Brian Syron

Brian Syron (19 November 1934 – 14 October 1993) was a human rights advocate, teacher, actor, writer, stage director and Australia's first Indigenous feature film director who has been recognised as the first First Nations feature film director.

He was born on 19 November 1934 in Eora country in the inner city suburb of Balmain, Sydney, New South Wales, but, as he wrote in various papers and books:

When I was born our people had already experienced a holocaust beyond imagining. There were no Eora living a lifestyle of any kind on the banks of Tuhbowgule (Sydney Harbour), Kamay (Botany Bay) or Deerubin (Hawkesbury River). My birthplace had experienced a massacre from 1790 to 1802 and my people were our country's first resistance fighters

Syron also lived an indigenous life with his paternal grandmother in his ancestral Birrippi lands at Minimbah, New South Wales, seven miles (11 km) up the Coolongolook River from Forster and 200 miles (320 km) north of Balmain. Minimbah means in Birripi language "Home of the Teacher" and his traditional country encompassed Taree, Forster and the Great Lakes area of the Wang Wauk and Coolonglook rivers on the North Coast. He was a child of a bicultural marriage with his mother coming from the coal fields of Yorkshire, England. His paternal dreaming was the Eagle, although he described himself as a Magpie - half black, half white. He was also exposed to Aboriginal mission life at Purfleet and Forster through the 1930s and early 1940s and spent time as a 14- and 15-year-old in Grafton Correctional Centre. Even with this background Syron told the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) on 15 November 1992:

I have no mortgage on being dispossessed or having a tough life. We've all had it. Every Aboriginal person I know of in my generation has had one hell of a time. Nobody has a mortgage on that. We've all been through it. Our obligation, our mandate, as artists is to communicate with our people first.{Syron, HREOC, 15.11.92}

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