The Biggest Estate on Earth

by Bill Gammage

  Religious sanction makes sense. Nothing is more powerful, but as explanation it misled observers into thinking that people subordinated or lacked ecological understanding. On the New South Wales south coast in 1836 Alexander Berry told a visitor,

  the natives . . . believe in transmutation, after death. This first claimed his notice, when he had wounded a Porpoise, which some Blacks, who were with him in the boat, tried to dissuade him from firing at. On landing, the men told the women what had been done, at which they made great lamentation; and he learned from them, that they regarded the Porpoises, as having been the ancient chiefs of the neighbourhood, who, when they died, had changed into these animals; and who, they said, drove fish on shore for them, sometimes whales, when the people were very hungry!33

  Porpoises did do that (ch 5); it was the explanation Berry baulked at, leading him to miss Aboriginal knowledge of the practical benefits of porpoise conservation.

  This broaches a key truth about the Dreaming. In its notions of time and soul, its demand to leave the world as found, and its blanketing of land and sea with totem responsibilities, it is ecological. Aboriginal landscape awareness is rightly seen as drenched in religious sensibility, but equally the Dreaming is saturated with environmental consciousness. Theology and ecology are fused.

  The Dreaming seems dominant because people tend to describe the world in its terms. In explaining why certain plants or animals have gone, they say that the relevant ceremonies were not done or not done properly. They know well the link between extinctions and wrong fire, overstocking, feral predation and so on, and often they know a remedy, but these are not sufficient explanations, for none would have happened had the proper ceremonies been done. Again, they are famously expert trackers, but see these skills as stemming from knowing the rituals. In the north people know that fire kills rainforest: they take great care not to burn jungle thickets, but explain this by saying that if one did burn, its spirits would blind them.34 On Bathurst Island (NT) women harvesting a yam always leave the top and cover it with earth. They know this grows more tubers, but explain it by saying, ‘if dig it all out, then that food spirit will get real angry and won’t let any more yam grow in that place’.35 Queensland people kept open with fire a grass pocket in thick scrub, but said it was carved out by the moon throwing his boomerang around it.36 People know their environment well, but equally know that they are not only maintaining a habitat or invigorating an eddy, but working in tandem with creator ancestors. The more Law a person knows, the more certain he or she is to undertake and succeed in any activity.

  Ecology explains what happens, the Dreaming why it happens. Striving to learn how the world works is fundamental to life, for knowing is safety, comfort and power. People prize knowledge as Europeans prize wealth. Teaching and testing begin in childhood. ‘Listen, I’ll only tell you this once’, a teacher might say. This signals a test. If months later you can repeat what you were told, you are told more. If not, you have reached your limit. The more you learn the more you are told. The most senior learning is always theological, and only the able and committed progress to its more complex realms. Those who learn most become clever people, with immense sacred and secular power. The cleverest can be telepathic or fly through the air or point the bone, in these ways coming nearer to unveiling the Dreaming, though they will never reach that distant grail.37

  The Dreaming explains, but in terms of the real world. The rituals and management it ordains work. They can be repeated and their effects predicted, and they maintain biodiversity and affirm life’s balance and continuity. Social groupings too are enforced theologically but expressed ecologically. A person has totem names, but might use a name from a natural event—stung by bees, heaps up grass, watches water. Some mobs were known by their country’s geography (coast, forest, grass) or its dominant ecology (mangrove, heath, Spinifex). At big gatherings visitors camped in the direction of their country, so that camp layouts imitated a region’s ecology. For marriage or totem or trade, social divisions might reflect those between sun and rain, fire and water, predator and prey. On the Darling, one division was between light and shade:

  The shadow thrown by the butt and lower portion of a tree is called ‘nhurrai’; that cast by the middle portion of the tree is ‘wau-gue’; whilst the shade of the top of the tree, or outer margin of the shadow, is ‘winggu’. Again, the men, women and children, whose prescribed sitting places are in the butt or middle shades of the tree are called ‘guai’mundhan’, or sluggish blood, whilst those who sit in the top or outside shade are designated ‘guai’gulir’, or active blood . . . [They] are supposed to keep a strict watch for any game . . . friends or enemies, or anything which may require vigilance.

  The shade divisions helped regulate marriage.38 The Dreaming enforces hard-learnt ecological practice.

  An ecological cradle is exposed where theology and society clash, and theology defers. Three examples:

  1. In theory the Dreaming gives and asks equally of all things. In practice human freedoms and duties are more visible and varied than those of other species. It is not that animals or fire or water do not have duties: they do, and they perform them—shortening grass, scavenging, making food or habitat, performing ceremony. But only people take shapes unlike their totem, or light fires, or eat so many other species, or trade, or bury or burn their dead.

  2. Humans and their totem animals and plants do not always decline or increase at the same rate, but when a human totem population declines its species is at risk, and other totems lack marriage and trade partners. Totem allegiances are therefore adjusted from time to time.39 Similarly, even where a creation myth explains why a certain food or place is taboo, under intense pressure this might be lifted.

  3. Sometimes all a country’s carers died out. Someone must then move in, and elders went to great lengths to decide who, and to induct them, for if you knew neither the songs nor the country it was dangerous to be there. Often neither exterminating tribal wars40 nor the many catastrophes after 1788 led to enemy occupation, but if necessary even enemies might learn the songs and slowly move in. No land or sea could be vacant, all must have its care and ceremonies or it would vanish, fragmenting the world. Peter Sutton comments of western Cape York that re-allocating land in this way, changing the Law, is ‘further support for the claim that Aboriginal land tenure—at least in this area—is primarily based on secular premises rather than sacred ones’.41 This was generally so. The change met the Law’s demand that every inch of land be cared for, but the demand stemmed from an immutable ecological imperative. If the Dreaming were truly free of the environment, human intervention need not occur. Instead, theology served ecology.42

  Songlines show the Dreaming’s grounding in the land and its creatures. In depicting the country it passes through and naming the creatures in it, a songline states its ecological associations. Allan Newsome demonstrated this memorably west of Alice Springs. He studied in detail the major totem sites along a red kangaroo songline, and found that each coincided ‘with the most favourable habitat for the species’, notably where range washouts grew the best grass. Further, whenever the red kangaroo ancestor flew through the sky or went underground, it avoided an unfavourable habitat. No-one told Newsome this—his informants invariably spoke in spiritual terms. But they knew: they were describing the land from a red kangaroo viewpoint, and they banned hunting at its major sites. The songline decreed a clear conservation imperative: in bad seasons roos have refuges, but when in good seasons their numbers build up and some move out, they can be hunted.43

  A songline is also a map, compass and calendar. It follows paths ecologically suited to its creator ancestor, and teaches how to exploit resources en route. If you can sing a song you can follow it, even into country you have never been. If you can’t, unless someone with you knows it you are lost. If you stray too far off line you might be trespassing. People learn their local sector first, or only, but learning beyond it licenses travel further along it. Songlines also
recite countless ecological signals to people and animals: when coral trees flower it is time to dig crabs, when a bird sings a grub lays eggs, when the west wind blows blue-tongue lizards emerge and women dig for honey ants, when march flies appear crocodiles lay eggs, when the blackwoods flower northwest Tasmanians hunted muttonbirds.44 Such specific associations are necessarily local and seasonal, varying each year. It is easy to see how ancestral hands might regulate these mobile marvels of timing, but each states and obeys an ecological reality.

  Totems are ecological. The well-known Eaglehawk and Crow division separates hunters from gatherers, and most totem names combine place, creature and totem: Tarnda (Adelaide) red kangaroo, Wurundjeri (Melbourne) Ribbon Gum, Narrandera (NSW) jew lizard and so on. People studied first their own totem and its allies and habitat, to everyone’s benefit. Jew lizard people studied the plants and animals around narrung’s sandy habitat, the insects in the sand and the bark, the birds visiting, the winds, the water, the fire needs. To keep each in balance required repeating spiritually the same ancestral ceremonies, and ecologically the same management practices. Both are work, a dance as much as a fire regime, both protect the Dreaming and biodiversity, from long repetition both can be fine-tuned for success. Yet if the ecology changed, for example when rabbits or camels arrived, totems were adjusted to fit. ‘Those totems were always there’, people say, ‘it’s just that we didn’t know about them before.’

  Totems work as ecological alliances. John McEntee sees Europeans as splitters, looking inwards, classifying more and more precisely, but Aborigines as lumpers, looking outwards, seeking ever wider associations. He illustrates with an Adnamatana (SA) grouping: goanna and western quoll are the same ‘skin’ because both eat meat and have white chests, five toes and spots on the back. Adnamatana explain this in spiritual terms: for example the spots are spear wounds, got when the two ancestors were killed for having an illicit affair.45 The myth has a moral lesson (the Law punishes offenders), and an ecological teaching (goanna and quoll scavenge similarly).

  Totem alliances are local. Although both are birds, cockatoo and grebe might or might not be allied, depending on their local links. In Arnhem Land brown goshawk and red-bellied barramundi live along the same stretch of the Roper so have the same skin, and in the Centre, Mulga country is honey ant country so people of these totems share responsibility for it, but neither link is universally so.46 Wagga Wagga is Wiradjuri for ‘many crows’. To say this is also to name open country with many lizards and few small birds, one a cause and the other a consequence of many crows, but not all open country is crow country. In Canberra yellow-tailed black cockatoos once fed on pine and river oak kernels, so caring for them meant caring for these trees. This required stable river banks, which are platypus habitat. Platypus eat worms and shrimps, which need reeds to breed, which is waterbird habitat, which attracts snakes, and so on. Such lumping makes a cycle or eddy too big for one totem to manage, so the Dreaming assigns each a part, and commands them to negotiate to balance the whole. The tone is theological, the teaching ecological.

  When totem interests conflict, for example when firing pine threatens cockatoo habitat, some negotiations must be difficult, but they are done, emphasising the totem system’s central ecological role in maintaining biodiversity. Although a Ngarrindjeri (SA) man, David Unaipon told a beautiful Darling River myth of how the land became too crowded, so the animal, bird, reptile and insect families met in the Blue Mountains to negotiate a solution. Frilled lizard grew impatient, and caused a huge storm which killed almost all the platypus. Grieving, the other creatures gathered to help platypus. This led to very long debate on who platypus was related to and who it could marry.47 The myth continues, but this fragment shows creator ancestors negotiating, a concern for the welfare of every totem, and a Dreaming answer to an ecological puzzle which stumped Europeans after 1788: what exactly a platypus was.

  Totems make clear how basic to the unity of creation an ecological perspective is. All must care for the land and its creatures, all must be regenerated by care and ceremony, no soul must be extinguished, no totem put at risk, no habitat too much reduced. That mandate, not the theology, made land care purposeful, universal and predictable. This is true of every part, even what might seem untouched wilderness, and even where ecologists today can’t see why. The parks and puzzles Europeans saw in 1788 were no accident.48

  Especially in the face of local omnipotence, a universal Dreaming was a great intellectual achievement. By so thoroughly implanting means and incentives to shackle body and soul to the survival of all things in heaven and earth, it made environmental management obligatory. Its reach and power were evidenced late in 1830, when eight Tasmanians and two white men were seeking northeast Tasmanians still free. One white, George Robinson, hoped to persuade free people to leave their land for Swan Island, just off the coast. His party saw a lot of burnt land and a few tracks but no Tasmanians, until on 31 October they ‘descried a smoke inland . . . from its appearance the natives was burning off ’. The party hurried forward, and late that day found tracks and ‘the bush on fire for a considerable distance’. Next day they came up to the Tasmanians.

  Four men and a woman were in camp. In all 69 people lived in the northeast, the hunted remnant of perhaps 700 people two decades before. The camp was led by Mannalargenna. He knew whites killed men and children and stole women, he knew Robinson’s party was seeking his though not why, and he knew soldiers were hunting, for the Black Line, the military cordon bent on capturing every surviving Tasmanian, was under way. He knew too that smoke would betray his small band, yet still they fired the land, in the face of death toiling to do what perhaps ten times as many would once have done. Nothing shows so powerfully how crucial land care was. This was no casual burning. It was a mortal duty, a levy on the souls of brave men and women.49

  This was repeated across Australia after 1788. Defying catastrophe, people tried above all to continue a spiritual and ecological life. Before 1788 they did this easily. In most seasons they had plenty of spare time, and spent it nourishing the mind more than the body. Art was voluminous and intricate: imagine a dot painting on sand several metres square, composed of different coloured feathers, most of them tiny, stuck down with blood. Songs were long, corroborees might last months, initiations years. Not only in their parks did people think and act like gentry.

  This hardly reflects people constantly on the edge of want. They cannot have been the scavenging, chance-dominated savages Europeans thought them. A rich and time-eating spiritual life builds on abundance, not poverty. In the driest and most fire-prone continent on earth, abundance was not natural. It was made by skilled, detailed and provident management of country.

  5

  Country

  The Dreaming taught why the world must be maintained; the land taught how. One made land care compulsory, the other made it rewarding. One was spiritual and universal, the other practical and local. Songlines distributed land spiritually; ‘country’ distributed it geographically. Everyone had a country: narrowly defined, land, water and their sites and knowledge in the care of a family under its head. A family was a man, perhaps his brothers, and their wives, relatives and descendants, though some moved out on marriage and others moved in or out as suited. ‘The inhabitants of these wilds must be very few . . .’, Oxley decided, ‘their deserted fires and camps which we occasionally saw, never appeared to have been occupied by more than six or eight persons.’1 In their country a family saw an environment shaped in the Dreaming and thronged with sites and stories, witnessed the familiarity plants, creatures and elements had with particular localities, and thought itself part of these intimacies. Not only obvious features which Europeans name, but every pebble and ripple disclosed both the ecological logic of its existence and the Dreaming’s presence. Here wallaby and wallaby ancestor live, there nardoo and nardoo ancestor, there avenging fire killed lawbreakers, here a punishing flood reached. Totem site and ecological niche alike proved the need and re
ward in caring for country. Some places might not be touched for years, but not for a moment did carers forget them.

  Each country was

  surrounded by other countries, so that across the continent and on into the sea, there is a network of countries. No country is ruled by any other, and no country can live without others. It follows that no country is the centre toward which other countries must orient themselves, and, equally, that each is its own centre.2

  Countries formed a national continuum. To ensure this, qualified others might mediate to adjust a country if human populations fluctuated too much, at least in the north specialist managers advised on fire, and neighbouring elders had a working knowledge of a country and its stories, and dropped hints if they felt it needed care.

  The literate habit of fixing boundaries imposes an illusory rigidity on 1788. Spirits or totems limited where someone could go, but generally the boundaries of country were permeable. Almost everyone had rights and interests in other countries. At New Norcia (WA) ‘each family regards one particular district as belonging exclusively to itself, though the use of it is freely shared by nearby friendly families’.3 Core territory lay amid zones open according to kin, totem, clan, neighbour, trading partner or occasion. Within a family one member might have access rights denied another, yet neighbours came ‘to each other’s assistance. The tribal boundary may not be crossed over without permission. But if conditions become dry within one tribal area it is customary to offer one’s tribal neighbours a section of country for hunting or a lake on which to fish.’4 People helped neighbours or kin fleeing war, initiating children, or tackling big projects like fish and game drives or clean-up fires, and came hundreds of kilometres for seasonal harvests of bogong, bunya, cycad, eel and their associated ceremonies. In these ways rights to country were spread but like the magic pudding never reduced.5