2

The first people of Gariwerd

The first Australians were among the original great ocean explorers. From about 70 000 years ago, during a relatively short ice age, the western parts of Indonesia were connected to a south-east Asian continent known as Sunda; Australia and New Guinea were joined to form Sahul. About 18 000 years ago, the end of the ice age flooded low-lying parts of these landmasses, creating many of Indonesia’s islands, and separated Australia from New Guinea. When the sea levels were low it was possible for people to see from several vantage points on the southern coast of Timor across to a chain of islands that are now submerged about 100 m below the surface of the Timor Sea. There were multiple routes to the islands and, from there, more pathways across to the north-west of the Australian continent.¹ This helps to explain why some of the oldest evidence of human occupation in Australia comes from places in the north. A now remote cave on an island that was once connected to the northwest of the Australian mainland was used as a hunting shelter 50 000 years ago, for example, while at Deaf Adder Gorge in the Northern Territory there is evidence of the arrival of humans shortly after 60 000 years ago.² From Madjedbebe, a rock shelter also in northern Australia, artefacts have been dated to 65 000 years ago.³ At the dry Lake Mungo north of the Murray River, buried remains of early Australians revealed that humans had reached south-eastern Australia by 40 000 years ago.⁴

What we know of the people of Gariwerd through the written records of European colonists might be accurate for, at best, a few decades before their arrival in the 1830s. These historic accounts by and large describe a society and culture that had already encountered and had been altered by European colonisers. Using this written evidence to interpret archaeological sites tens of thousands of years old also presumes an entirely unchanging Indigenous society and culture, which is unlikely. Indeed, Gariwerd is home to most of Victoria’s Indigenous rock art and, as well shall see, this artwork displays several evolutions and innovations over time, including new techniques, styles, and technology, hinting at broader cultural and social changes. Other archaeological evidence from Gariwerd hints at a similarly complex history of transformations over time in the ways in which the people of Gariwerd related to one another and their neighbours, and how they interacted with the natural resources available to them.⁵ From this collection of disparate materials, a story emerges of monumental environmental and cultural changes in and around the mountains of Gariwerd that transformed the landscape and its people over thousands of years.

Archaeology, rock art, and environmental change

One colonist and ethnologist, Robert Smyth, suggested in 1878 that ‘All that is known of the original condition of the natives of Victoria points to this: that the rivers were their homes … [the] Richardson, Glenelg, and Wimmera gave refuge to many tribes’. But, he said, ‘The mountain ranges … are not fitted to maintain an uncivilized people during all seasons of the year,’ because their vegetation was too dense. ‘Aboriginals could never have searched but the margins of these areas,’ he said, ‘The mountain fastness, in winter covered with snow, and at times, in all seasons, shrouded in black mists, were regarded with awe by the natives.’⁶ Smyth was generally mistaken. Human presence within the Gariwerd mountains commenced, at the very least, about 22 000 years ago.⁷ Furthermore, the mountain forests had not always been as they appeared in Smyth’s time, but had expanded and retreated in cycles over many millennia.

Archaeological research in Gariwerd began in earnest only during the 1970s, when the Victorian Archaeological Survey undertook several large-scale excavations of the floors of rock shelters in the Victoria Range and the western Black Range where rock art had already been recorded. Some of this material was reassessed in the 1990s, providing a greatly extended timeline for the human occupation of Gariwerd. Much more work is still needed. From the evidence that does exist, we can gain an impression of the deeper history of Indigenous use and occupation of the mountains and of the various interactions between humans and the environment that had occurred there since the late Pleistocene. The outline of this story is something like this: humans were occupying Gariwerd from at least 22 000 years ago, and the archaeological record indicates that more and more people began living in the area after around 5000 years ago. From about 2000 or 1500 years ago, usage of Gariwerd and other parts of south-west Victoria was at its most intensive. The history of Gariwerd’s occupation over the past twenty millennia has been driven by a range of social, demographic, and environmental influences.⁸

We can trace some of the changes in how people have used the mountains by examining the kinds of materials they left behind. The earliest evidence of human use and occupation of Gariwerd appears about 22 000 years ago, around the last ice age (or Last Glacial Maximum). In the drier, colder and harsher late Pleistocene, people probably found refuge in and around the mountains. Gariwerd, with its more reliable water resources, was at the core of their territory. Some of the oldest archaeological material, from the Drual shelter, shows evidence of seed-grinding from a time when grasses were plentiful and other natural resources less so. Indeed, across Australia during the last ice age the occupied territory of the continent shrunk by up to 80 per cent as people sought protection from the arid deserts. Rainfall decreased by over 60 per cent, and people began living around well-watered mountain ranges and major river systems. Gariwerd stood at the western extremity of one such environmental refuge in the south-east of the continent. At the peak of the ice age, the population had dwindled – perhaps by over half – and this, too, can be seen in Gariwerd, where use of the Drual shelter appears to have been at times fleeting.

The next piece of evidence appears at the Billimina shelter, where occupation has been dated at some time before 10 000 years ago. There are hints that, after the Last Glacial Maximum, occupation of Gariwerd became far more localised and gradually more intensive. Some of the oldest stone artefacts primarily come from the Mount Stavely Volcanic Complex to the east of the ranges, and from parts of the Southern Murray Basin in the north. After about 5000 years ago, however, when tree cover had expanded over the mountains and water was more abundant around the ranges, the artefacts found in Gariwerd’s rock shelters began to be dominated by more local materials, including sandstone and quartzite from outcrops around the ranges. Over this time, therefore, the activities of people living in and around the mountains were probably more focused on the local region. It is speculated that the flooding of the Bass Strait 11 000 years ago would have pushed refugees north, perhaps accounting for some of the growing population in south-east Australia after this time – increased population densities might have eventually contributed to more intense, localised occupation of the land.

At the Mugadgadjin shelter, first occupied perhaps 5000 years ago, grindstones and a hatchet, along with burnt bones, mussel shells and emu eggshells, as well as hearths, ovens and fire pits, hint at more domestic uses. Material used for stone tools in the larger rock shelters was sourced locally, even though it lacked the more useful flaking qualities of fine-grained materials found out beyond the mountains; the people of Gariwerd had become more insular, their lives more centred around the generally richer resources of the local area. At the Billimina shelter, for example, remains of bandicoots, sugar gliders, brush-tail and ring-tail possums, bettongs, potoroos, bush rats, blue-tongue lizards, and probably those of swamp wallabies and grey kangaroos, as well as a suspected piece of turtle bone, were identified. Mussel shells and emu eggshells were found, too.

From around 4000 years ago, more and more rock shelters began to be used throughout Gariwerd. How they were used changed, and the intensity with which they were used increased as well. The changing occupation of Gariwerd took place in a time of growing population densities across western Victoria. New strategies for environmental management, including the use of fire, new aquaculture technologies, and new plant food harvesting techniques likely emerged that helped to secure reliable, abundant, and sustainable natural resources. Trading networks expanded, allowing resources to be transferred across great distances – for example, although artefacts found in Gariwerd were increasingly made from local materials, greenstone hatchets from Victorian quarries far away only appeared around 4000 years ago. There are indications that sites in Gariwerd were used regularly for both ceremonial and domestic purposes from around this time, including campsites and villages in the mountains and on the surrounding plains. The Wartook basin – now an artificial reservoir – was once a large swamp, depending on the conditions, and was home to a small village. Grindstones and grinding patches have been located here, along with numerous stone tools and implements, including greenstone hatchets. Hearths and cooking pits used 4000 years ago were dotted around the shoreline, where kangaroo meat and roots were roasted on embers. While findings such as these indicate more generalised, domestic occupation, similarities to other sites around western Victoria also raise the possibility that Wartook was the focus of seasonal ritual activity in the mountains involving groups of many hundreds or even thousands of people from across the region.

In the innumerable rock shelters in Gariwerd where food was prepared and meals were cooked, Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people and their ancestors also left behind evidence of their society and culture in the form of rock art. Although the art painted on bodies and bark, or drawn in sand, is lost, the sandstone rock shelters of Gariwerd preserve hundreds of pieces of Aboriginal art. Indeed, for the Europeans, it was rock art that first captured their archaeological interests.

Samuel Carter, whose Glenisla pastoral station lay to the west of Gariwerd on Jardwadjali country, might have been the first colonist to report Aboriginal rock art in the area. Searching for stray cattle in 1859, he came across a large rock shelter in the Victoria Range. Across its walls were thousands of motifs – about 2500, all told – extending 10.5 m along the rear wall of the shelter, from just centimetres from the shelter floor to over 2.5 m above it. Most of the paintings are distinctive vertical bars painted with fingers, but there are also human figures, human hands and feet, emus and their tracks, and other simple motifs and dots (Plate 2.1). Most of these paintings are red, while several of the figures are yellow and white.⁹ Carter would write that ‘In the very olden times, before the arrival of the whites they [Aboriginal people] congregated in large numbers at a rock in the Victoria Ranges near Glenisla.’ In 1911, he observed that ‘This rock is still marked with native pictures and signs, though rather disfigured by white people writing names over the stone.’ He continues to note that there were

rough sketches of kangaroo and emu, and figures, but these have almost been covered by the writing of white people, who have had picnic parties to the rock. The aboriginal drawings were done in red ochre, mixed with opossum fat. This combination made a kind of paint, which has resisted the ravages of time and weather, and but for the disfigurement by the whites, the writings are as clear as the day they were painted on the stone.¹⁰

Although their meaning and significance has not been preserved, Carter suggested that Aboriginal people ‘counted time by moons and would draw strokes on the rock representing the number of moons they had been there.’ Others, later on, described how ‘human figures and those of animals are depicted in red, and rows of straight lines … resemble certain Arunta tribe totemic markings on rock. Mystery veils these relics of the lost tribes. They are ceremonial and sacred in many cases, but we do not know their real meaning.’¹¹ This site has been known variously over the years as Red Rock, Painted Rock, Blackfellows Rock and Glen Isla Rock, and was, for many decades, the only known rock art site in Victoria. The rock shelter, which would eventually become known as Billimina, was also the subject of the first published recording of a rock art site in Victoria when the Reverend John Mathew read an account of it to the Royal Society of Victoria in 1897; this was also one of the first studies of rock art in Australia. More recent studies of the artworks and archaeological evidence at Billimina suggest that, when the shelter was first occupied, it was for specialised occasions – rituals and ceremonies – while its newer art, more casual in nature, appeared at a time when the shelter was put to more domestic uses.¹²

Many decades later, a second Gariwerd rock art site was reported by Europeans just 2 km from Billimina. Manja, which means ‘hand’ in Jardwadjali, consisted of two large, open shelters overlooking swamp flats to the west. With excitement, The Herald in Melbourne reported on it in 1929: ‘A new aboriginal mystery cave—the Cave of Red Hands—has been discovered in the Grampians. It contains age-old stencils or paintings—symbols sacred to the aborigines.’ The shelters at Manja were adorned with nearly three hundred paintings, mostly in red pigment, and mostly hands – the largest concentration of hand stencils in Victoria – with one white hand stencil. There are also animal tracks and human figures, as well as simple line drawings. Most of these artworks were made during an early period – sometime from the mid-Holocene up to 2000 years ago – while the archaeological evidence on the shelter floor indicates it began to be used for more domestic purposes in the last thousand years.¹³

‘Breaking a path through scrub and bracken higher than our heads, we toiled up a rock slope, rounded great shoulders of sandstone, and entered the Cave of Hands’, explained one of the men who came across the site in 1929. ‘No scientists had even heard of this cave, destined to become famous. It was a startling discovery. Until yesterday only one “aboriginal art gallery” was known to exist in Victoria – at least by ethnologists’: the Billimina rock shelter near Glenisla. The correspondent continues to recount how

At Cavendish we first heard of the ‘Cave of the Blood Red Hands’. It must be the Glen Isla shelter, we thought, but were assured that the cave was known to many Western District people, though science had no knowledge of it … It is in a wild and lonely spot, among the rugged splendour of the ranges, which really form a portion of the Grampians. Red hands, those mysterious stencils or ‘paintings’, which have been found in many countries, and even in the caves of prehistoric man in Europe, are vivid on the walls of this big rock-shelter in western Victoria. Some are as fresh, as if they were the work of yesterday; others are faint. Probably they were done a thousand years ago; certainly some of the hands are centuries old.¹⁴

In 1896, Maynard Ord, a journalist, published a history of Stawell that provides some insights into the fascination Europeans had with the art of Gariwerd. Just to the east of the main Gariwerd mountains is the smaller Black Range, which contains one of the most significant rock art sites in south-eastern Australia. Ord wrote that, ‘Quite independently of the natural beauties of the miniature mountain, the Black Range basin and valleys have some local stories which are a little tinged with romance … In the early days of the goldfields settlement it was told that in some remote gorges of the Black Ranges there were mysterious caverns, approachable only by long labyrinth passages’. In these mysterious caves, Ord recounted, ‘primitive drawings by an ancient and defunct peoples were existent’. But, he said, although ‘It is still believed by some persons that such hidden caverns do exist and remain unexplored … there seems little foundation for such a tradition.’ Nevertheless, Ord reflected that ‘It was gratifying to think that by climbing over a ridge of rocks, and then descending into a ravine, you might discover some wonder of nature or of aboriginal history that had not been known to the civilised world before.’ Alas, ‘The caves with the reported drawings have never yet been discovered.’¹⁵

Some years later, in 1904, Alfred Howitt, an ethnologist, published his Native Tribes of South-East Australia. In it, he said that ‘one of the Mukjarawaint [Jardwadjali people] said that at one time there was a figure of Bunjil and his dog painted in a small cave behind a large rock in the Black Range near Stawell, but I have not seen it, nor have I heard of anyone having seen it.’¹⁶ Howitt had gained knowledge of the shelter from ‘a half-caste native of the Mukjarawaint tribe’, a man named John Connolly. In fact, despite Howitt’s claims in 1904, Connolly had told him exactly where the shelter was, and had also told him that there were two dogs, not one – although, that said, Howitt had recorded that Bunjil was painted with ‘a little dog on each side’, rather than one side as it actually was (Plate 2.2).¹⁷ By at least 1911, local residents knew of the cave: two eleven-year-old boys, Eric Robson and Harry Stanton, who called the shelter ‘Mancave’, had graffitied the site. In the late 1920s, A.S. Kenyon, of the Field Naturalists Club in Melbourne, wrote that a search for ‘a cave with a painting of Baiamai, the Great Spirit … has been made without result’. To confuse matters, the search had been conducted in ‘the Black Range, the range west of the Glenelg’; there are Black Ranges on either side of Gariwerd.¹⁸

In the 1920s, John Mathew related a story, told to him by a ‘woman from the Wimmera’, of Bunjil and Bunyip. One day, atop Gariwerd, Bunjil swept his family up into his arms and jumped safely to the plains below, but he had dropped his mother-in-law, who was badly hurt. She gathered herself up and made her way ‘to the Little Wimmera where the other natives were camped.’ Bunyip came along and said that he wanted to take her with him. She negotiated with Bunyip and suggested that her son-in-law be taken instead. He hid by the riverside and waited for Bunjil to come along. When Bunjil arrived, related the woman to Mathew, ‘he wanted to spear Bunyip’, but his mother-in-law said ‘Don’t spear it, catch it! So he caught hold of Bunyip, and Bunyip caught hold of him and rent him in two. A big tree, where the river cannot be bottomed, still marks the spot.’ The story continues:

Bunjil’s body was separated into fragments, and the birds came and tried to gather him together. One little bird used a small rainbow by way of a net, but it proved to be too small. Another bird used a bigger rainbow, and gathered up the pieces. Then they were spread out on a possum rug, and they gradually drew together, until Bunjil was whole and alive again. The other birds, namely, the natives of that age, were afraid that he might jump into the river again, so they caught him and took him to the camp. As a memorial of this episode there is at a certain place a cave with a figure of Bunjil and two dogs. A native once told Dr. A. W. Howitt that there was a figure of Bunjil and his dog painted in a cave behind a large rock near Stawell.¹⁹

The site of Bunjil’s shelter was eventually ‘discovered’ in 1957, and its location made public after an inspection by the Field Naturalists Club in Stawell. The site was photographed and recorded. Rather than finding Howitt’s now well-known suggestion that there was one dog with Bunjil, there were two dogs depicted, as Connolly had originally said. This discrepancy, and the distinctiveness of the painting, caused many decades of questioning over the origins of the artworks. Many came to believe they were of European origins. One Stawell resident said Bunjil had been drawn in the early 1950s by a young girl, and another story suggested a local eccentric had painted the figures after seeing a statue of Buddha. Indeed, the view that Bunjil’s shelter was the work of settlers became widely accepted, and the site had been struck from the Victorian Archaeological Survey register by 1980. It was restored in 1983, when analysis finally confirmed that Bunjil and both his dogs had, in fact, been painted with traditional Aboriginal ochres, but that parts of the painting had been traced over with European whitewash and red lead paint.²⁰

Bunyip, Bunjil’s rival, also became an object of fascination among early colonists. Richard Bunbury, whose station was at the foot of Mount William on Duwul balug land, wrote to his father in 1846, pronouncing that ‘the question of the existence of an unknown animal in this country is at last set at rest; the beast exists, but what it is remains to be decided & I would give a year’s salary to be able to go and look for one.’ He wrote that the Aboriginal people he had met ‘all sketch the same animal, something between an Emu and an Alligator; beating Jonathon’s half horse half alligator hollow … their habitations appear to resemble the otter, the entrance being below water … The head is described by some as like that of a large mastiff or young calf and by others more like that of an emu with large eyes & long snout’. What Bunbury was speaking of had been reported all across the colony for many decades, a large creature of myth, said to dwell in swamps and billabongs, and in creeks and waterholes. Its name was synonymous with the devil. ‘The blacks call it nearly the same name all over the country,’ Bunbury told his father. ‘[S]ome “Bunyeep” & some “Banyep”’:

Until lately no white man had seen one & it was considered to be fabulous and the extreme fear of them manifested by the blacks was attributed to superstition; but lately in some of the newly explored parts of the country they have been repeatedly seen & some points clearly ascertained: they are amphibious and move about solely at night, frequenting all the large rivers & lagoons and the deep waterholes of many of the creeks, thought apparently soon leaving settled neighbourhoods as no traces of them have ever been seen by whites in many places said by the blacks to be frequented by them. Nothing will induce the blacks to go into some water holes where they expect them to be; and on the Murray two or three blacks have been seen who have been terribly mangled by them while fishing.²¹

Bunbury would later propose that ‘if I was to start off by myself some fine day & shoot a Bunyep I fancy I should make as much money by it as by my cattle.’ He was just one of many colonists, including the governor of the colony, Charles La Trobe, who sought out the elusive creature.²²

Apart from Billimina, Manja, and Bunjil’s Shelter, there are around 200 other rock art sites in Gariwerd, accounting for about 90 per cent of the rock art in Victoria. This includes Drual, where the oldest archaeological evidence has been found. Here, the artworks include emu tracks, human figures, and other simple designs in red and white. At Gulgurn Manja, in the northern ranges, there are over 190 motifs, including emu and kangaroo tracks, as well as hand prints and bar strokes. That shelter has 26 hand imprints – many of them about the size of a child’s hand – created with smears of red ochre, rather than the distinctive stencils made by blowing ochre onto the hand as at Manja. There are more of these hand prints at Gulgurn Manja than anywhere else in Gariwerd. It was once a major place of occupation in winter and spring, when its north-easterly orientation provided shelter from prevailing cold weather; availability of food and water was restricted in these parts of the ranges during the warmer months.

At the Ngamadjidj shelter on the western side of Mount Zero (Mura Mura), occupants painted figures dancing, squatting and standing, all in a white clay called kaolin. The figures here have a great resemblance to some recorded in the 1840s by colonists, who were told they were korokeets, or evil spirits. To the west of Gariwerd, in the western Black Range, are the Mugadgadjin and Burrunj shelters. At Mugadgadjin, 100 white and red motifs include human figures as well as the tracks of emus, kangaroos and crows. Burrunj, a larger shelter, contains a striking red ochre spiral motif, as well as a comb-like illustration, emu tracks, and a hand and forearm stencil.²³

It was proposed in the 1980s that the rock art of Gariwerd could be divided into three distinct phases based on the colours and materials used and the techniques employed by artists. Some paintings are imposed upon older paintings, giving an indication as to which came first. The earliest phase of Gariwerd rock art – and the least well preserved – was marked by the use of red painting, hand stencils and prints. Then came red and black drawings, followed by white paintings, which are the best preserved and newest. After bushfires raged through 90 per cent of Gariwerd between 2006 and 2014, rangers and rock climbers have come across many more, previously unreported, rock art sites, allowing the sequence of Gariwerd art to be refined. It is now suggested that the most recent sites feature white drawings and yellow paintings. White paintings appear earlier, preceded by black drawings and then red drawings. Red paintings and red stencils are the earliest examples. The newly reported rock art sites also contain previously unseen techniques, including scratching, abrading and pounding.²⁴ For a long time it was thought that the cultural significance of only Bunjil’s Shelter could be explained. To Bunjil we might now add his nemesis Bunyip. While some distinct motifs in Gariwerd have in the past been referred to simply as ‘lizard men’, more recently recorded rock art in the Mount Difficult Range is reported to depict bunyips, or Bunyip, which so fascinated the colonists.²⁵ This is in addition to a 9 m ground drawing of a bunyip that was once found to the east of Gariwerd on Djab wurrung country near Challicum.²⁶

Apart from Bunjil and perhaps Bunyip, the precise meaning of many figures and motifs depicted in the rock art of the mountains has not been preserved. By contrast, the society, culture and ecological knowledge and practices of the first people of Gariwerd have been well recorded – at least as they existed just under 200 years ago. From 2000 years ago across Australia, environmental conditions began to improve, environmental strategies began to focus more intensely on local resources, trading networks expanded and became more formalised, regional art styles began to diverge in more distinctive ways, and territorial boundaries were strengthened.²⁷ At many of the archaeological sites of Gariwerd, there is a good sense that the most intensive period of occupation and use occurred about 1500–500 years ago.²⁸ The social, territorial, and religious worlds encountered by nineteenth century Europeans might have begun to form in a more familiar way at this time, too. With a denser population and finite resources, these ways of organising society and managing natural resources were essential. The mid-to-late Holocene was thus a period in which the people of Gariwerd, much like first Australians in other parts of the continent, transformed the way they related to one another and to their lands and resources. Increasing social and cultural complexity, and growing populations, also altered the ways in which the people of Gariwerd made use of the land and its natural resources.

Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali society

Although people had been living in Gariwerd for at least 22 000 years, the languages that came to be spoken there by the middle of the nineteenth century were related to those that emerged across Australia in the mid-Holocene about 5000 years ago based on a single root language from near the Gulf of Carpentaria. The expansion of this family of languages coincided with the development of new technologies, ecological practices and social institutions across the continent.²⁹ When the Europeans arrived in western Victoria in the 1830s and 1840s, they encountered not only the Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali speakers, but also their complex social and cultural organisation and their biocultural and ecological knowledge and practices.

The colonists’ efforts to understand the organisation and make-up of the Indigenous peoples of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales emerged in 1839 with the creation of the Port Phillip Protectorate under Chief Protector George A. Robinson. The District was divided into four sectors, and an Assistant Protector was assigned to each. Assistant Protectors were instructed to learn the languages of the Aboriginal groups in their district and to undertake a census of the population. Western Victoria fell under the jurisdiction of Assistant Protector C.S. Sievwright in the south and E.S Parker in the north. Robinson toured western Victoria in the early 1840s and wrote detailed journals containing notes on the Aboriginal people he met along the way. Parker was a diligent assistant to Robinson, travelling extensively throughout his district, which encompassed the Loddon, Mount Macedon, and North-Western regions, and by 1843 he believed he had met with all the Aboriginal groups in the area. Parker encountered a clearly defined social organisation and he came to believe that the district could be divided into language areas, and that each language area was ‘divided into several tribes sometimes as many as ten or twelve, each of which has a distinctive appellation.’ He said in 1854 that he thought ‘Each of these tribes has its own district of country – its extent at least, and in some instances its district boundaries being well known to the neighbouring tribes. The subdivision of the territory even went further than that; each family had its own locality. And to this day the older men can clearly point out the land which their fathers left them, and which they once called their own.’³⁰

The colonists likened the social structure of western Victoria to that of the Scottish Highlands. In May 1841, after meeting with a Scottish colonist from the Highlands during his tour of western Victoria, Robinson wrote in his journal that ‘the Aboriginal clans or tribes are like the Scotch clans in their destruction of each other.’ Another Scottish squatter, Colin Campbell, who lived east of Gariwerd, observed that the local Indigenous people ‘lived in clans, and their laws were not dissimilar to those of Scotch Highlanders a century and a half ago’.³¹ Indeed, a missionary observed in 1840 that ‘It must be remembered that the numerous tribes are in every respect perfectly distinct – that the country occupied by each tribe has, amongst them, well defined limits – that there are almost endless variations in the dialects peculiar to the several tribes – that they are very jealous of their hereditary interest – are often involved in fierce contentions’.³²

These concepts of clans and tribes frequently collapsed different layers of Aboriginal culture and society into one, easily definable unit. The reality was more complex. In western Victoria, Indigenous Australians were part of three large macrolanguage groups, somewhat akin to nations. In the far west, near the border with present-day South Australia, was the Bungandidj macrolanguage. Near the south-west coast and its hinterland, around modern-day Warrnambool, Port Fairy and Portland, were the Maar speakers. In the central and northern parts of western Victoria – the Gariwerd, Wimmera and Mallee regions – was a western branch of the Guli macrolanguage, more commonly known as Kulin, from ‘kuli’. The western Kulin nation incorporated the dialects and subdialects of Djab wurrung, Pirtpirt wurrung, Knenknen wurrung, Nundajali, Mardidjali, Jardwadjali, Jagwadjali, Djadjala, Buibadjali, Biwadjali, and Wudjubalug.

Gariwerd itself was the home of Djab wurrung speakers in the east, including the subdialects Pirtpirt wurrung and Knenknen wurrung. For a long time, it was believed that a significant portion of country to the west and south of Gariwerd had belonged to Bungandidj speakers. The anthropologist Norman Tindale had argued that Bungandidj speakers occupied the ‘Western Grampians’ and that ‘Under pressure of Jaadwa [Jardwadjali] people, they were contracting southward towards Casterton about the time of first white contacts.’³³ More recent research indicates that this was probably not the case, and that parts of Gariwerd and its plains to the west were indeed on the country of Jardwadjali speakers, who also spoke Nundajali, Jagwadjali, and Mardidjali dialects.³⁴ Nevertheless, there are suggestions of a third language group who occupied a tract of country from east of the Pyrenees and west across northern Gariwerd. Many of the people who were Knenknen wurrung speakers, some evidence indicates, had died in the early nineteenth century. Through a process of formalised succession, their land was cared for and then claimed by neighbouring groups, and the remaining Knenknen wurrung speakers were absorbed into Djadja wurrung, Jardwadjali and, in most cases, northern Djab wurrung country, where their dialect was still spoken at the time of European colonisation.³⁵

By and large, Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung people could understand each other well, because their languages were almost indistinct, and they shared perhaps over 90 per cent of their vocabularies. They also shared parts of their language with neighbours to the north and west, as well as central Victorian Kulin nations.³⁶ The names of many Gariwerd features would have been shared between Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung speakers (Table 2.1). The name ‘Gariwerd’ was first written down in 1841, taken from a Jardwadjali speaker by Robinson, as ‘Currewurt’. On country to the east, from Djab wurrung or Djargurd wurrung speakers he recorded ‘Erewurrr, country of the Grampians’ – likely a mishearing of Gariwerd. Variations on Gariwerd recorded include Cowa, Gowah, and Gar – generic words for a pointed mountain. Elsewhere, Dhauwurd wurrung (Gunditjmara) speakers from the southwest coast of Victoria called the mountains Murraibuggum, while Wada wurrung speakers (Wathaurong) nearer to Geelong used the name Tolotmutgo.³⁷

Table 2.1. Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung names for selected Gariwerd landscape features

Source: Ian D Clark and Lionel L Harradine (1990) A Submission to the Victorian Place Names Committee: The restoration of Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung names for rock art sites and landscape features in and around the Grampians National Park. Koorie Tourism Unit, Melbourne.

While language groups comprised one layer of society and culture, they were not the same – in the middle of the nineteenth century, at least – as land-owning groups. One colonist, James Dawson, and his daughter Isabella had learnt that affiliation with a ‘tribe’, or language group, was passed down through fathers. Furthermore, he noted the existence of land-owning ‘families’, which were smaller divisions in the ‘tribe’: ‘The territory belongs to the tribe and is divided among its members. Each family has the exclusive right by inheritance to a part of the tribal lands, which is named after its owner; and his family and every child born on it must be named after something on the property,’ he said.³⁸ Later, he wrote that ‘Each person is considered to belong to his father’s tribe’.³⁹ Hinting at the existence of Maar and Kulin nations, and observing the presence of ‘tribes’, or language groups, Alfred Howitt also wrote in 1904 that

I use the word ‘tribe’ as meaning a number of people who occupy a definite tract of country, who recognise a common relationship and have a common speech or dialects of the same. The tribes-people recognise some common bond which may be their word for ‘man’, that is, an Aboriginal of Australia … But while individual tribes are thus distinguished from others, there are numerous cases in which the word for ‘man’ is common to the languages of a considerable number of more or less nearly related tribes, indicating a larger aggregate, for which, in default of a better term, I use the word ‘nation’.⁴⁰

Howitt also thought he recognised something like Dawson’s ‘families’, or what he called ‘clans’, the ‘primary geographical division of a tribe with descent in the male line’.⁴¹ These smaller ‘families’ and ‘clans’ were in fact local groups who were associated with particular tracts of the country encompassed by the language group. The local land-owning group to which one belonged and called home was determined, as with language, through the father. Thus, an Aboriginal child at Gariwerd took their language from their father, who spoke Djab wurrung or Jardawadjali dialects. The father also determined the local estate group to which a child would belong. Among Djab wurrung speakers, there were around 41 of these smaller groups at the time of European contact, and the Jardwadjali had perhaps 38 so-called ‘clans’. The number of individuals within each group ranged from around 40 to 60 – the total Djab wurrung population at the time of European contact or shortly thereafter was somewhere between 2460 and 4920, while the Jardwadjali population was between 2220 and 4440.⁴²

Across the country belonging to Jardwadjali speakers, the Ngarum ngarum balug lived south-west of Duwul (Mount William), for example. The land near the head of the Mount Difficult Range, near Mount Zero, belonged to the Murra murra barap, and to their west were the Lil lil gundij on the Wonwondah pastoral station. Heading south into the Victoria Range were the Whiteburer gundidj and the Tukallut balug. Further west, near Balmoral, were groups whose names have only been preserved as the ‘Congbool and Yat Nat Clan’. North, at Horsham, were the Djura balug, and at Mount Arapiles lived the Djurid balug. Near Dadswell Bridge and Glenorchy in the north-east of Gariwerd were the Larnget, Barbardin balug, and Konecin balug. Jardwadjali country extended far to the west, down to Casterton in the south and past Apsely and Edenhope in the north. Its northern boundary encompassed, from west to east, present day Lake Bringalbert, Horsham, Murtoa, and as far north as Donald. The Jardwadjali eastern boundary extended south down Wallace Creek, turning back towards Gariwerd north of Halls Gap and Lake Lonsdale. Of the Gariwerd mountains, their country encompassed the Black and Dundas Ranges, along with the Mount Difficult and Victoria Ranges.

Djab wurrung territory extended from the Serra Range onto the plains to the south and east of the mountains (Fig. 2.1). Along the Serra Range, the Neetsheere balug lived at Mount William, and the Watteneer balug, Yam yam burer balug, Weeripcart balug, Mitteyer balug were nearby. At Mud-dadjug (Mount Abrupt) were a group described as the ‘Mutterchoke gundij’ and at Wurgarri, or Mount Sturgeon, near Dunkeld, were the Wurcurri gundij. Djab wurrung country extended south where the Kolorer gundij lived at Mount Rouse and at Hexham were the Buller buller cote gundij. In the west were the Beeripmo balug at Mount Cole, down to the Bulukbar at Lake Bolac. Back towards Gariwerd, Stawell, Great Western, Ararat, and Halls Gap all fell within Djab wurrung country.

Besides territorial affiliations, primarily at the local estate level, and linguistic affiliations, which both came through the father’s side, there were further levels of social and cultural organisation among the people of Gariwerd that descended through mothers. These forms of social organisation created an extra layer of association that transcended the local territory, connecting different ‘clan’ and language groups to others in the wider nation, and enabling people from different language groups and local estates to come together, for example, as seasonal hunting bands.

Apart from division of ‘tribes’ and ‘families’, wrote Dawson, ‘there is another [division] which is made solely for the purposes of preventing marriage between maternal relatives. The Aborigines are everywhere [in western Victoria] divided into classes; and everyone is considered to belong to his mother’s class, and cannot marry into it in any tribe, as all of the same class are considered brothers and sisters.’⁴³ The Kulin people of western Victoria, including the people of Gariwerd, saw the cosmos as being divided into two parts denoted most commonly as ‘black cockatoo’ and ‘white cockatoo’. The people, animals, and landscape could be classed according to either one of these. Unlike territorial and linguistic forms of organising life, which came from fathers, whether an Aboriginal child would be a black cockatoo or white cockatoo was dependent on his or her mother’s association. If a mother was white cockatoo, so was her child. Howitt also alluded to this form of social organisation in a discussion of what he called Krokitch and Gamutch (white cockatoo and black cockatoo) ‘classes’:

Fig. 2.1. Approximate boundaries of the Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali language groups. Reproduced with permission from Ian D Clark (1990) Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900. Monash University, Melbourne.

In all the native tribes of Australia there are geographical divisions of the community determined by locality, and also divisions of the tribe on which the marriage regulations are based. The former are distinguished by certain local names, while the latter are denoted by class names, or totems, and more frequently by both class names and totems. In the aggregate of the community these two sets are coterminous, but under female descent no division of the one set is coterminous with the other. That is to say, the people of any given locality are not all of the same class or totem, nor are the people of any one class or totem collected in the same locality.⁴⁴

Howitt therefore recognised that Aboriginal people of western Victoria organised themselves geographically – according to language and local estate groups determined by the father – but also socially or culturally, according to the ‘class or totem’ of their mother. He wrote that ‘The son is of the father’s horde and tribe, but of the mother’s totem and class; of the local division to which the father belongs, but of the mother’s social division.’⁴⁵ Following their mothers and grandmothers, Djab wurrung children were classified either Krokitch, associated with the eaglehawk, Bunjil, or Kaputch, which was the crow Waa, both of the Gariwerd creation story. The ‘totem’ of the Krokitch was the white cockatoo, while Kaputsch was the black cockatoo. Among other aspects of life, this system helped to regulate marriage. One Djab wurrung man whose totem was a ‘whipsnake’ or boa, and was a black cockatoo, said that ‘He must marry a white cockatoo, his daughter who is a white cockatoo, can marry a black cockatoo, but their children must be the same totem as their grandfather. He himself married a yelmara daughter but the children must be the same as her father, that is yelmara.’⁴⁶

In order to marry according to the Krokitch/Kaputch, white cockatoo/black cockatoo, system, individuals looked beyond their language or territorial groups for a partner – women would, in general, relocate to their husband’s local estate, but this did not necessarily negate their linguistic identity – creating intricate webs of linguistic, territorial, and social associations across western Victoria. Robinson recorded that Djab wurrung people had, in his time visiting them, married with Djadja wurrung people from the Gal gal bulug and Burong bulug estates, Wada wurrung speakers of Burrumbeet balug, Moijere balug, Wongerrer balug, and Moner balug, and Dhauwurd wurrung people of the Moperer gundij in the south.

Children were also assigned what anthropologists have referred to as a ‘totem’ that revealed and maintained deep spiritual connections between individuals and the land and the Dreaming. For the people of Gariwerd, these totems were helpers and guides, and they would, in return protect and nurture them. Possums, quolls and wallabies were potential Djab wurrung ‘totems’ for white cockatoo children, for example, and boas, kangaroos and magpies for the black cockatoo. Jardwadjali speakers took on possums, pelicans, emus, kangaroos and the Southern Cross, among other features of the natural world. All told, this way of organising society and culture linked individuals materially and spiritually to the land, but also to their families and local and regional communities.⁴⁷

Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung people were part of a larger regional culture and society, sharing mutual languages and interests, and intermarrying. Robinson observed that the Djab wurrung ‘are in amity with the natives extending over an extensive region of the interior, from the Loddon east to the Wannon west, and from Boloke [Lake Bolac] on the south to the Grampians and Pyrenees and beyond the Wimmera’.⁴⁸ In 1881, Dawson noted that land-owning groups speaking Jardwadjali, Djab wurrung, northern Dhauwurd wurrung, Girai wurrung, and Wada wurrung would gather in mid-summer at ‘a large marsh celebrated for emus and other game’, Mirraewuae, near present-day Caramut.⁴⁹

Social interaction was often underlaid by economic considerations. Goods of all kinds were exchanged between individuals and groups so that the diverse resources of south-east Australia could be redistributed as they were needed. Noorat, far to the east on the volcanic plains, was one site for large gatherings of groups from across the region during which trade and associated ceremonies and rituals would occur. To Noorat, people from Gariwerd would bring the prized ‘obsidian or volcanic glass, for scraping and polishing weapons’, which could be found around the Mount Stavely Volcanic Complex. They would also bring materials for weapons-making in the form of ‘maleen saplings, found in the mallee scrub [in the Wimmera], for making spears’.⁵⁰ It was through these expansive trading networks that many ‘foreign’ items found at archaeological sites in Gariwerd made their way to the mountains. While it seems clear that economic motivations – access to natural resources – underpinned much social organising between western Victorian Aboriginal groups, it was also the case that the efficient and continued operation of these systems was reliant on the highly specialised knowledge of local ecosystems possessed by different estate and language groups across the region.

Biocultural and ecological knowledge

As with understandings of Indigenous society and culture around the middle of the nineteenth century, what we know of Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali environmental and land management is mostly recorded in the works of colonists and in oral traditions. The records are therefore fragmentary and subject to interpretation. Generally, however, these materials illustrate that Indigenous economies, in which natural resources were central, operated with the aid of the complex social and cultural systems described above; exploitation of the natural world required cooperation, collaboration and exchange. Ecological knowledge and processes were embedded within social and cultural practices, so that environmental practices were inextricable from other parts of life. Knowledge of the environment was, and remains, a key element of Australian Aboriginal life and culture. Indeed, one colonist in 1881 suggested that ‘it is very questionable if even those [European people] who belong to what is called the middle class, notwithstanding their advantages of education, know as much of their own laws of natural history, and of the nomenclature of the heavenly bodies, as the aborigines do of their laws and of natural objects’.⁵¹

Creation mythologies of Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia often explain the behaviour and characteristics of various animal species, and account for how landscape and environmental features came into being.⁵² They speak of an empty and formless world, given life by ancestors in ancient times. In Victoria, many Aboriginal groups relate the story of how the eagle, Bunjil, brought this life to the land, shaping it and making it fertile and bountiful. He created people and taught them to hunt and manage the countryside. He gave them rules for living and organising their societies. A contemporary version of the Gariwerd creation story explains that ‘At the end of his time on earth, Bunjil rose into the sky and became a star. He remains up there to this day, the protector of the natural world, his people and their beliefs.’ Once he had created the mountains of Gariwerd, goes one story, he ‘took the form of Werpil the Eagle so that he could view his work. He looked over the cliffs and the mountains. He listened to the sound of water, dripping after rain and thundering over waterfalls. He watched the plants and animals grow: from moss and tiny blades of grass to tall sturdy gums; from birds that flew to animals that burrowed through the soil.’ Bunjil appointed two brothers, the Bram-bram-bult brothers, to ‘bring order to the new world; to name the animals and creatures, to make the languages and give the laws’. In one retelling from the 1960s, the story of a fierce battle between Waa (or Wa) the crow and Tchingal the emu was related, the result of which was the creation of Barigar (Rose’s Gap) and Jananginj Njaui (Victoria Gap):

Tchingal was the name of a monstrous, huge and ferocious female emu, who lived on the flesh of the creatures she caught. Her home was at a place called Wombagruk in the mallee scrub, and there she had her nest, which contained her only egg, and on which she was, at the time sitting.

One day Wa, the crow, happened to pass that way. As soon as she saw him, Tchingal left her nest, and ran after him in a furious manner. Wa, aware of the danger, fled across toward Gariwerd … and ran into a hole which tunneled under one of the mountains there. Tchingal rushed at the mountain and struck at it with her foot. The mountain split in two, and that is how Barigar [Rose’s Gap] was made.

The crow flew on, with the emu in pursuit. They came to another hole in the mountains, and once again the crow flew into it, and once more the emu struck at it with her foot. That is how Jananginj Njaui [Victoria Gap], through which Bugara [the Glenelg River] issues into the Western Plains, was made. By then the sun was so low on the horizon and Tchingal made her camp there for the night. This is why the place has since been called Jananginj Njaui, which means ‘the sun will go’.⁵³

The story continues to explain how, the next morning, Waa the crow rose early and escaped to the swamp at Moora Moora; this was his sacred territory, and Tchingal the emu was not allowed to follow him there. Frustrated and hungry, Tchingal spotted a man, Bunya, in the distance, and decided to hunt him for food. Although Bunya was out hunting, he was not a brave man. Rather than use his spears for protection, he threw them to the ground and took refuge up a large tree. Waa the crow had, in the meantime, flown north from Moora Moora to where the Bram-bram-bult brothers were, and told them of his escape from Tchingal. The brothers decided to punish Tchingal for her misdeeds. As they came down to the plains around the mountains, the brothers saw a bright star shining, which was Tchingal’s eye. They crept up on the ferocious emu and speared her three times: once in the chest, once in the rump, and once in the neck. Tchingal was fatally wounded and fled away to the north to die, leaving a trail of blood behind that became the Wimmera River.

The brothers turned their attention to Bunya, the hunter, who was hiding in a tree and refused to come down. One brother, furious that Bunya could be so cowardly, transformed the man into a possum and told him that he must stay in the treetops, and was only allowed to hunt for his food at night. Once they had dealt with Bunya, they went to the place where Tchingal had died, and plucked all the feathers from her body. They split the feathers into two, throwing one half to the left and the other half to the right, and creating two piles of feathers the size of the emus we know today. To look at these emus, we can still see how their feathers are split in half. A contemporary version of the story, in which Tchingal is male, continues to explain how

After feasting on Tchingal’s flesh, all the people travelled to collect his egg. It was so big and heavy that no one could lift it until Babimbal the Wattlebird came along. He was very strong and managed to carry the egg to Horsham, where it was cooked and made into a great feast. Babimbal had the honour of dishing it out, and in so doing he splashed himself with some of the yolk, creating the wattles on the side of his head. Before leaving, the Bram-bram-bult ordered the two emus to divide their large egg into several smaller ones in future, so they wouldn’t be as jealous of their one egg as Tchingal had been. In this way they hoped to keep the peace.

The story of Tchingal and Waa and the brothers Bram-bram-bult is told in the stars above Gariwerd. At the head of the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross, is the orange star Gamma Crucis, which is Bunya, the timid possum hiding up his tree. The larger star to the west is the spear that pierced Tchingal in the chest, and the smaller star nearby is the one that struck in the rump. The eastern star Alpha Crucis is Druk, the mother of the brothers, who are the Pointers, Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri. The dark patch of sky near the Southern Cross – the Coalsack Nebula – is Tchingal’s head. Waa the crow is the bright star Canopus, a safe distance from Tchingal.⁵⁴

The landscape, the sky, and the people and animals that live there are therefore intimately related in the Dreaming. This story emanates from the land itself and helps to explain how all the various parts of the cosmos are related to one another. It also explains the behaviour of various species – the timid, secretive possum, for example – while the story’s depiction of the hunting of Tchingal bears much resemblance to recorded methods for emu hunting. Waa the crow, in other stories, is often portrayed as a thief, which might help to explain Tchingal’s apprehension at his appearance. The ancestral spirits of Aboriginal Creation mythologies are present in the landscape and the animals that live there and are reflected in the night sky.

Beyond stories of the Dreaming, however, colonists also collated a great deal of information on Aboriginal knowledge and use of plant foods, animal foods, water and fire, all of which was dictated by cycles of night and day, lunar months and annual seasons perceptible in the moving night sky, changes in weather and animal behaviour, and the flowering of certain plant species. In contrast to a linear calendar, seasonal cycles naturally adjusted for alterations to the start and length of seasons; this makes much sense on a continent where such cycles are subject to periodic variations associated with the El Niño– Southern Oscillation climate system. The stars also provided guidance. The anthropologist Robert Mathews noted in 1904 that Indigenous Australians observed the constellations closely and noted their associations with seasonal change on the land. They recognised, he said, that ‘the stars which occupy the northern sky in the cold winter evenings travel on, and are succeeded by others in the following season; and that these are again displaced by different constellations during the warm evenings of summers’.⁵⁵ The changing constellations provided indications that particular plant and animal species would be available for harvesting or hunting, and that predictable patterns of weather were on their way. For the people on the arid plains north of Gariwerd, the appearance of Arcturus (or Marpeankurrk) in the northern sky meant it was the time of year for gathering termite larvae, while the appearance of the constellation Coma Berenices (Tourt-chinboiong-gherra) represented a flock of birds drinking water and signalled the onset of dry summer weather.⁵⁶

In western Victoria, Aboriginal people also noted changes in the wind, the presence of rainbows, the colour of the sky at dusk and dawn, and changes to animal behaviour. To the north, in the Mallee, one newspaper correspondent in 1876 reported an Aboriginal man exclaiming that good rains were imminent ‘because pelican fly away from billabong, and wallows all quambie along o’ ground. Big one rain come bailie, me know, because curlew yabber along o’day time’. The writer noted that the sky ‘at that time was like a great canopy of lead, and the heat was thick, intense, and oppressive; and there was considerable agitation among the birds, as if they expected a catastrophe.’⁵⁷ Aboriginal people in western Victoria had informed James Dawson that ‘when mosquitos and gnats are very troublesome, rain is expected; when the cicada sings at night, there will be hot wind the next day.’ He was also told that the appearance of migratory swifts indicated the coming of bad weather, as did the call of the grey currawong, ‘the chirp of the little green frog, the creak of the cricket, and the cry of the magpie lark’.⁵⁸ The wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax) could be sometimes seen ‘towering to an immense height, turning its head suddenly down, and descending vertically, with great force and closed wings, till near the earth, then opening and sweeping upwards with half-closed wings to the same height. This movement repeats again and again, for a long time, without exertion and with apparent pleasure.’ Dawson said that ‘the aborigines call this movement “warroweean” and always expect warm weather to follow it’.⁵⁹

Dawson also recorded some Djab wurrung names for different kinds of weather. Storms, for example, were categorised according to intensity and the kinds of the damage they tended to cause. In Djab wurrung, stormy days were muun muurt peetch, and a storm or hurricane event was puundaa yirneen. A storm that ‘destroys blossoms’ was called borran borran kulan chimmuk, while a more powerful storm – one that ‘blows young magpies out of their nests’ – was described as kang’aelap kanga’elap kaeaerae. Ethnologists also took interest in seasonal names, although they approached their task with the four European seasons in mind. Dawson said that, in the Kuurn kopan noot dialect, summer was kuluun, for example, and winter was moat moatt.⁶⁰ Another, William Stanbridge, believed that the year in western Victorian Aboriginal society began ‘at the end of March or the beginning of April, and is divided into four seasons’, and he recorded that in western Victoria autumn was weeit, winter was myer, spring was gnallew, and summer was cotchi.⁶¹

While the Gariwerd seasons were lost for a time, in more recent times Traditional Owners have worked with both ethnological material and oral traditions to build new calendars. From late March to June is the season of gwangal maronn, of sunrises, bees and flocking birds, when the land starts to cool after the heat of summer. From June to late July is the coldest season, chinnup, which is the season of the cockatoo, and when the first wildflowers might begin to appear across the ranges. Larneuk is the season of nesting birds, from late July to late August; it is the wettest time of year in Gariwerd, when rivers run high. Late spring, from late August to the middle of November – petyan – is the season of wildflowers across the mountains, when the days are becoming warmer. From petyan to late January is dry and hot; ballambar is the season of warmth, butterflies and wetland plants.⁶²

Knowledge of the seasons and their cycles underpinned farming, hunting, and plant food cultivation. As with other Indigenous groups in the western parts of Victoria, the people of Gariwerd were perhaps some of the first humans to practise aquaculture. Fish traps and weirs across rivers were a common sight in the region west from Geelong. In 1853 one pastoralist who lived in the east of Gariwerd wrote about what he described as ‘fish weirs’. He said that ‘About the Grampians they were numerous at the time of my residence, and had apparently been much more so, justifying from the traces left by them in the swampy margins of the river.’ He had ‘found many low sod banks extending across the shallow branches of the river, with apertures at intervals, in which were placed long, narrow, circular nets (like a large stocking) made of rush-work.’ Such fish nets, or baskets, were widely used in western Victoria, including by Gunditjmara people, mostly famously at Budj Bim near Lake Condah.

Eels were a key resource for Djab wurrung people. In the early weeks of autumn, large, fatty, mature eels migrate south from the Dividing Ranges along inland waterways. During this seasonal migration, Djab wurrung estate groups would relocate to migratory routes, especially around Lake Bolac and Mount William, and harvest a large volume of eels using weirs and traps of stone, clay and brush. For up to two months, visiting groups would establish temporary camps alongside the permanent villages of those who lived by these waterways. At the base of Mount William, along a creek descending from the mountains, a European visitor to Gariwerd in 1841 described one system of such aquaculture on Duwil balug land. ‘At the confluence of this creek with the marsh observed an immense piece of ground – trenched and banked resembling the work of civilized men but which on inspection I found to be the work of Aboriginal natives constructed for the purpose of catching eels. A specimen of art of the same extent I had not before seen,’ the observer wrote. He continued to describe the construction of the eel traps at the foot of the mountains:

These trenches are hundreds of yards in length. I measured in one place in one continuous trepple [triple] line for the distance of 500 yards. These treble water courses led to other ramified and extensive trenches of a more torturous form. An area of at least 15 acres was thus tracd over … There must have been some thousands of yards of this trenching and banking … The whole of the water from the mountain rivulets is made to pass through this trench ere it reaches the marsh; it is hardly possible for a single fish to escape.

Around these trenches were ‘several large ovens or mounds for baking, there were at least a dozen in the immediate neighbourhood. They were the largest I have seen: the one I measured was 31 yards long, two yards high and 19 yards broad. They roast their food on these places. Numerous fragments of quartz which they had used for sharpening and preparing their implements lay strewed about’.⁶³ A second system of eeling on the flat plains of Djab wurrung country was also described: ‘Our course … lay towards the mountains. Saw smoke of native fire on the opposite side of the swamp to which we were. Saw numerous old native ovens—large, some 15 feet in diameter. Pass several dieks [dikes] dug by the natives for draining of small lagoons into the large ones for the purpose of catching eels, &c. These channels were from a foot to 18 inches deep and from one to 300 yards in length.’⁶⁴ The presence of this abundant, well-managed resource meant that the people of Gariwerd were a healthy, affluent and well-fed people in pre-contact times. In the wetlands, and especially during the cooler seasons, they were mostly sedentary, building villages of well-constructed homes that were occupied as the patterns of subsistence and seasonality dictated.

On Jardwadjali country, near Mount Arapiles, Thomas Mitchell came across one of these buildings in July 1836. He said that he and has party had ‘noticed some of their huts which were of a very different construction from those of the aborigines in general, being large, circular, and made of straight rods meeting at an upright pole in the centre; the outside had been first covered with bark and grass and then entirely coated over with clay. The fire appeared to have been made nearly in the centre; and a hole at the top had been left as a chimney. The place seemed to have been in use for years as a casual habitation.’ Inside the buildings, Mitchell found ‘various articles such as jagged spears, some of them set with flints; and an article of their manufacture which we had not before seen, namely, bags of the [women], very neatly wrought, apparently made of a tough small rush. Two of these also resembled reticules and contained balls of resin, flints for the spearheads etc. The iron bolt of a boat was likewise found in one of these huts.’⁶⁵

The plentiful birds around Gariwerd were also actively hunted. Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali men hunted and snared a variety of species, including brolgas, bush turkeys, ducks, emus, parrots and swans. ‘They had the art here of catching birds with a long slender stick like a fishing rod, at the end of which was a noose of grass twisted up. With this apparatus and a screen of boughs, they succeeded in putting salt on birds’ tails to some purpose,’ wrote one Gariwerd squatter.⁶⁶ In more detail, another colonist whose pastoral station was at the foot of Mount William wrote that ‘the blacks will generally succeed in catching [bush turkeys] if they try,’ and described how they would ‘crawl along the ground perfectly flat holding a leafy branch of a tree or a small bush in the left hand in such a manner as to screen the hand from the bird’s sight, while two long wands are carried in the right hand, one of which has a string open noose at the end made of the sinews of the kangaroo, and the other has a small bird generally a lark or a quail dangling by a string’. The hunter edged closer to the bird, holding the leaves or bush ‘so as to make it always maintain a natural position & appearance’, and when the ‘inquisitive bird stops to examine the little one which seems to be twittering towards it’, the noose would be dropped over its head.⁶⁷ A variant of this method was also recorded by a pastoralist to the north of Gariwerd, who wrote that ‘When the hot weather prevails, birds are easily caught by them in the following manner: They conceal themselves in an arbour of boughs, close to the small remnants of surface water, or at wells, and snare the birds by laying a gin (attached to the end of a rod) where the birds must or are most likely to stand when they come to drink. Having secured their victim, they draw the rod in, and by having the same snare attached to the end of the rod, they can set it again without leaving the arbour or frightening other birds away by showing themselves.’⁶⁸

Hunting emus evidently required a different approach. In some cases, large holes were dug near swamps; when emus came to drink, they would become trapped in the mud. Near the Wannon River, noted one visitor, ‘There are hiding places, made in the trees, that are situated in the gullies and where the natives used to conceal themselves and watch for the emu passing when they would spear them from the tree.’ The observer noted that ‘I have seen in my travels a great number of these little bush huts in trees, mostly cherry trees. The natives, when the cherries are ripe, break off a large branch and lay it under the tree. He ascends before daylight and it is placed in the track of the emu. He then, with a strong and long spear made for the purpose, spears the bird.’⁶⁹

This method of hunting emus is reminiscent of a story related to Dawson, who wrote of ‘a tradition respecting the existence at one time of some very large birds, which were incapable of flight, and resembled emus. They lived long ago, when the volcanic hills were in a state of eruption. The native name for them is “meeheeruung parrinmall” – “big emu”, and they are described hyperbolically as so large that their “heads were as high as the hills,” and so formidable that a kick from one of them would kill a man. These birds were much feared on account of their extraordinary courage, strength, and speed of foot’, wrote Dawson. ‘When one was seen, two of the bravest men of the tribe were ordered to kill it.’ He continues: ‘As they dared not attack it on foot, they provided themselves with a great many spears and climbed up a tree; and when the bird came to look at them, they speared it from above. The last specimen of this extinct bird was seen near the site of Hamilton.’⁷⁰ Although there is no direct archaeological evidence of human predation, Dawson’s informant was plausibly describing how Genyornis newtoni – the mihirung, or ‘thunder bird’, rendered here as ‘meeheeruung’ – might have been hunted before it became extinct. If the extant fossil record for the mihirung is taken alone as evidence, the story told to Dawson would have to have been over 35 000 years old.

In any case, spears were the weapon of choice for hunting larger animals. A squatter exclaimed to his relatives at home in 1844, ‘How formidable a weapon even a light wooden spear is in the hands of these savages, you may guess from the horse having been struck through the centre of the forehead & killed on the spot.’ Recounting witnessing a large bullock speared, he said ‘I am satisfied that a ball … & smooth bore would not have gone through at twenty yards.’ Of the spears used throughout Gariwerd and the western parts of the Port Phillip District, he said they were ‘of the rudest possible description … they are compelled to use the long thin stems of the tea tree & the stringy bark saplings … these they sharpen to a long taper conical point & harden the whole spear which is about six or seven feet long in the fire to prevent its warping.’ Using a ‘throwing stick they can send these rude missiles from 80 to 120 yards & for short distances with surprising accuracy’. Aboriginal hunters in the Gariwerd area would carry with them ‘three or four light throwing spears’, along with one or two longer, heavier barbed spears ‘with pieces of bone or glass and attached with strong cement & sinews’. They also took ‘a shield, leangle, waddy, tomahawk, & one, or more, commonly two boomerangs’.⁷¹

Along with these more organised activities, women and children would also gather small animals and reptiles, along with birds’ eggs and plant foods. In the north of Gariwerd, said one observer, ‘The aborigines in this tract of country subsist chiefly on a variety of roots which are very abundant, opossums, small kangaroos (called cumma) which frequent the edge of the mallee scrub, an occasional emu, the fruit or flower of the stunted honey-suckle (very prevalent in the desert), and manna in the autumn.’⁷² ‘In some of the fresh water ponds there are found immense quantities of mussels, which the native women dive for,’ wrote one European. ‘We often saw numbers of shells lying in heaps where the blacks had been eating them.’⁷³ Women would also search in the reeds by lakesides and waterholes for swans’ eggs, and children would climb trees in search of smaller birds’ nests. When Canopus appeared above the horizon in early spring, Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali women and children knew it was the time of year to seek emu eggs. The foraging activities of Djab wurrung women were attested to in 1836, when Mitchell and his expedition came across a reed basket to the south-east of Gariwerd containing ‘three snakes; three rats about 2 lbs. of small fish, like white bait; cray fish; and a quantity of the cichoraceous plant tao, usually found growing on the plains with a bright yellow flower [myrnong]. There were also in the bag, various bodkins and colouring stones, and two mogos or stone hatchets.’⁷⁴

Writing in 1853, a colonist noted that, when he arrived in the region, ‘One variety of food was in use among the natives here which was new to me at the time. It was a portion of the grass-tree top. This was first pulled out of the stem, a few preliminary taps being made with the back of the tomahawk, and then a length of soft, white, succulent matter neatly twisted off the lower extremity, where it had been embedded in the rugged trunk; it reminded me of asparagus in the proportion of tender to tough.’ He also ‘observed them take a red grub out from the grass-tree, which I was informed was “merrijig” and “likit sugar”, with an assurance further, that I was a “stupid fellow” for not adopting it as an article of diet.’ He continues:

I cannot confirm the character given of this eat-able, however, not having been induced by the scorn and wonder of the aborigines to test their bill of fare further than by trying the crawfish and grass-tree. I conceive it quite possible, however, that an unprejudiced person might pronounce grubs red or white less repulsive in appearance as food than a fat, delicious oyster. I am by no means convinced that, while in our self-satisfied horror at seeing fellow-men, black and savage though they be, eating things certainly not unlike worms, we abstain from Australian grubs, we may not be losing the enjoyment of a delicacy second only to white-bait.⁷⁵

Perhaps the most widely consumed plant food in south-eastern Australia was the yam daisy, which was often referred to by colonists simply as an edible root, and by Victorian Aboriginal people as myrnong. This was a staple of Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung diets throughout the year. One early colonist in the area in 1841 recorded women ‘spread over the plain as far as [he] could see them … each had a load [of myrnong] as much as she could carry’. Indeed, the baskets carried by the women who lived around Gariwerd could hold up to 30 kg, and the evidence suggests they were harvesting vast quantities of the sweet, starchy tubers. The harvest remained sustainable because the myrnong tubers were only thinned out, while the digging aerated the soil, stirring through litter and ash, and cultivated and fertilised myrnong and other edible lilies and orchids. The absorbent and loose nature of the cultivated soils were often remarked upon by European colonists in the middle of the nineteenth century.⁷⁶

Cultivation of plant foods was aided by Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung use of controlled burning, which was often intended to increase yields of perennial herbs and native orchids, lilies and myrnong. The use of fire on selected patches of the land eradicated competitor species, fertilised the soil with ashes, and opened the area to sunlight, ensuring an abundant crop by spring. The rich pasture produced by selective burning would also attract animals for hunting. This form of land management was applied with a great deal of care. In Western Australia one colonist had recorded in 1840 that ‘The dexterity with which they [Aboriginal Australians] manage so proverbially a dangerous agent as fire is indeed astonishing. Those to whom this duty is especially entrusted, and who guide or stop the running flame, are armed with large green boughs, with which, if it moves in a wrong direction, they beat it out.’ He observed, with some admiration, that he could ‘conceive no finer subject for a picture than a party of these swarthy beings engaged in kindling, moderating, and directing the destructive element, which under their care seems almost to change its nature, acquiring, as it were, complete docility, instead of the ungovernable fury we are accustomed to ascribe to it.’⁷⁷

The colonists were well aware of the use of fire in Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali land management. A squatter on the plains adjacent to the Serra Range had, in 1841, complained of the ‘constant fires … in all parts of the country, kindled either accidentally or by the blacks for the sake of the young & sweet grass that springs up the year after the burning of the old & attracts game.’⁷⁸ In December of that year he told his father that ‘The whole face of the country appears from any elevated ground to be enveloped in smoke so numerous & extensive are the fires.’ He explained that fires would sometimes arise ‘spontaneously from the friction of dead branches of the trees in windy weather; sometimes they are lighted by the blacks for the sake of the young grass that springs & entices the kangaroos & emus &c.’⁷⁹

The forests of the mountains themselves experienced very few intense bushfires, despite the presence of an active burning regime on the open plains below. Indeed, that the scrub and forests of Gariwerd were generally not managed with fire is attested to by the need for tracks through the forest understorey. One pastoralist in the northern ranges noted how it was in Gariwerd that he ‘first saw the tracks formed by the natives travelling over any particular pass. There was one across the Grampian Range, about 15 miles north of Mount William, leading up a wild romantic glen and over on to the source of the Glenelg. I found another through the tea-tree scrub of the Wannon, near Mount Sturgeon, from which, on each side of the river, other tracks diverged over the open ground; they were much like cattle tracks except that they passed over places which cattle were not likely to attempt.’⁸⁰

One of the outcomes of Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali fire regimes, apart from encouraging the growth of plant foods and attracting animals, was to shape the landscapes around Gariwerd into open woodlands and grasslands punctuated with large trees, such as river red gums, with very little understorey. In addition to this, the soils of western Victoria were rich and fertile, and water was in abundance. The climate was temperate and agreeable. These environmental conditions, partly shaped by the people of Gariwerd and their neighbours, and certainly attractive to them, proved alluring to a group of people with an entirely different worldview and understanding of nature. Their arrival in western Victoria signalled vast transformations to the Gariwerd landscape – including the introduction of intense bushfires into the ranges – and their meeting with the Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung people would leave a grim legacy.

Endnotes

1.Norman K, Inglis J, Clarkson C, Tyler Faith J, Shulmeister J, Harris D (2018) An early colonisation pathway into northwest Australia 70-60,000 years ago. Quaternary Science Reviews 180, 229–239. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2017.11.023

2.Veth P, Ward I, Manne T, Ulm S, Ditchfield K, Dortch J, Hook F et al. (2017) Early human occupation of a maritime desert, Barrow Island, North-West Australia. Quaternary Science Reviews 168, 19–29; Roberts RG, Jones R, Spooner NA, Head MJ, Murray AS, Smith MA (1994) The human colonisation of Australia: optical dates of 53,000 and 60,000 years bracket human arrival at Deaf Adder Gorge, Northern Territory. Quaternary Science Reviews 13, 575–583.

3.Clarkson C, Marwick B, Fullagar R, Wallis L, Smith M, Roberts RG et al. (2017) Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago. Nature 547, 306–310. doi:10.1038/nature22968

4.Bowler JM, Johnston H, Olley JM, Prescott JR, Roberts RG, Shawcross W, Spooner NA (2003) New ages for human occupation and climatic change at Lake Mungo, Australia. Nature 421, 837–840. doi:10.1038/nature01383

5.For a discussion of these issues, see Colley S (2002) Uncovering Australia: Archaeology, Indigenous People, and the Public. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

6.Smyth RB (1878) The Aborigines of Victoria, Vol. 1, pp. 33–34. George Robertson, London.

7.Bird C, Frankel D, van Waarden N (1998) New radiocarbon determinations from the Grampians-Gariwerd region, western Victoria. Archaeology in Oceania 33, 31–36; Bird C, Frankel D (2005) An Archaeology of Gariwerd: From Pleistocene to Holocene in Western Victoria. University of Queensland, Brisbane.

8.The following narrative is derived from a range of sources. For Gariwerd, see Bird, Frankel and van Waarden (1998); Bird and Frankel (2005); Gunn RG (2003) Three more pieces to the puzzle: Aboriginal occupation of Gariwerd (Grampians), Western Victoria. The Artefact 26, 32–50; McNiven I, David B, Lourandos H (1999) Long-term Aboriginal use of western Victoria: Reconsidering the significance of recent Pleistocene dates for the Grampians-Gariwerd region. Archaeology in Oceania 34(2), 83–85. For late-Pleistocene and Holocene population movements, see Williams AN, Ulm S, Cook AR, Langley MC, Collard M (2013) Human refugia in Australia during the Last Glacial Maximum and Terminal Pleistocene: A geospatial analysis of the 25–12 ka Australian archaeological record. Journal of Archaeological Science 40(12), 4612–4625; Williams AN, Ulm S, Turney CSM, Rohde D, White G (2015) Holocene demographic changes and the emergence of complex societies in prehistoric Australia. PloS One 10(6), E0128661; Williams AN, Ulm S, Sapienza T, Lewis S, Turney CSM (2018) Sea-level change and demography during the last glacial termination and early Holocene across the Australian continent. Quaternary Science Reviews 182(C), 144–154. For mid-Holocene intensification, see Lourandos H (1983) Intensification: A Late Pleistocene-Holocene archaeological sequence from southwestern Victoria. Archaeology in Oceania 18(2), 81–94; Brian D (2006) Harry Lourandos, the ‘great intensification debate’, and the representation of Indigenous pasts. In The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies. (Eds D Bruno, B Barker and I McNiven) pp. 107–122. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.

9.Gunn RG (1983) Aboriginal rock art in the Grampians. Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey 16.

10.Carter S (1911) Reminiscences of the Early Days of the Wimmera. Norman Bros., Melbourne, p. 42.

11.‘Mystery cave in Grampians’ (1929) The Herald, 11 March, p. 1.

12.Bird and Frankel (2005).

13.Bird and Frankel (2005).

14.‘Mystery cave in Grampians’ (1929).

15.Ord M (1896) Stawell: Past and Present. Stawell News & P.C. Chronicle, Stawell, p. 45.

16.Howitt A (1904) The Native Tribes of South-east Australia. Macmillan, London, p. 494.

17.Alfred William Howitt Papers, MS 9356, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. The papers are being digitised in a project led by Jason Gibson at <https://fromthepage.com/tyay/howitt-and-fison-papers>

18.Kenyon AS (1929) in Clark ID (2016) ‘We Are All of One Blood’: A History of the Djabwurrung Aboriginal People of Western Victoria, 1836–1901. Vol. 1. Createspace Publishing, Scotts Valley, p. 69.

19.Mathew J (1925) Aboriginal sketch: Gleanings in Aboriginal magic. The Australasian, 7 March, p. 66.

20.Clark (2016).

21.Bunbury RH (1846) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 30 December 1846. Papers of Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.

22.Clark ID (2018) A fascination with bunyips: Bunbury, La Trobe, Wathen, and the Djab wurrung people of Western Victoria. La Trobeana 17(1), 27–39.

23.Wettenhall G (1999) The People of Gariwerd: The Grampians’ Aboriginal Heritage. Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Melbourne.

24.Gunn RG, Goodes J (2018) Wartook Lookout 1 (WO-1) and the Gariwerd rock art sequence, Victoria. In Excavations, Surveys and Heritage Management in Victoria 7. (Eds C Spry, E Foley, D Frankel, S Lawrence, I Berelov and S Canning) pp. 7–11. La Trobe University, Melbourne; Gunn RG, Goodes J, Douglas L (pers. comm).

25.Hinchliffe J (2019) Rediscovered rock art reveals an ancient monster. The Age, 13 January (online).

26.Clark (2018).

27.Williams AN, Ulm S, Turney CSM, Rohde D, White G (2015) Holocene demographic changes and the emergence of complex societies in prehistoric Australia. PLoS ONE 10(6), e0128661. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0128661

28.Bird and Frankel (2005).

29.Bouckaert R, Bowern C, Atkinson Q (2018) The origin and expansion of Pama– Nyungan languages across Australia. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2(4), 741–749. doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0489-3

30.Parker ES (1854) The Aborigines of Australia. Lecture delivered in the Mechanics’ Hall, Melbourne, before the John Knox Young Men’s Association, 10 May 1854. Hugh McColl, Melbourne, p. 11.

31.Campbell C (n.d.) in Bride TF (Ed.) (1898 [1969]) Letters from Victorian Pioneers. Heinemann, Melbourne, p. 319.

32.Tuckfield (1840) in Clark (2016).

33.Tindale NB (1974) Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names. University of California Press, Berkeley.

34.Clark ID (1998) Understanding the enemy – Ngamadjid or foreign invader? Aboriginal perception of Europeans in nineteenth century western Victoria. Monash University Faculty of Business and Economics Working Paper 73, 1–25.

35.Clark ID (2006) Land succession and fission in nineteenth-century western Victoria: the case of Knenknenwurrung. Australian Journal of Anthropology 17(1), 1–14. doi:10.1111/j.1835-9310.2006.tb00044.x

36.Clark (2016).

37.Clark ID, Harradine LL (1990) A Submission to the Victorian Place Names Committee: The restoration of Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung names for rock art sites and landscape features in and around the Grampians National Park. Koorie Tourism Unit, Melbourne.

38.Dawson J (1881) Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia. George Robertson, Melbourne, p. 7.

39.Dawson (1881), p. 26.

40.Howitt (1904), p. 41.

41.Howitt (1904), p. 44.

42.Clark ID (1990) Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900. Monash University, Melbourne.

43.Dawson (1881), p. 26.

44.Howitt (1904), p. 42.

45.Howitt (1904), p. 43.

46.Hood (n.d.) in Clark (2016), p. 62.

47.Wettenhall (2009).

48.Robinson G (1841) in Clark (1990), p. 91.

49.Dawson (1881), p. 3.

50.Dawson (1881), p. 78.

51.Dawson (1881), p. iv.

52.Cahir F, Clark I, Clarke P (2018) Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-Eastern Australia: Perspectives of Early Colonists. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.

53.Massola A (1968) Bunjil’s Cave: Myths, Legends, and Superstitions of the Aborigines of South-east Australia. Lansdowne Press, Melbourne.

54.Wettenhall G (1999), pp. 49–50. Adapted from an account written by Martin Gordon (1998) for Brambuk: The National Park & Cultural Centre, Halls Gap.

55.Mathews R (1904) Ethnological notes on the Aboriginal tribes of New South Wales and Victoria. Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales 38, 203–281.

56.Cahir, Clark and Clarke (2018).

57.The Traveller (1878) Border Watch [Mount Gambier, South Australia]. 29 June, p. 4.

58.Dawson (1881), p. 98.

59.Dawson (1881), p. iv.

60.Dawson (1881), pp. xxxix–xl.

61.Stanbridge WE (1857) On the astronomy and mythology of the Aborigines of Victoria. Philosophical Institute of Victoria. Transactions 12, 127–140; Stanbridge WE (1861) Some particulars on the general characteristics, astronomy, and mythology of the tribes of the central part of Victoria, Southern Australia. Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 1, 304.

62.Brambuk: The National Park & Cultural Centre (2019) Gariwerd Six Seasons. Gariwerd Enterprises, Halls Gap, <http://www.brambuk.com.au/gariwerdsixseasons.htm>.

63.Robinson GA (1841) in Clark ID (Ed.) (1998) The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate. Vol. 2: 1 October 1840–31 August 1841. Heritage Matters, Melbourne, p. 308.

64.Robinson (1841) in Clark (1998), p. 306.

65.Mitchell (1839), p. 194.

66.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 271.

67.Bunbury RH (1845) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 1 April 1845. Papers of the Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.

68.Clow TM (1853) in Bride TF (Ed.) (1898) Letters from Victorian Pioneers. RS Brain, Melbourne, p. 112. Clow’s second letter does not appear in the 1969 edition of this book.

69.Robinson (1841) in Clark (1998), p. 256.

70.Dawson (1881), p. 92.

71.Bunbury RH (1844) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 25 December 1844. Papers of the Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.

72.Clow TM (1853) in Bride (1898), p. 112.

73.Kirkland (1845) in Clark (2016). Vol. 3, p. 14.

74.Mitchell T (1839) Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia. Vol. 2. T & W Boone, London, p. 270.

75.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 272.

76.Wettenhall (1990).

77.Stokes JL (1840) in Wettenhall (1999), p. 35.

78.Bunbury RH (1841) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 14 December 1841. Papers of the Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.

79.Bunbury RH (1841) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 18 December 1841. Papers of the Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.

80.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 272.