Here we are
Most likely, Hideo Kojima is working on Death Stranding 2. Certainties are obviously not there, but a series of signs in this regard would have been found by some users in his recent teaser with Elle Fanning, an actress who apparently will play an important role in the next project of the Japanese game designer. A project that would now be ready to be unveiled, thanks to a twitter from the founder of Kojima Productions launched just in these minutes.
Hideo Kojima is a great fan of Twitter and has shown it very often. The social network is an integral part of his life, even his working life, and today he published a photo, which portrays an action figure (or rather, a sort of Funko Pop) and the monitor with an Adobe screen. Premiere. As we all know, the game designer loves editing his game trailers himself, and so it's clear that he's working on something closely related to his project. Which, however, we cannot say for sure.
There is obviously a precedent for this: a couple of weeks before the arrival of Death Stranding on PC Game Pass, Hideo Kojima had posted a very similar photo. An announcement is certainly in the pipeline, but we cannot know what it is. It could really be the trailer for his next game. More remote (but not to be excluded) the arrival on PC Game Pass of the Director's Cut of Death Stranding, but it would not make particularly sense. On the other hand, it is easier to clarify the timing of the announcement.
Editing. pic.twitter.com/ny4JXPek3m
- HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) October 14, 2022| ); }
Trying to connect the dots, it is very likely that the trailer for the next project by the Japanese game designer is in the pipeline long before The Game Awards 2022. We cannot therefore rule out a possible PlayStation Showcase or another event not yet announced. Obviously, at least for now, we invite you to take this information with a grain of salt: the only sure thing is that Hideo Kojima has some news in store for us and could show them really soon.
Reclaiming Dyarubbin: “Here we are… we’ve never gone away”
Meet the woman reclaiming Dharug history: “Sydney has always been an Aboriginal place… this is our identity, this is where we come from.”
As a child, Jasmine Seymour would listen, rapt and wide-eyed, to tales of her Dharug ancestors and their connection to country – the yams harvested from the rich alluvial plains of the Hawkesbury River, the destruction of a giant eel engraving at nearby Cattai.
Named the Hawkesbury in 1789 by the infant colony’s first Governor of NSW, Arthur Phillip, the great river of her childhood had always been known as Dyarubbin by the First Nations peoples of the area – the Dharug people to the north and west and Darkinjung peoples on the opposite side of the river, custodians of the region for around 50,000 years.
A descendant of Dharug warrior Yarramundi and his daughter Maria Lock, Seymour grew up in nearby Maraylya, bounded in the north and the east by Cattai Creek.
To her ancestors, the great river winding its way through a vast arc of sandstone country was a rich source of sacred ritual, storytelling, spiritual nourishment and sustenance.
“Where Yarramundi met Governor Phillip on the banks of the Hawkesbury River, my family still pretty much live right there, and have never left.
“When I was little, my grandmother taught us to farm and eat yams, that was passed down to her from her relatives. She had a lot of bush food knowledge, a real understanding of place. We also got a big sense of belonging from my uncle, so that comes across to me in my connection to who I am and my own connection to place.”
The Hawkesbury, for Seymour, also holds dark and painful history.
As explored in the upcoming SBS documentary series The Australian Wars, the bloody wars fought between the colonial settlers and local tribes raged from the time the first land grants were allocated in 1792; women and children were among the most vulnerable victims of the violent conflict.
Between 1794 and 1816, Dyarubbin was the site of one of the longest and most brutal frontier wars in Australian history.
This dark history has stained the geography of the river up and down its length. One particularly painful area for Seymour is Sackville Reach Reserve, where some of her ancestors were rounded up and placed in a tiny, cramped dog’s leg of land reserved for dispossessed tribes in 1889 at Cumberland Reach. Today there stands a monument memorialising the Aboriginal people of the Hawkesbury, but as Seymour says in the documentary, “it’s been used against us to say that we’re not here anymore.”
Aboriginal people living on the reserve were expected to pay board to live on their own land, she says. Many worked on a nearby pastoral property in exchange for wages and rations.
“They had to hunt and find food and pay the colony back for their food. It is a really sad place – especially when you consider how big the Hawkesbury is, to be given a tiny patch of land that is really bordered by a huge cliff, and that is very wet, and very dark… to me, it’s like a prison, almost.
“And right across the river, you see all this beautiful farmland, where you imagine yams would be growing and it’s the hunting places of the Dharug people. And to be completely taken over by colonial farming, it’s such an insult.”
Seymour’s story is one of many in The Australian Wars, which gives voice to the history and legacy of First Nations peoples during Australia’s brutal frontier wars – and interrogates a critical question: who writes Australian history and how does it shape Australian identity?
SBS confronts the Frontier Wars that shaped our nation in 'The Australian Wars'
The three-part documentary event, presented by Rachel Perkins, premieres Wednesday 21 September at 7.30pm on SBS and NITV.
As filmmaker and narrator Rachel Perkins says in the show, Australian history is full of silences. Names have immense power, encoding culture, history, geography and spiritual ties. Erasing Indigenous names from the landscape is part of this great silencing, drowning out their past in what historian Tom Griffiths calls the white noise of history-making.
“On the Hawkesbury, you really see the silencing of Aboriginal people,” says Seymour, a Western Sydney schoolteacher and author.
“Around the 1930s, an enormous eel engraving was deliberately destroyed at Cattai National Park. My family were living out there at the time and my uncle talks about it. We have this rich Aboriginal history and heritage but they really wanted this to disappear.”
Seymour witnessed first-hand the power of reclaiming names as a part of a landmark collaborative research project, The Real Secret River: Dyarubbin, led by Professor Grace Karskens.
Using a list of 178 Indigenous river place names collated by Reverend John McGarvie in 1829, the team of Dharug locals, historians, archaeologists and linguists identified the original locations along the river.
It was a soul-stirring experience, says Seymour: giving the river back its Indigenous names allowed for the recovery, recognition and revitalisation of the river’s Aboriginal history, culture and language. Some names include Colomatta Gulu-mada (Blue Mountains), Bulyayorang (Windsor), Marrengorra (Richmond) and Curry Jong (Kurrajong).
“I think it’s really important to reclaim history, especially in the Sydney area, because what they say about the Dharug is that we were the first colonised but the last recognised.
“Through the Dyarubbin project, we found the Indigenous names of the Blue Mountains and Windsor, their true names. If you think of globalisation and the sense of place that the world has today, and the people who fill those places, [reclaiming names] reminds us that Sydney has always been an Aboriginal place… this is our identity, this is where we come from.”
The Real Secret River project is part of a larger nationwide movement to reclaim Indigenous place names.
In 2021, Gomeroi woman Rachael McPhail began petitioning Australia Post to include traditional place names in all addresses.
Across the country, renaming projects include that of Ben Boyd National Park on NSW’s far south coast, which will be renamed because of Boyd’s association with ‘blackbirding’, the coercion of people through deception or kidnapping to work as slaves or poorly paid labourers.
For communities that had language stripped from them through colonisation, it is a way back to country and identity, Seymour says.
These renaming projects are truth-telling projects, about “reclaiming history, saying, ‘This is who we are, this is what happened to us’,” she says.
This is particularly critical in the Hawkesbury, where the past casts a long shadow.
Despite Western Sydney being home to one of Australia’s largest Indigenous populations, too few know of their Indigenous history.
“In the past if you had spoken about being Aboriginal, your children get taken, you lose your job…So there’s a really deep silence around the area’s Indigenous history because people were so persecuted.”
Seymour’s work on the project has inspired her to do a master’s in Indigenous language education as part of a broader mission to get Dharug language into schools. “It is such a good thing for community and well-being and a sense of belonging. It says, here we are – we’ve never gone away.”
Three-part documentary series The Australian Wars premieres on Wednesday 21 September at 7.30pm on SBS and NITV, airing weekly. You can catch up at SBS On Demand.
Join the conversation #TheAustralianWars
Related reading
This Bloody War: Facing the past that made our country
I am told by historians that this history is not taught in our curriculums, but how could you not know when so much is on the public record? Writes Dr Fiona Foley.
SBS confronts the Frontier Wars that shaped our nation in 'The Australian Wars'
The three-part documentary event, presented by Rachel Perkins, premieres Wednesday 21 September at 7.30pm on SBS and NITV.