The rapid development of the motor car and the multitudinous uses of petroleum in the industrial world tend to form in the back of our minds the idea that petroleum is something new, when in reality petroleum existed in remotest antiquity, and most of the ancients used it for a variety of purposes. It furnished fuel for the devotion man paid to fire as a sacred element; to him the occurrence of flammable material issuing in streams from the earth must have been a remarkable phenomenon, which he was quick to connect with magic and religion, so that many places where seepages occurred were sites of fire temples where the fire god was worshipped at eternal flames.
The University of Sydney acknowledges that its campuses and facilities sit on the ancestral lands of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples, who have for thousands of generations exchanged knowledge for the benefit of all.
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