A few dozen people stood in a circle to listen to Wiradyuri elder Dinawan Dyirribang talking about how on this day back in 1824, the Governor of NSW declared Martial Law as the war between the Wiradyuri and the British settlers escalated.

The declaration was at odds with the regime of terra nullius, the idea that there was “no-one” here with anything to lose.

“We lost big time,” said Dinawan, who was wearing ochre face paint and a necklace of possum skin and emu feathers with a tiny woven basket attached, such as his ancestors had worn.

One of these ancestors was Windradyne, whose one surviving son had children of his own. After the war, these people had to leave Bathurst.

For many decades there was a silence from the Wiradyuri people of this place. Dinawan’s family were in exile further out west, around Cowra.

Eventually, some generations later, they began to come back. But all that time they had never lost their stories of this land, how they had fought for it, and the murder of their men, women and children at sorry places dotted through this landscape.

The people standing in the circle of stones included the descendants of some of the early white settlers for whom the war was won; families who prospered on the Bathurst plains.

“Would you sell your Mother?” asked Aboriginal educator Laurie Crawford of the assembled group.

It was a weird question. He explained that for Aboriginal people, the idea that you’d buy and sell land was just as weird.

Land gives us all life; it feeds and nurtures us, and it is our responsibility to care for it.

Almost 200 years after Governor Brisbane’s declaration, all of us who live in this place are being asked to return to this older, wiser, way of viewing the land.

Can we learn together how to be less destructive? Or are we going to threaten our own future by destroying and overburdening that which gives us life?

For some, this is a spiritual question; for others, it is based on scientific evidence about how ecosystems work.

Either way, a truly sustainable Bathurst depends on how we answer these questions.