We must walk with Victoria’s First Peoples on the land they made beautiful

Noorat, a village of about 300 people, slumbers beneath the high green slope of a volcano on western Victoria’s vast lava plain, its crust punctuated by craters and lakes.

Time is a mind-bending concept in this landscape.

In modern Victoria, Noorat is considered an old village; white squatters arrived in the late 1830s, and the town got its first post office in 1875.

The crater of the dormant volcano Budj Bim (until recently Mount Eccles), in south-west Victoria, as depicted by Austrian-born painter Eugene von Guerard in 1865. Credit: State Library of Victoria.

Its volcano, Mount Noorat, is part of what is called the Newer Volcanics Province. It last blew its top, according to research, about 576,000 years ago.

About four kilometres to the south-west sits Lake Keilambete, an almost perfectly circular body of salt water lying deep and ageless within its own volcanic crater. Aboriginal elders say it has been a healing place for longer than history can record, and even today bruised footballers come to bathe away their aches in its waters.

It requires no great imagination to be struck by the bewitching nature of this country. Call it sacred. Born in ancient fire.

For uncounted millennia, the First Peoples knew this landscape just north of what is now the town of Terang as an important late-summertime ceremonial ground and trading post.

As the modern state of Victoria embarks on an attempt to acknowledge the truth of its deeper history and achieve justice for First Peoples via the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, we might begin our own search for truth by imagining what was here before Europeans came and changed everything.

The best estimate is that Indigenous tribes and clans lived in what is now Victoria for at least 40,000 years. Seasonal gatherings of dozens of language groups occurred at many special places, from the dry flatlands of the north-west to the deep forests of the south-east, along the river country of the north to the heights of the north-east alpine regions, to the brooding south-west range called Gariwerd until homesick Scots settlers called it the Grampians, and all the land between.

We start at Noorat only because it lay at the heart of one of the more populous areas of the state before Europeans came, and which has since been most studied.

Invited by message sticks borne by the envoys, or postmen, of the Girai (or Kirrae) Wurrung custodians of the country around Noorat, Indigenous groups drifted from tribal territories spread across the basalt plain that extends west from what we call Geelong and Melbourne.

Our knowledge of such gatherings is fragmentary, handed down through generations of lore holders who survived relentless efforts to deprive them of their language and customs, and recorded by early white ethnographers only after invasion had occurred.

Each clan, it is said, raised smoke to warn of their impending arrival at the annual gathering. Aboriginal people used fire to sculpt country in sophisticated ways, creating what we might call game parks to ensure ease of hunting and gardens for the gathering of vegetables, and they used fire and its smoke to send all manner of messages.

To the far south-west, Gunditjmara elder Walter Saunders has built a high, stainless-steel sculpture of a leaf on a forested hill overlooking the ocean near Portland.

It marks the place where a clan of his Gunditjmara people, the Cart Gunditj, raised smoke for uncountable generations to summon other clans when a whale beached below, promising months of feasting. The tradition continued when white whalers arrived and offered the carcasses of harpooned whales in return for smoke signals from the Cart Gunditj when whales swam into the bay.

Smoke, says Saunders, united the “mobs” because it could be seen from great distances, far beyond tribal boundaries.

Gunditjmara and Bunganditj elder Uncle Johnny Lovett.Credit: Justin McManus.

The annual Noorat gathering was, in the six-season calendar of Aboriginal people of western Victoria, the time known as Kooyang, or eel season, which runs from January to March.

Elders of each clan arrived first at the gathering place, following ancient tradition by sitting silently at a distance and jamming their spears into the ground until formally welcomed.

Visiting the territory of another tribe, or nation, was a sensitive, often dangerous business, as related by William Buckley, an escaped convict who spent 32 years from 1804 living with the Wadawurrung people of the Bellarine Peninsula and beyond. Decorum had to be observed if blood was not to be spilled.

The tribes came to hold ceremonies, initiate young men, organise the complex business of marriages, dance their corroborees, exchange necessities and bestow gifts.

The ceremonial ground, according to the lore of the Maar nation, which includes the Girai (or Kirrae) Wurrung, is still used today for new rituals.

The football ground at Noorat sits on ground stamped flat over time by dancers during corroborees.Credit: Justin McManus.

“I was told by my Aunt Violet it is where the Noorat footy oval is these days,” says John Clarke, a Girai Wurrung man and grandson of the late Banjo Clarke, famed during his long life as a holder of traditional knowledge.

All the First Nations ceremonial places, such as that at Noorat, were stamped hard and level by dancing feet. “Go to a football ground in just about any town and that was where the old corroborees were held,” says Johnny Lovett, a Gunditjmara and Bunganditj elder who lives in Hamilton, a city sitting on the junction of his two ancestral nations.

“Go around and have a look. Those places were ready-made. When our people were driven away, the white people used them as football grounds. Even the MCG is on an old corroboree ground, you know.”

Ceremony, with women pounding tight-rolled possum skins and men keeping time for the dancers and singers with clapsticks all through the night, occurred alongside the practical business of commerce and gift-giving.

“At the periodical great meetings, trading is carried on by the exchange of articles peculiar to distant parts of the country,” wrote James Dawson, a Scots-born pastoralist who devoted a significant slice of his life to learning the culture and languages of the people who populated the western plains before colonisation all but destroyed their ways of life.

“A favourite place of meeting for the purpose of barter is a hill called Noorat, near Terang,” Dawson wrote. Kangaroo skins from Noorat were “considered superior to all others for making rugs”. People from around Geelong brought “the best stones for making axes, and a kind of wattle gum celebrated for its adhesiveness”.

A corroboree on Emerald Hill in 1840, by English-born painter and businessman Wilbraham Liardet.Credit: State Library of Victoria.

“Greenstone for axes is obtained also from a quarry on Spring Creek, near Goodwood [a grazing property near Woolsthorpe]; and sandstone for grinding them is got from the salt creek near Lake Boloke [Bolac]. ”

From the Wimmera country came the maleen saplings for making spears, the Cape Otway forest supplied wood for bundit spears, heavy and prized as gifts, and a red clay used as paint was applied by a brush formed from the cone of the banksia.

Dawson’s senior informant was a powerful old man named Kaawirn Kuunawarn, known as Hissing Swan, or “King David, chief of the Kirrae [Girai] Wuurong”. Born about 1820, he gained the name Hissing Swan for the outraged reaction of swans when, as a child, he stole their eggs.

Dawson’s purpose – and that of his daughter, Isabella Park Taylor, who spoke the language of the Maar nation of western Victoria – was to capture as accurately as possible the lives, customs and language of tribal groups of the volcanic plains.

Nevertheless, the reference to a greenstone quarry at Spring Creek may have been mistranslated. The Whitehead family, owners of Goodwood since the mid-1800s, searched for years for such a quarry, and never found it.

More likely the prized greenstone – or dolemite – came from much further afield, and was brought to Noorat by people whose traditional land was on the country that became Goodwood.

Most of the stone for ground-edge axes in south-east Australia came from a large quarry at Mount William, near Lancefield, operated by the elders of two inter-marrying clans of the Wurundjeri people of what became the Melbourne district.

The Mount William quarries, called Wil-im-ee Moor-ring, meaning “axe place” in the Woiwurrung language, operated for at least 1500 years before Europeans arrived, and linked into trade routes extending as far as central Queensland, according to a study by archaeologist and anthropologist Fred McCarthy in the 1940s.

But Aboriginal people – many of whom believe their ancestors were created in the timeless Dreaming and did not come from Africa or anywhere else – had certainly lived in Victoria for a vastly greater sweep of time than 1500 years.

In 1947, the Australian geologist and palaeontologist Robert Alexander Keble undertook a dig at the Pejark Marsh, a wetland close to both Noorat and Lake Keilambete. There, he found an Aboriginal millstone, used for grinding grain and other food, beneath the bones of a Diprotodon optatum, the largest of the giant marsupials that once roamed Australia.

This creature, similar in shape to a hippopotamus, became extinct 25,000 years ago. Here was proof that Aboriginal people lived in Victoria for at least that long.

Then, in the 1940s, a farmer at Bushfield near Warrnambool, about 60 kilometres south-west of Noorat, was sinking a posthole 2.4 metres deep to anchor a winch when he made a discovery that would, in time, drastically extend the knowledge of Victorian prehistory.

Within the hole, which penetrated the ash layer left by the last eruption of the nearby Tower Hill volcano, the farmer came across what turned out to be an Aboriginal basalt axe. The existence of the “Bushfield axe”, found with some black shiny mineralised bones, signifying a long-ago feast, caused something of a stir when it was documented in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria in 1947.

Tower Hill circa 1855, by painter Eugene von Guerard.

The fact the ancient tool was discovered beneath the volcanic ash meant that Aboriginal people had lived in the area before the great volcano erupted.

A study published in the journal Geology in February 2020 reported that the latest dating technique – which examined the presence of the gas argon within rocks formed from lava – demonstrated Tower Hill had erupted 36,800 years ago (give or take an error margin of 3800 years) and that nearby Budj Bim (until recently known as Mount Eccles) had an eruption age of 36,900 years (plus or minus 3100 years).

The study, by Dr Erin Matchan and Professor David Phillips of Melbourne University, in collaboration with Professor Fred Jourdan and Dr Korien Oostingh of Curtin University, used these eruption dates alongside knowledge of the Bushfield axe to conclude that the minimum period of human occupation in Victoria was 36,800 years, give or take 3800 years.

The study took the further unusual step of making reference to creation stories passed down through many generations of the Gunditjmara people who lived in the area – stories that appear to confirm the First Peoples had witnessed the eruption of the Budj Bim volcano.

“If oral traditions surrounding Budj Bim do indeed reference volcanic activity, this could mean that these are some of the longest-lived oral traditions in the world,” the study concluded.

The Dreaming story of the Gunditjmara tells of four Beings – the first lawmen with special spiritual and ceremonial powers sent by the Great Creator to form the landscape. Three of the Beings moved on to other parts.

The fourth, Budj Bim, stayed and created the volcanoes of Tappoc (Mount Napier, near Hamilton), Kolorer (Mount Rouse, near Penshurst), and Budj Bim (near Macarthur).

Budj Bim caused his volcano to erupt. The upthrust formed part of his forehead, the scoria the remnants of his teeth and the lava flow – within which the Gunditjmara built an eel and fish aquaculture system – represented his blood.

An even more recent study by three eminent chroniclers of Aboriginal Australia offers compelling evidence that many Aboriginal groups from the volcanic plains were deeply aware of volcanic activity and wove that knowledge into their traditional stories.

The study, by Benjamin Wilkie of La Trobe University and Fred Cahir and Ian D. Clark of Federation University, notes Aboriginal language linked numerous volcanic hills of western Victoria with the words for “hot” and “burning”.

The section on Tower Hill is particularly intriguing, with evidence that Koroit, the Dhauwurd Wurrung name for Tower Hill, means “smoking, hot ground”.

If there remains uncertainty about the relationship between the ancient inhabitants of Victoria and fire-breathing volcanoes, there can be none about the use of fire by the First Peoples.

A mountain of evidence, from Indigenous elders, colonial settlers, explorers and modern scientists, shows conclusively that Aboriginal people used fire to carefully sculpt their landscapes and enhance the availability of their food sources, both game and vegetable.

Australian historian Bill Gammage spent years collecting such evidence – though he has been criticised for relying almost entirely on white sources – before publishing in 2011 his magisterial work, The Biggest Estate on the Earth: How Aborigines made Australia.

The book introduced many Australians to the knowledge that the earliest European colonisers found a land so carefully tended – and so different to that of today – that their most common description of it was that of “an English gentleman’s park”.

Aboriginal people, Gammage wrote, had used fire to fashion open woodlands with no tangled understorey, and to ensure valleys and flatlands were soft, open grasslands.

The arrangement was to provide shelter for animals and to attract a wide array of game into the open, and to ensure that desirable plants above and below ground flourished.

Furthermore, Gammage established that the system of rotating different forms of fire over periods of years was much more sophisticated than merely reducing fuel. It was a tool that relied on an extensive and intimate understanding of all the flora and fauna in any given area.

A 19th-century depiction of an Indigenous man hunting emus. Credit: State Library of Victoria.

The revived understanding of Aboriginal husbandry of game and plants morphed into growing studies of Aboriginal housing in Victoria. Researchers, from the 1960s on, had shown many groups maintained semi-permanent villages of substantial dwellings, some of which – like those on the lava flows of south-west Victoria – had stone walls.

Aboriginal writer Bruce Pascoe supercharged this knowledge. He proposed in his popular 2014 book, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, that the First Peoples had become farmers, many of them living sedentary lives with no need to move from place to place.

In response, a version of Australia’s seemingly endless culture wars erupted after anthropologist Dr Peter Sutton and field archaeologist Keryn Walshe published this year Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, a forensic critique of Pascoe’s work.

Essentially, Sutton and Walshe argued that Aboriginal Australians had not been agriculturalists in any European sense, but sophisticated hunter-gatherers; that Pascoe had misrepresented some of the evidence upon which he relied; and that Aboriginal voices were missing from his thesis.

Girai Wurrung man John Clarke finds himself bemused by the debate. He believes there is much yet to learn.

John Clarke at Lake Keilambete, with Mount Noorat in the background. Credit: Justin McManus

However, he defends Pascoe from the charge that he did not rely on Aboriginal knowledge. He says he first met Pascoe many years ago at the Framlingham home of his grandfather, Henry “Banjo” Clarke, and that Pascoe had been a frequent visitor, seeking the knowledge passed down by the elders.

Banjo Clarke, born in a bark hut in the Framlingham forest near Warrnambool in the 1920s, was celebrated as a “wisdom man” of the Girai Wurrung people. He died in 2000.

His grandson, John, general manager of cultural landscapes for the Eastern Maar Corporation, is helping shape a biocultural landscape strategy for his people.

He believes the First Peoples named every feature of their land and water for the serious purpose of sustaining all life. He is intent on searching for those original meanings in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of what existed before Europeans came. “The names are all clues and indicators about resources, and what the people were going there to gather or to hunt or whatever,” he says.

He points out, as an example, that the old name for a spectacular waterfall on the Hopkins River was “Thanang Poonart”. It means “eels bite the stones”. Eels, a key food source for the people of the western plains and the volcanic stone country, appeared to bite the stone face of the waterfall as they struggled to climb upstream.

The hideous paradox, however, was that Aboriginal people, by employing their intimate and ancient knowledge of the land, had created an environment that would prove irresistible to invading agriculturalists from the other side of the world.

“People made the land beautiful, but settlers took it because it was useful,” Gammage wrote of colonisation. “Paddocks in forests gave them water, pasture, timber and security. By shaping land so carefully for grazing animals, people paved the way for pastoral occupation.

“The more carefully they made the land, the more likely settlers were to take it.”

And so it turned out to be for the land around Noorat, and clear across Victoria.

A script written over tens of thousands of years would turn out to be the setting for a great tragedy for its authors, the First Peoples.

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