To understand Jebribillum, begin with what a bora ground is. For Aboriginal nations across eastern Australia, the bora was where boys were initiated into manhood, where law and story were passed on, and where ceremony bound a community to its country. These were never casual spaces; they were the places where a people's law was made real. The ground at Burleigh Heads is among the few on the Gold Coast to survive largely intact into the present day, and it remains significant to the Yugambeh and the Kombumerri Aboriginal Corporation as living heritage, not a museum piece. It sits within sight of Jellurgal, the sacred headland at Burleigh that the Kombumerri hold as their Dreaming Mountain, the place where the Creator Spirit Jabreen is said to have raised the land with his own hands. To stand at the bora ring is to stand inside a landscape that was, and is, thick with meaning — one whose stories were never written down because they were carried, generation to generation, in voice and ceremony.

The story of the ground's survival is a story of repeated rescue. In 1913 the Nerang Shire Council gazetted it as a reserve to stop it being carved into housing allotments — a move in which John Appel, the grandson of a missionary, played a part. The ring survived further attempts at destruction in 1929 and 1941, and saw off later proposals for a sports ground and a cattle compound. By the 1950s the surrounding fence had fallen into disrepair, and the Lands Department claimed little remained of the site. In 1954 the Queensland Naturalists' Club and the Queensland Anthropological Society publicly refuted that claim, reporting in the newspapers that the ring was in good condition, and lobbied hard for its protection. They won.

In 1962 the Burleigh Heads Lions Club undertook a year of reclamation work. They built a gateway, raised a protective fence decorated with boomerangs around the ring, and set a memorial cairn at its centre. When the project was complete, the ground was re-entrusted to the care of the Gold Coast City Council in a ceremony that brought the past vividly into the present: thirty-five Aboriginal people travelled down from Cherbourg to perform five corroborees on the site. Today the ground is protected under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act, the kind of legal shield that earlier custodians of the site could only have wished for.

In 1991 the park gained a second layer of significance. Beside the bora ring, the Yugambeh elders and sisters Patricia O'Connor and Ysola Best — both co-founders of the Kombumerri Aboriginal Corporation for Culture — led the creation of a war memorial dedicated to Indigenous men and women who served in Australia's wars between 1914 and 1991. It was the first war memorial in the country devoted to Indigenous soldiers. The memorial rock was carried down from Tamborine Mountain, and its tribal totems were designed and painted in local ochre by the artist Marshall Bell, in consultation with the Kombumerri community. It stands for service long unacknowledged: Aboriginal Australians who fought for a nation that did not yet count them as citizens. On a single small corner of ground, then, two histories meet — the oldest ceremony of this country, and a long-overdue act of remembrance.