The Biggest Estate on Earth

by Bill Gammage

  The right to say who could enter country was the decisive expression of legitimate possession. ‘No individual of any neighbouring tribe or family can hunt or walk over the property of another without permission of the head of the family owning the land. A stranger found trespassing can legally be put to death’, James Dawson wrote of western Victoria in 1881.6 In northwest Australia no tribe used another’s land except by invitation. Each ‘has its own district in which it reigns supreme; such district is again sub-divided into portions belonging to the individuals of that tribe, the children inherit and females share equally with the males in the distribution of landed property’.7 John Browne stated of Albany people,

  it is difficult to say in what the rights of ownership consist . . . members of the tribe hunt indiscriminately over each other’s ground . . . [Yet] should an enemy, or one of another tribe wilfully trespass on these grounds, such a liberty would be immediately noticed, and would in all probability lead to acts of violence and retaliation on both sides.8

  Around Bunbury (WA) in 1841–3, each family had

  a more or less defined area of country belonging to it—a kind of heritage; its rights over such track were respected, and any infringements regarded in the light of trespass. Even if an individual of the same tribe, yet of a different family, had occasion to traverse it, he would only, if obliged at all, take just enough to appease his hunger—e.g., one bird, or one egg, from a nest, leaving the remainder for its rightful owners. And it was wonderful to note how each knew exactly what was on their piece of land; they were never selfish about its products, but during the superabundance of any food plants, game, fish etc., at any particular season would send round for neighbouring families to come and make common property of what Nature had so plentifully supplied them.9

  Eyre wrote,

  particular districts . . . are considered generally as being the property and hunting-grounds of the tribes who frequent them. These districts are again parcelled out among the individual members of the tribe. Every male has some portion of land, of which he can always point out the exact boundaries. These properties are subdivided by a father among his sons during his own lifetime, and descend in almost hereditary succession . . . Tribes can only come into each other’s districts by permission, or invitation, in which case, strangers or visitors are well treated.10

  Especially in the southeast, neighbours named groups by their word for ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the word they used to permit or deny access to country. Eora (Sydney), possibly from eor, ‘yes’, is a post-1788 invention,11 but at least fifteen groups in western New South Wales and northwest Victoria, at least six in New England, and some in southern Queensland were named, presumably by neighbours, from their word for ‘no’. ‘Always ask’ was and is the rule, strict and universal, even for kin confident of the answer. This was closely guarded. ‘Their wars generally originate . . . in their hunting beyond their limits’, a New South Wales squatter remarked in 1841,12 and east of Perth George Moore observed,

  among themselves the ground is parcelled out to individuals, and passes by inheritance. The country formerly of Midgegoroo, then of his son Yagan, belongs now of right to two young lads (brothers), and a son of Yagan. Some trespassers went upon this ground, lighted their fires, and chased the wallabies. This was resented by the young lads, and, as it happened, there was a large meeting of natives at the time, a general row commenced, and no less than fifteen were wounded with spears.1314

  People felt intensely for their country. It was alive. It could talk, listen, suffer, be refreshed, rejoice. They were on it and others were not because they knew it and it knew them. There their spirit stayed, there they expected to die. No other country could ever be that. Even as he was dispossessing them Robinson confessed, ‘The natives of VDL are patriots, staunch lovers of their country.’15 When an elder could no longer travel easily and death might come, he stayed at a favoured place, teaching the country to two or three attending wives and warriors.16 ‘Within the boundaries of their own country, as they proudly speak’, James Dredge remarked in 1837, ‘they feel a degree of security and pleasure they can find nowhere else—here their forefathers lived and roamed and hunted, and here also their ashes rest.’17 Puntutjarpa rock shelter, in very tough desert south of Warburton (WA), was occupied for most of the last 10,000 years, and Richard Gould paid ‘tribute to the aborigines whose resourcefulness led to the establishment and maintenance of this dignified and rewarding way of life under what were perhaps the most rigorous environmental conditions ever encountered by any historic or prehistoric hunters and gatherers’.18 Country was heart, mind and soul.19

  Country was not property. If anything it owned. ‘The above families belong to this Ground’, John Wedge observed near St Leonards (Vic) in 1835.20 A family head might speak of a country as his, but only because he had a right and duty to manage it. He did not own it, for he could not dispose of it: the Law decreed who inherited. When Bundal was ordered off government land at the Cowpastures near Sydney, he exclaimed, ‘The government land, well, that’s a good joke. It’s my land, and was my father’s, and father’s father’s, before me.’21 At Adelaide Clamor Schurmann found that ‘every adult native possesses a district of land, which he calls his country, and which he inherited from his father’.22

  Some newcomers thought families owned land. In southwest Australia Henry Chapman stated, ‘the land is allotted, in comparatively small portions, to different families, as their hunting and provision grounds. The boundaries of these tracts are very distinctly defined, and scrupulously observed amongst themselves. This fact implies the existence of personal property in the soil.’23 Others judged that a clan owned land, since in necessity it could re-apportion it among families, or that a tribe did, since in necessity it could re-distribute groups, but in Victoria Robert Smyth neatly captured the progressive devolution of country:

  Each of these tribes had its own district of country—its extent at least, and in some cases its distinct boundaries, being well known to the neighbouring tribes. The sub-division 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.24

  ‘No English words’, Bill Stanner concluded in 1969,

  are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre . . . The aboriginal would speak of ‘earth’ and use the word in a richly symbolic way to mean his ‘shoulder’ or his ‘side’ . . . When we took what we call ‘land’ we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and locus of life, and everlastingness of spirit. At the same time it left each local band bereft of an essential constant that made their plan and code of living intelligible. Particular pieces of territory, each a homeland, formed part of a set of constants without which no affiliation of any person to any other person, no link in the whole network of relationships, no part of the complex structure of social groups any longer had all its coordinates . . . the aborigines faced a kind of vertigo in living. They had no stable base of life; every personal affiliation was lamed; every group structure was put out of kilter; no social network had a point of fixture left.25

  People cared for and took life from country. Possession was duty, making them life curators in two senses: bound for life to keep country alive (ch 8).26

  They were bound to all their country, not just its best parts. Eyre observed,

  no part of the country is so utterly worthless, as not to have attractions sufficient occasionally to tempt the wandering savage into its recesses. In the arid, barren, naked plains of the north, with not a shrub to shelter him from the heat, not a stick to burn for his fire (except what he carried with him),
the native is found.27

  He added,

  there are no localities on [Australia’s] coast, no recesses in its interior, however sterile and inhospitable they may appear to the traveller, that do not hold out some inducements to the bordering savage to visit them, or at the proper seasons of the year provide him with the means of sustenance.28

  In Victoria, ‘rather than forego the pleasures of a change of scene, the horde will break up its encampment among an abundance of game, and remove to a site where all their address in hunting can scarcely satisfy their wants’.29 Between Berrima and Albury (NSW), ‘whatever place we have been in, whether on the top of the highest mountain, or in any of the deepest ravines, we always find evident marks that the natives occasionally resort to them, although there does not appear to be any inducement to visit these secluded places’.30 Sooner or later people patrolled every corner, burning, balancing, refreshing.31

  The chances of a family’s travel led newcomers to find empty land, and some to assume that this was permanent. That was unthinkable. Country was always in mind. Eyre pointed out,

  although a tribe may be dispersed all over their own district in single groups, or some even visiting neighbouring tribes, yet if you meet with any one family they can at once tell you where you will find any other, though the parties may not have met for weeks. Some one or other is always moving about, and thus the news of each other’s locality gets rapidly spread among the rest.32

  Land without Law, the notion that any country could run wild, denied the Dreaming.

  Ecology permeated society. In Arnhem Land Frank Gurrmanamana

  marked out two parallel sets of small holes. One set, he said, were vegetable foods which grew gu-djel (in the clay), namely roots and tubers. The other set were the vegetables gu-man-nga (in the jungle/vine thicket), namely fruits. These two sets were linked, a pair, one from each set, appearing together at the same time of the year to be successively replaced by another pair, and so on. He then listed the names of both sets of plants in their predicted order of appearance in nature. They were likened according to Gurrmanamana to plants walking side by side through the seasons.33

  Arnhem Landers classified country

  as accurately as any ecologist, and they are able to state without hesitation what food supply, animal and vegetable, each association will yield . . . The accuracy with which an Arnhem Land hunter could name and give an association according to its botanical composition, and the food supply, woods for spears and other purposes, as well as resins and fibre plants that it would yield at any season of the year, was astonishing. It showed that these natives are far from the shiftless and improvident people of popular report.34

  Walking and in camp, before birth and at play, teaching never ceased. As with totem links (ch 4), it lumped rather than split:

  The child is taught from a holistic point of view, and the example used is a tree. He/she is taught everything there is to know about the existence of that tree. When it blooms, the insects that live in its branches and bark, the birds and animals that use that type of tree only for food and shelter, what certain parts of the tree can be used (food or healing). Then he or she is taught about the surrounding vegetation, landscape, geology and climate. This method teaches the child about symbiosis, and how significant the relationship of one thing is to another, so as to gain a complete understanding of each of the organisms within the whole picture.35

  Ecological knowledge was unavoidably local. Season and circumstance compelled local adjustments, while plants and animals changed over their life cycles, eddies in place as well as time. People expected help from ancestors and totems, but help hinged on knowing country. What they knew decided how well they lived, sometimes whether they lived. ‘The main technology for the organization of country’, Debbie Rose wrote,

  is and was knowledge. Knowledge is country-specific, and virtually the whole body of knowledge for any given country is related to the generation of life in and around that country. Countries are interdependent, so it is not the case that one person’s knowledge is restricted only to one country, or that countries are self-sufficient in their knowledge, but it is the case that each country has its own specificities, the knowledge of which belongs to some people and not to others.36

  Eyre illustrated this:

  Another very great advantage on the part of the natives is, the intimate knowledge they have of every nook and corner of the country they inhabit; does a shower of rain fall, they know the very rock where a little water is most likely to be collected, the very hole where it is the longest retained . . . Are there heavy dews at night, they know where the longest grass grows, from which they may collect the spangles, and water is sometimes procured thus in very great abundance. Should there be neither rains nor dews, their experience at once points out to them the lowest levels where the gum scrub grows, and where they are sure of getting water from its roots, with the least possible amount of labour that the method admits of, and with the surest prospect of success.37

  Strehlow reported,

  my guide Lilitjukurba, when taking me across the southern Pintubi area where most of the waters were either deep holes in the ground or clefts in sunken boulders scattered in the mulga thickets, located these difficult sites with astounding precision. We would often travel ‘blind’ through thick mulga scrub for several hours, and then halt suddenly before a soak or a rock-plate invisible even from a distance of fifty yards.38

  Local supremacy allied with wide geographical knowledge, continental connections, and a universal theology. These levied the soul, but were the means and measures of a proud contribution to eternity. ‘Think global, act local’ is an apt maxim for 1788. It made an entire continent structured and committed to making resources abundant, convenient and predictable.

  Local detail let people predict what animals would do, and when. They forged alliances, most obviously with dogs, most famously with killer whales or porpoises on the east coast. In Moreton Bay (Qld) Roger Therry watched as men

  crowded to the beach, all armed with spears, and watched with intense interest a shoal of porpoises tumbling and rolling from the Pacific towards the bay. The sight of these porpoises is always an occasion of joy to these poor people. They regard the porpoises as their best friends, and never allow them to be caught or injured. They even know and recognise some of them by name.39

  Foster Fyans saw people

  fishing in consort with the porpoises along the shore. It was . . . amusingly agreeable to see the natives working, spearing the fish driven towards the shore, and the porpoise devouring what escaped the natives or [was] driven back by them. The very best of terms existed. The porpoise appeared in no fear by the approach of a native so close as four or five yards; neither did their yelling and shouting in the least alarm them.40

  Tinker Campbell was more precise:

  Here, for the first time, I saw the blacks fishing. There were many hundreds along the beach with their towrows (nets) in hand. As soon as the shoal of fish appeared in the offing some two or three of the blacks would advance to the water’s edge, and, striking the water with their spears as a signal to the porpoises to drive the fish into the bank—which signal the porpoises would instantly obey—the main body of blacks, some hundreds in number, would rush in with their towrows and dip up the fish . . . The blacks even pretend to own particular porpoises, and nothing will offend them more than to attempt to injure one of their porpoises.41

  On land people in their country grabbed what they chanced on, totem permitting, but typically found what they expected. From miles away they could discuss with ease a nesting bird or a termite mound. They left plants to grow, and by watching sun and rain knew when a harvest was ready. Jenny Isaacs reported, ‘Women know where to go to get food, and discuss where to go before leaving camp’,42 and during a Kimberley drought Phyllis Kaberry asked a friend if she had any magic for goanna or honey. ‘She answered in a matter-of-fact tone “me find em that one sugar-bag (wild-honey), me can’t lose em
”. When I pressed her further with “suppose you no bin find em”, she looked contemptuous and said, “me find em alright; me savvy”.’43 This was harvesting, not random gathering. People were ruled not by chance and hope, but by knowledge and policy.44

  Knowledge so intricate could hardly terminate anywhere. It was inextricably continent-wide, and cradled in knowing the continent. Since people could neither deny nor deflect creation, they depended on understanding it as fully as possible—the more they knew the better they could manage their lives and their country. They strove to know what lay beyond. They travelled to harvest, initiate, marry, celebrate, sit in council.45 Coast and inland they exchanged long-distance visits, there to learn of far lands and skills. In 1820 Shoalhaven coast men were familiar with Lake George, and north of Albury in 1825 a man in a yellow jacket addressed Hume and Hovell in English and had been at the lake. It was thus known in most of southeast New South Wales, and probably more widely, since south coast people travelled to Tumut, and in August 1844 Robinson saw Monaro people at Twofold Bay watching a dance composed by an Omeo man who may also have been there.46 At the lake, men ‘described’ the Murrumbidgee ‘to communicate with the sea, at a great distance, pointing southerly’ and named tides and marine fish there. No white man knew that then. Upper Shoalhaven men said that limestone abounded west of the river mouth. No white man knew that either. In 1840 Fowler’s Bay (SA) men assured Eyre that there was no inland sea, and told him of big trees with strange animals far to the west which Eyre identified as koalas.47 In 1844 Toonda surprised Sturt

  by drawing in the sand a plan of the Darling for 300 miles of its course, also of the Murray a good distance both above and below its junction. He drew all the Lagoons on the Western side and gave the name of each; by comparing afterwards the bends he drew with Major Mitchell’s chart, they both agreed. The part he drew was from the junction of the Bogan to the junction of the Murray.48