Waiting for rain as an ancient world files past, hoping truth matters

It rained, chattering on the roof and gurgling down the pipes.

Such a delicious song, accompanied by a chorus of frogs.

Walkers for truth wend their way from Portland, western Victoria, heading 400 kilometres through an ancient land to a modern parliament.Credit: Justin McManus

I’d been tap-tapping the freshwater tanks for months, anxiously recording the level dropping rung by rung.

From February last year, parts of south-west Victoria, where my house sits, have been drier than at any time since 1900, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Paddocks lie parched and bare. Farmers expend their savings and energy hand-feeding sheep and cattle or making tough judgments about sending their hollow-bellied animals off to market or to expensive agistment.

Drought extends across western Victoria to the centre and north-east of the state, where sheep on bare paddocks rush farmers bringing feed.Credit: Joe Armao

But what of those fat clouds that rolled in and dumped their load on Monday, causing my backyard gauge to record more rain in 24 hours than all the combined falls of the year?

A bit further north, the same cold wind that pushed those swollen clouds my way brought storms of dust: topsoil torn from dried-out South Australia. Even where rain fell, it wasn’t enough to make much difference to anything but a few rungs on rainwater tanks.

Winter’s first serious cold front came charging in with the clouds.

Too cold now for seed to germinate. Those who have been around for a while will tell you the season is pretty well buggered.

Australia is built on paradox. Down here in western Victoria, while we prayed for rain and exulted to the music of it when it fell, large parts of NSW, drowning, had been praying for it to stop.

A land of paradox: while Victorians prayed for rain, many in NSW prayed for it to stop.

Survival in Australia has also been built on resilience. As anyone who has been paying attention knows, resilience is becoming more imperative as climate change brings more extreme and frequent droughts and floods.

In the hours before the rain came clattering on my roof, ranks of the most resilient Australians of all marched past my house.

Denied a formal voice by a recent political strategy of divide and conquer, they were using their feet, heading to Parliament House, 400 kilometres away, to deliver truths gathered in a great document that tells their stories for the first time in their own words: about what happened after Europeans came and put an end to the world their ancestors had known for tens of thousands of years.

They call it a Walk for Truth.

It began in Portland, where Victoria’s colonisation began when the Henty family sailed in and established a permanent – and illegal – settlement in 1834.

It will end on June 18 at Melbourne’s Parliament House because that’s where legislators hold out the hope of negotiating the first black-white treaty in Australia’s history.

The walkers, the first of more than 4000 registered to take part in stretches of the trek, are of Aboriginal and European heritage. They want the same thing.

Call it justice through truth-telling, for that is what the Yoorrook Justice Commission, which has gathered the stories for the parliamentarians to absorb, was established to achieve.

The Indigenous walkers carried not only close-held stories of injustice – stolen land, stolen children, massacres and marginalisation – but the knowledge that they are survivors of a culture so old it beggars the mind to imagine it.

Their ancestors’ experience of climate change reduces ours to not much more than a breeze on a drizzly day.

The forebears of those born in the far south-west of Victoria were here when the volcanoes were still blowing their tops.

The volcanic bowl of Tower Hill circa 1855, painted by Eugene von Guerard.

We know this because a stone axe was found in the 1940s at Bushfield, near Warrnambool, a metre beneath the ash layer deposited by the last explosion of Tower Hill.

Recent technology has established Tower Hill, between Warrnambool and Port Fairy, erupted 36,800 years ago (give or take an error margin of 3800 years). Not far away, Budj Bim near Macarthur (formerly known as Mount Eccles) had an eruption age of 36,900 years (plus or minus 3100 years). Portrayals of its fiery explosion live on in creation stories handed down through more than a thousand generations of Gunditjmara people.

Thus, the minimum period in which Aboriginal people have lived in Victoria’s south-west is 33,000 years, their own ancestors having arrived in Australia’s north maybe 30,000 years before that.

In Europe and Asia around that time, Homo sapiens were putting an end to Neanderthals and in some cases assimilating with them.

When I was celebrating a rain shower that might have eased a drought of a few months, I was struck by the knowledge that many of those walkers passing my house carried the genes of people who had lived through Australia’s last ice age and mega-droughts that each lasted 20 years and more.

The last ice age hit its freezing glaciated peak about 20,000 years ago, and petered out about 11,500 years ago.

How do a people emerge from a world flowing with boiling lava into thousands of years of deep freeze, in which the sea was 120 metres below its current level and the coastal plains of Victoria extended to the continental shelf and, in places, clear to Tasmania? And then witness their lands shrinking, with the sea rushing in and claiming back those coastal plains?

Finally, a mere blink ago, there came Europeans sailing across the horizon, leading to more destruction of Aboriginal lives and culture in a few decades than volcanoes and almost 12,000 years of frozen landscape had been able to achieve combined.

A new beginning? Portland, where colonisation in Victoria began in 1834, sits beneath a rainbow this week.Credit: Tony Wright

The walkers for truth drifted by, heading to a beach called Convincing Ground, site of the first recorded massacre in Victoria, and on to a lake in Budj Bim’s lava field called Tae Rak, where the ancients built elaborate fish traps and farmed eels at least 6700 years ago. That’s about 1000 years before the Britons got around to building Stonehenge.

I waved to the last of the walkers and returned to tap-tapping my rainwater tanks, hoping for a proper end to the latest dry. And new beginnings.

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