by Bill Gammage
South from the airport, hills ‘quite low, with very few Trees on them, and abounding with beautiful fine Grass’245 guided the Queanbeyan River and Jerrabombera Creek north to the Molonglo. The river was a ‘beautiful range of Ponds’, the land on its upper reaches and Burra Creek ‘a little scrub and some fine forest country’, on its lower reaches grassy.246 The creek came from thin forest hills into ‘level forest’, then mostly grass and a few open forest belts to river wetlands now East Basin.247 West of these streams, ‘perfectly dry’ in April 1824, was ‘a beautiful open flat . . . lying in the midst of lofty mountains’.248 It ran south past a ‘Grassy’ Red Hill to ‘the finest Plain we ever saw . . . not a Tree . . . The soil on most parts . . . very good and the Herbage excellent’,249 ‘quite free from trees’, but not naturally treeless (appendix 1). Northeast of the Wanniassa hills the grass gave way to ‘fine forest country’ including coolamon and canoe trees, which continued south beyond the ACT, with at least one ‘beautiful small plain’ at Isabella Plains.250
The Murrumbidgee’s bordering hills were ‘rather high, but very thinly wooded and fine Herbage’, ‘thinly timbered, with a useless Description of Wood quite free from Scrub or Brush Wood’, some ‘covered with nothing but Honeysuckle’—banksia, a rapid regenerator after occasional fire.251 From Mt Tennant north Hoddle noted ‘grassy hills open forest’,252 and about Lambrigg Allan Cunningham declared, ‘we climbed the steep Grassy Hills and pursued our Journey a few miles on their Main Ridge . . . The lofty hills around us . . . were grassy to their Summits & therefore afford no scope for botanical enquiry.’253 They are thick forest now.
From the Murrumbidgee, Weston Creek led back to the Molonglo, where ‘open plain’ and ‘open forest’ alternated, Hoddle dotting lines to mark their boundaries. About Yarralumla a small ‘fall’ and a ford spanned the river. Both banks carried ‘undulating grassy hills’ or ‘fine grassy open forest’, with at least one ‘open plain’ ringed by ‘open forest’. Smith seems to describe this country up to Black Mountain: the banks ‘on both sides the whole of the way we went which was a distance near 10 miles is a most beautiful Forest as far as we could See thinly wooded . . . in the Valleys a fine Rich Soil’.254 By 1853 the trees were thickening: ‘dark forests’, a tourist called them. Northeast from Black Mountain, grass plains and slopes alternated with open forest crests to the city. East from City Hill, ‘bare of trees’, a small creek ran, or didn’t run, through an ‘open plain’. North, another ‘snug plain . . . about one mile in length’ reached to Mt Ainslie. A ceremonial ground may have been in forest at one end, at Corroboree Park.
In short, good soil grew grass, and most hills carried grass or scattered trees with little or no undergrowth. This pattern reversed that normal now. To make it required knowledge and skill greater than we have today, and constant work. It was done by people who ‘spread themselves over the district in bands of 20 to 30, camping for a week or a month, according to the available food and the season of the year’.255 Near Tuggeranong Cunningham unwittingly recorded how valuable this mobility was:
5 Emus were observed at a short distance from us feeding on the open plain and altho’ my Horses were moving about in their presence they manifested not the slightest alarm: a like conscious feeling of [no] danger was exhibited by three fox-colour’d native dogs who not heeding us were howling within view of our Fire—a clear proof of the absence of molestation towards these Animals by the Aborigines.
Next day he saw more emu along Weston Creek.256 Other newcomers recalled Canberra’s plenty: fish and eels in the rivers, birds in the wetlands, emu, brolga, Wonga pigeon and other now vanished animals abundant.257
It was done with fire. On 8 December 1820 several fires were burning ‘at a distance’ from the Molonglo;258 in February 1822 much country north of the Queanbeyan had been burnt;259 in February 1824 Weston Creek ‘had been burnt in patches about 2 months since, and as the tender blade had sprung up these portions, assuming a most lively verdant cast, form’d a most striking contrast with the deaden’d appearance of the general Surface, still clothed with the vegetation of last Year’.260 At Woolshed Creek in April 1824 it was ‘Evident that these Wandering Beings were at no considerable distance from us, as the Country to the Eastw’d . . . has been in flames all the Day.’261 In May 1832 Hoddle wrote ‘Black Hill’ on his sketches of Black Mountain and O’Connor Ridge because both were burnt: for Black Mountain the name stuck.262 These were summer to early autumn fires, now times too dangerous to burn, but in 1788 best to expose ripe yams, kill saplings, and make grass.
Newcomers were hungry for grass. Late in 1824 Joshua Moore’s overseer John McLaughton built ‘Canberry’ on Acton Ridge at Old Canberra House, and a shepherd’s hut overlooking South Oval. Early in 1825, reputedly guided by an Aboriginal girl, Robert Campbell’s stockman James Ainslie located ‘Pialligo’ at Duntroon House. From flood-free ridges both stations commanded grass–forest templates, springs, swamps, fords, camps and ceremonial grounds. In both senses they overlooked the work of generations. That work dictated where they located, for they took the best places, the most refined and beautiful country. The two biggest runs, Duntroon and Yarralumla, stood on prime sites on each side of Limestone Plains, and when in 1913 Canberra was proclaimed the national capital, they squeezed the new city between them. In this way those unknown and unknowing families whose land they took were the city’s founders.263
1788’s plant patterns were unnatural but universal. How people did this varied from region to region, but everywhere they made similar templates for similar purposes. Different lives, from Spinifex to rainforest, the Wet to the snow, coast to desert, obeyed a strict inheritance, followed the same Law, allied with fire and worked locally to make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable. They made a continent a single estate.
10
Farms without fences
People farmed in 1788, but were not farmers. These are not the same: one is an activity, the other a lifestyle. An estate may include a farm, but this does not make an estate manager a farmer. In 1788 similarly, people never depended on farming. Mobility was much more important. It let people tend plants and animals in regions impossible for farmers today, and manage Australia more sustainably than their dispos-sessors. It was the critical difference between them and farmers.
Being a farmer implies full-time work. No-one did that in 1788, not by farmer notions of work anyway. It also implies treating plants as things, denying them a ‘transmigration of souls’,1 an equality of being, because cultivators so obviously control them. In 1788 plants and animals had souls, making ritual more effective than cultivation in managing them. People negotiated as well as tended, offering preferred conditions to persuade, not command (ch 4). After a harvest or hunt they left, but by knowing the cycles and watching the weather knew when to return. With less labour and no guarding, they managed resources as reliably as did fencing.
That should not obscure how much people did farm and how clearly the farmer option confronted them. This is worth exploring because most Europeans think farming explains the lifestyle differences between them and Aborigines. There must be a way to explore those differences and their momentous consequences. There must be a way to say why a white man writes this book in Australia rather than an Aborigine in England. Farming is a place to begin—first animals, then plants.
Kangaroos and cattle have similar preferences. Hence the Cowpastures, the self-concentration of Sydney’s escaped herd on a kangaroo ground. Henry Waterhouse wrote in 1804,
I am at a loss to describe the face of the country otherways than as a beautiful park, totally divested of underwood, interspersed with plains, with rich, luxuriant grass; but, for want of feeding off, rank, except where recently burnt. This is the part where the cattle that have strayed have constantly fed—of course, their own selection.2
He describes some grass templates dormant and others active, luring and locating grazing animals. After a fire, ‘the young herbage that springs up
. . . is sure to attract the kangaroos and other game; and the horned cattle are also very fond of feeding upon this burnt ground, as it is termed in the Colony’.3 Without fences, ‘burnt ground’ concentrated kangaroos and cattle in the same places for the same reasons. No wonder settlers took such country so quickly. Grass templates were farms without fences.
People also reared dingos, possums, emus and cassowaries, penned pelican chicks and let parent birds fatten them, moved rats and caterpillars to new breeding areas, and carried fish and crayfish stock across country.4 Endless ingenuity worked water. Nets of European quality, mesh and knot varied to suit a prey, were put in or over suitable water, and margin land shaped to match. Duck nets with floats and sinkers spanning inland rivers meant reeds and shallows; fish nets half a mile long circling coasts or tidal flats meant camps and plant food. Coast and inland, thousands of weirs, dams and traps of stone, mud, brush or reeds extended species and harvests. Wicker gates or woven funnels let fish or crayfish upstream on in-tides and trapped them on the ebb. Grass fronds laid over shallow edges gave fish shade and made them vulnerable. Along the Mary east of Darwin,
Many fish weirs were seen and one could not help being struck with the ingenuity displayed in their construction, on one creek we were surprised to find what looked like the commencement of work for a line of tramway. There were sapling sleepers about eight feet in length and of various thicknesses laid a few feet apart for at least half a mile. The work must have been done by natives but am quite at a loss to understand their motive.56
An extensive weir system helped harvest the Darling at Brewarrina. William Mayne saw it in 1848:
In a broad but shallow part . . . where there are numerous rocks, the Aborigines have formed several enclosures or Pens, if I may use that word, into which the fish are carried, or as it were decoyed by the current, and there retained. To form these must have been the work of no trifling labour, and no slight degree of ingenuity and skill must have been exercised in their construction, as I was informed by men who had passed several years in the vicinity, that not even the heaviest floods displace the stones forming these enclosures. The Aborigines catch immense quantities of fish in these and are also enabled to destroy great numbers of fishing Birds of various kinds that are attracted to them by their prey thus imprisoned; and from these two sources the Tribes in that locality derive a considerable portion of their subsistence.7
Several hundred successively smaller traps caught ‘drayloads’ of fish. Mathews noted, ‘Each division of the tribe, and the families composing it, had their own allotted portion of the fishing grounds, and every pen or trap had a name by which it was known and spoken of among the people.’89
In southwest Victoria people remained ‘many months’ beside intricate flow systems made to farm eels. With ‘some attention to the principles of mechanics’, they cut 300-metre canals into bedrock, built 50-metre aqueducts a metre high, and dug kilometres of channels to join and extend eel ranges and abundance. Even in drought or flood the systems regulated flows so that pot traps worked in water coming or going. At Toolondo and Mount William people cut canals across watersheds to let eels into inland waters. This took at least decades, and works were still being extended when Robinson saw them in 1841. As at Brewarrina, traps were owned: ‘My native attendants pointed out an extensive weir, 200 feet long and five feet high; they said it was the property of a family, and emphatically remarked, “that white men had stolen it and their country”.’1011
Eel farming showed people promoting a resource, yet they left surplus to rot. ‘The Fishing Season had terminated,’ Robinson reported. ‘Putrid eels, some of them three feet in length, lay in mounds and tainted the air . . . the Lake was indicated to our olfactory senses, by the tainted breeze, when at the distance of at least a couple of miles.’12 People similarly balanced other templates. Too many plants or animals forced the excess off-template, prompting open season; too few warned people to prohibit and conserve. Temporary bans were declared for scarcity or ceremony. Permanent bans might relate to age, gender or totem. Commonly, women or children could not eat certain foods, nor people kill or eat their totem, though this was not universal. Fire and hunting regimes were adjusted to help species in decline; no plant was cropped out; young, guardian and totem species, sometimes females, and in spring eggs and breeding animals and plants were prohibited. In 1841 Grey reported several bans, including a ‘law that no plant bearing seed is to be dug up after it has flowered . . . I have never seen a native violate this rule.’13 In South Australia the ‘wealth and variety’ of Ngarrindjeri resources was affirmed by ‘the fact that twenty types of food were forbidden to young men, and thirteen types were forbidden to boys . . . these . . . were considered relatively easy to obtain, so were reserved for older, less vigorous people’.14 Carpentaria people could not hunt in the country of someone recently dead. Ronald and Catherine Berndt concluded that conservation
was much more widespread than is realized. Their intimate knowledge of the growth of various creatures, as well as of the increase of vegetable and other plants and trees, led many of them to realize that conservation was essential even in times of plenty. They could not afford to be careless . . . there are also cases of Aborigines sprinkling seeds around or preserving certain valuable trees; or saying, for instance, ‘The stingray are breeding just now, we won’t kill any for food until the new ones have grown.’15
No doubt 100-year droughts and rogue fires helped teach this wisdom, but only affluent societies can afford such lavish restraints.
People were so affluent and provident that they could declare fauna sanctuaries. Lindsay remarked of South Alligator (NT) people, ‘Portions of the country are conserved for two or three years to allow the game and reptiles to increase. Then, about August, a tribe will visit the spot, and by setting fire to the grass in patches will find abundance of food.’16 ‘For several years before a gathering in mass’, Gilmore wrote, ‘no kangaroos, possums, or wild fowl were hunted or disturbed round the area devoted to the meeting.’17 Permanent sanctuaries might be in places difficult to harvest, like gorges, but most were on the best regenerating localities, usually totem sites. Strehlow wrote of Irbmangkara (Running Waters) on the Finke (NT), magnificent wildfowl country, that since the beginning of time no game or fowl could be killed within about two miles of its sacred cave.18 Helena Spring (WA), in tough desert northwest of Lake Mackay, is the best water for hundreds of miles. Carnegie found it much used by birds and animals, but
Curiously enough, but few native camps were to be seen, nor is this the first time that I have noticed that the best waters are least used . . . These desert people . . . have some provident habits, for first the small native wells are used, and only when these are exhausted are the more permanent waters resorted to.19
Latz explained,
In the desert you’ve got to have this system because you have really bad droughts and so on. You’ve got to have a sanctuary from where your animals can expand back out after a drought. Not a single animal was allowed to be killed in this area. Not a single plant was allowed to be picked. These sanctuaries were scattered all over the landscape— wherever there was important Dreaming there was a sanctuary area.20
Every year or so Murray and Edward (NSW) people alternated the camping and sanctuary sides of swamps, and Murrumbidgee people
invariably set aside some parts to remain as breeding-places or animal sanctuaries. Where there were plains by a river, a part was left undisturbed for birds that nested on the ground. They did the same thing with lagoons, rivers, billabongs for water-birds and fish. There once was a great sanctuary for emus at Eunonyhareenyha, near Wagga Wagga. The name means ‘The breeding-place of the emus’—the emu’s sanctuary . . . The law of sanctuary in regards to large or wide breeding-grounds, such as Ganmain or Deepwater, where once there were miles and miles of swamps . . . was that each year a part of the area could be hunted or fished, but not the same part two seasons in succession.21
Such places
calibrated abundance.22
Bans and sanctuaries uncorked culling. Balance and continuity were reciprocal: no species should threaten or overrun another, and totem guardians were bound to prevent it—hence the putrid eels. Animals forced off their templates intruded onto the templates of others, offending the Law and the land. They were fair game. In central Australia, for
a few months after a rain a large wandering horde of men, women and children revelled in an abundance of food. Animals were slaughtered ruthlessly, and only the best and fattest parts of the killed game were eaten; every tree was stripped bare of its fruits; and all that was unripe or tasteless were tossed away.23
Kimber explained, ‘There is a distinct concept of maintaining a specific supply, and of culling from it, in a known area.’24 Such slaughter was reducing excess, not reducing excessively. It was balance more than waste, and although hunting off-template was less predictable, people may have preferred it, conserving templates for ceremonies or hard times. Abundance indeed, if so much planning and care went into making and rotating templates, only to avoid them.
