until the European contact of the 1820s disrupted the patterns of the seasonal movement and the resource use that the Kombumerri had sustained for the millennia before the colonial settlement began the dispossession that the following century completed.

The Jellurgal Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Burleigh Heads, the cultural centre that provides the Kombumerri and the Yugambeh cultural interpretation, the indigenous tourism, and the community programs that sustain the cultural practices and the knowledge that the community preserves and shares with the Gold Coast's broader population and the visiting tourists who want to understand the First Nations heritage that preceded the tourist city that the Gold Coast has become, provides the cultural bridge between the Kombumerri heritage and the contemporary Gold Coast community that the cultural centre's programs create through the guided walks, the cultural workshops, and the heritage interpretation that the Jellurgal team delivers. The centre's location at Burleigh Heads, the rocky headland that the Kombumerri people used as the cultural and the ceremonial site and that the national park has preserved as the natural area within the Gold Coast's developed coastal strip, creates the connection between the natural heritage of the headland and the cultural heritage of the Kombumerri people whose place the headland remains.

The Yugambeh language revival, the community-led effort to document, to teach, and to revitalise the Yugambeh language that the missionary period and the colonial assimilation policy suppressed to the point of endangerment, provides the cultural continuity mechanism that the community uses to reconnect the younger generations to the language that carries the cultural knowledge and the spiritual relationship to the country that the Kombumerri worldview expresses in the linguistic structure and the vocabulary that the Yugambeh language embodies. The language programs at the schools in the Gold Coast and the Tweed areas where the Yugambeh curriculum provides the introduction to the language and the culture for the students who grow up on Kombumerri country without the prior knowledge of the First Nations heritage that the country and the place names carry in the Yugambeh language.

The Gold Coast City Council's First Nations reconciliation program, including the acknowledgement of country protocols at the council events and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy framework that guides the council's engagement with the Kombumerri and the broader First Nations community of the Gold Coast, provides the institutional recognition of the Kombumerri people's connection to the country that the council's reconciliation action plan commits to sustaining in the council's operations and the community engagement. The council's support for the Jellurgal Cultural Centre and the Kombumerri community heritage programs creates the partnership between the local government and the First Nations community that the reconciliation framework requires for the practical expression of the acknowledgement that the council's policies commit to.

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