by Bill Gammage
In good seasons kangaroos breed prolifically. On Eyre Peninsula (SA) people slaughtered excess roos; in the Blue Mountains they drove wallabies over cliffs.25 This kept roos on their templates. Explorers sought roo meat daily, yet many reported no kangaroos for days, then many, then none. On 19 March 1798 a party southwest of Sydney ‘fell in with’ kangaroos, on 23 March it ‘had no signs of a kangaroo for three days’, on 28–9 March it ‘saw hundreds’.26 On 23 June 1817 Oxley saw a ‘flock’ of kangaroos for ‘the first time since we quitted the Lachlan’ on 18 May. He reported no more until he found them ‘abounding’ on 8 August. In 1818 they were ‘in very great numbers’ on 12 June, in ‘hundreds’ on 6 August, ‘abounding’ on 26 August, in ‘abundance’ on 31 August and ‘abounding’ on 12 September, but on the other days he reported none even though his party sought them, and he was where later they were common. Finally he declared, ‘These animals live in flocks like sheep.’27 On Cooper’s Creek, Burke and Wills, armed and used to shooting roos, saw none and starved, and between 1849 and 1886 Creek settlers saw none or few, though later they were common.28 On Tasmania’s aptly named Forester River, Robinson
came to a large plain of tolerable good feed; it was of great extent and abounded with kangaroo. I had seen no place like it on this side of the island, and the clumps of trees of various sorts gave it a delightful park-like appearance. I named it kangaroo park. This country had been well burnt off.29
On the Yarra, Hoddle ‘entered some forest land distant from Melbourne 23 miles called Kangaroo Ground for about 5 miles—then barren scrub. The Kangaroo Ground has excellent soil and appears to extend for several miles to the north-west. It abounds with Kangaroo.’30 Long after the animals have vanished, Kangaroo Grounds speckle Australia, and Kangaroo Creek, Flat, Ground, Gully, Point and Valley have post codes. Roos were on paddocks without fences.31
After 1788 roos multiplied and spread as their preferred habitats degraded. Where they were not seen in 1788 they became plagues. When the Tasmanians were ‘removed’, ‘Opossums and Brush Kangaroos . . . increased in many districts, and are very troublesome’.32 Three years after Adelaide was settled, Hahn declared,
It is almost inconceivable that these people used to live solely on kangaroo meat, as the country has never been particularly well supplied with these animals . . . if they were so common, then some . . . would have been encountered on the overland journeys between Adelaide and Sydney . . . Anyway, there are very few now in the surrounding district. It is therefore more likely that the people eat the fish which abound in the rivers.33
The Adelaide plain and the overland stock route soon swarmed with kangaroos. In northern New South Wales BE Norton found few early references to them, but ‘large-scale slaughter’ by the 1880s, ‘one property killing 10,000 in 1881 and another destroying 20,000 in four years . . . graziers offered an incentive of 6d a head for kangaroos and 3d for wallabies’.34 On a Murray station kangaroos cut carrying capacity by over 75 per cent between 1848 and 1862, and in 1878 the station shot 11,000 roos in six months.35 That year pastoralists petitioned parliament for relief from ‘the increase and ravages of marsupials in many parts of the colony . . . a large extent of country . . . [is] virtually useless . . . being wholly overrun with these pests’.36 In 1881, New South Wales paid a bounty on 581,753 roo scalps—1600 a day—and in 1884 on 260,780 scalps in the Tamworth district alone, but roo plagues continued. In Victoria a station killed 10,000 roos annually for six years without reducing their number, but Curr thought ‘the evil . . . much more serious’ in Queensland.37 Central Queensland roos merely in ‘goodly number’ in 1862 ‘overwhelmed’ the district in 1875–7.38 As late as 1901–2 in the Centre, where by the 1930s roos were common, Murray several times noted their scarcity, once remarking, ‘Saw half a dozen kangaroos here, a large mob for these parts.’39 Where Canberra grassland carried small mobs in the 1820s, roo numbers today threaten its survival. After 1788 roos ran wild.40
In 1788 koalas ranged the southeast and east coasts inland to the edge of the plains, but their locations were distinct, lightly populated, and few. Europeans did not record a koala until 1798 (ch 7), nor get one live until 1803, from Sydney people,41 yet by the 1900s koalas were common around Sydney. Mt Yarrahapinni (NSW) (‘koala falling down’) is an ancestral koala place ‘densely wooded to the summit, with an almost impenetrable forest of gigantic trees, but its spurs descend in beautiful verdant park-like declivities to the beach, the grass growing luxuriantly’ where the koala fell down.42 This is rainforest country, but those ‘gigantic trees’ were eucalypts, feeding koalas and keeping them confined.
Within a few decades koalas were a plague. In 1844 Robinson thought them ‘in places abundant’ in Gippsland; 30 years later they were a pest there. On the Goulburn (Vic) no-one reported them in the 1840s; by 1870 there were ‘thousands’. Around Bega (NSW) they were not noted by the earliest settlers, common by 1860, and in streets and gardens from the 1880s until 1905. At Port Stephens (NSW) no-one thought koalas common until the 1890s. In southeast Queensland early Europeans occasionally noted them; after 1900 millions of skins were sold there, including a million in 1919 and 584,738 in one month in 1927.43
Other species multiplied. Crocodiles may have been fewer in 1788 than in 1888 and now. On the Murray in 1856 Gerard Krefft listed all the district’s animals and birds, but not wombats, later common there. In 1788 possums were common, in places a staple. ‘White fellow shoot ’em like possum’, Wiradjuri said in telling Rolf Boldrewood how readily settlers killed their people. Possum numbers exploded after 1788. By the 1870s they were killing forests by eating new leaves, and Riverina station hands could shoot them without leaving camp. Emus range widely and in some parts of the Centre did so in 1788,44 but in woodland they seem to have been restricted to particular plains, and not numerous there. Rolls pointed out that Leichhardt’s hundred or so at Seven Emu River was thought a big mob. By the 1880s New South Wales governments and pastoralists were annually paying bounties on thousands of birds and eggs. Forrest saw only odd birds south of the Murchison (WA) in 1874, but by the 1920s the district carried tens of thousands. Western Australia built over 300 miles of fence, paid a beak bounty, and in the 1930s called in the army with machine-guns to cull the birds, with no success. In the 1880s New South Wales declared noxious kangaroos, wallabies, kangaroo rats, pademelons, wombats, bandicoots, possums, emus, eagles, hawks, crows and dingos. None were thought numerous when settlers arrived.45
Why these increases? After 1788 stock shortened the grass, increasing feed for native grazers, but so far the only explanation common to all increases is that until 1788 animal numbers were kept low by human or dingo predation.46 Yet dingos too were uncommon in 1788 and increased later, including by eating grazers.47 Only people were fewer, decimated by germs and guns. This mattered, but so did its companion change to settler land management and the collapse of the templates.
People grew crops in 1788. They knew plants intimately. Several languages had five or six words for a leaf ’s life stages. In 1985 Kakadu (NT) elders named 420 scarp species including several not known to science, and detailed the behaviour of each.48 People cultivated New Zealand Spinach, Bunya and Queensland Nut (Macadamia), tended vines on forest edges, portulaca on raised mounds, Bush Tomato on burnt ground before rain, Pituri in deep sand. They planted fruit and berries, sometimes backburning or log-fencing them from animals. When young Mary Gilmore spat out a Quandong seed, a woman scolded her and picked it up to plant.49
The two main crop groups were tubers, bulbs, roots, rhizomes and shoots (hereafter tubers), and grain. Tubers were easier to gather and better to eat. People grew them where it was wet enough: from most coasts as far inland as water would sustain them, and in wet places elsewhere. Grain, particularly Native Millet, was a supplement or staple in places without enough tubers or other plant food. In general dry places grew grain; elsewhere grew tubers. Either might cover many hectares or be in small niches. Agriculture spread more widely over Australia t
han now.
Yams such as warran and murnong declare their farming heritage. Cape York people know that replanting tops not only ensures more yams, but leads to a ‘multiple-ended tuber’, a ‘mother yam, which is especially succulent’.50 Many accounts mention replanting tops,51 but people did much more. Warran and murnong prefer open grassland thinned by fire, and to flourish in the millions they did in 1788 they need soft soil, seasonally dug over. In season women spent hours a day tilling, replanting, transplanting and weeding. In Western Australia they dug warran paddocks over many square miles. North of the Hutt in April 1839, Grey found
a tract of light fertile soil, quite overrun with warran plants . . . for three and a half consecutive miles we traversed a fertile piece of land, literally perforated with the holes the natives had made to dig this root; indeed we could with difficulty walk across it on that account, whilst this tract extended east and west as far as we could see . . . more had here been done to secure a provision from the ground by hard manual labour than I could have believed it in the power of civilised man [sic] to accomplish . . . [The ground was] fuller of holes than a sugar plantation, all of which had been dug by the natives to extract their favourite yams. There were also many large beaten paths, along the sides of which we every here and there found native wells, of a [great] depth and size . . . these circumstances all combined to give the country an appearance of cultivation, and of being densely inhabited, such as I had never before seen.52
In 1851 a settler thought warran people ‘very little addicted to hunting and very few of them are even expert at tracking a kangaroo. This may result from the great variety of edible roots, particularly the A-jack-o or warang, which grows here in great abundance and to a very large size.’53 People cultivated it on the Swan and in the Kimberley, but as Rupert Gerritsen noted, not continuously down the West Australian coast. It is a tropical plant; how, he asked, did it get south of the break?54
In southeast Australia people farmed murnong. Varieties grow in dry places, high country, and open forest, but its heartland was the open plains from Melbourne to Mt Gambier (SA). The seed does not last in the soil so crops need continuous mature plants, yet ‘millions’ grew there, and where women dug them, for mile on mile the ground looked ploughed. ‘Today the native women were spread out over the plain as far as I could see them, collecting punimim, murnong . . .’, Robinson wrote in July 1841. ‘They burn the grass the better to see these roots.’55 Further west Mitchell met ‘open grassy country, extending as far as we could see, hills round and smooth as a carpet, meadows broad, and either as green as an emerald, or of a rich golden colour, from the abundance, as we soon afterwards found, of a little ranunculus-like flower . . . we went on our way rejoicing’. His way interrupted a woman digging murnong, ‘the only visible inhabitant of this splendid valley, resembling a nobleman’s park on a gigantic scale’.56 At Sunbury (Vic) Batey recalled a slope of
rich basaltic clay, evidently well fitted for the production of myrnongs. On the spot are numerous mounds with short spaces between each, and as all these are at right angles to the ridge’s slope, it is conclusive evidence that they were the work of human hands extending over a long series of years. This uprooting of the soil to apply the best term was accidental gardening, still it is reasonable to assume that the Aboriginals were quite aware of the fact that turning the earth over in search of yams instead of diminishing that form of food supply would have a tendency to increase it.57
‘There is a nutritious root which they eat and are fond of ’, a settler near Melbourne told a Select Committee in 1845,
that, I think, has greatly diminished, from the grazing of sheep and cattle over the land, because I have not seen so many of the flowers of it in the spring as I used to see. It bears a beautiful yellow flower. The native name of this root is ‘murnong’ . . . It is rather agreeable to the taste . . . a man named Buckley . . . tells me, that a man may live on the root for weeks together.5859
Other yams were grown. On the Hawkesbury in July 1789 Hunter observed:
The natives here, appear chiefly to live on the roots which they dig from the ground; for these low banks appear to have been ploughed up, as if a vast herd of swine had been living on them. We put on shore, and examined the places which they had dug, and found the wild yam in considerable quantities, but in general very small, not larger than a walnut [seed yams?]; they appear to be in greatest plenty on the banks of the river; a little way back they are scarce.60
On the Arnhem coast,
the parsnip yam was particularly important. When yams were dug out, the top of the tuber was left still attached to the tendril in the ground so that the yam would grow again. The same practice has been recorded from other parts of Arnhem Land and Cape York. At Lockhart on the east coast of Cape York Peninsula the vines were marked as sign of ‘ownership’. Yams were also planted on offshore islands.61
Specialising in one variety was not universal. When after seventeen years with Queensland people Jimmy Morrill detailed the many tubers they ate, each had its totem place:
one of which grows at the tops of the mountains is the best eating called ‘moogoondah’, it is white, sweet, firm, dry, and grows in red clay soils. There is another, lower down, at the foot of the mountains, in the scrub, called ‘mulboon’, which is soft and more moist and is very nice eating. There is another root rather of a sticky nature when cooked, grown on the mountains, not in the scrub, but in the grass, and white like a turnip, with a small thin leaf, called ‘cornool’. There is another smaller and darker in its colour, but in other respects very much like it, called ‘cahnan’. Another, a creeper which grows on the high banks of the fresh water rivers, with a small green leaf, the leaves very thick, called ‘booan’. There is another, similar to a turnip, but smaller, called ‘manoon’. There is one which runs in and out among the grass with a little blue flower, called ‘cardoala’ or ‘cardoabar’, and many others more or less like them.62
Here is a hint of cropping: Morrill once says ‘grown’, and some of these tubers need fire to thin competition. There is also a hint of transplanting: might ‘manoon’ be murnong? Like warran, did plant and name come from the tropics?63
To grow grain, people chose water margins or overflows, in dry places blocked channels to extend them, burnt ground preferably before rain (ch 6), spread seed, watched the season to know when to return, reaped the crop by pulling or stripping with stone knives, dried, threshed and winnowed the grain, and stored it in skin bags or pounded it ‘between stones with water, forming a kind of paste or bread’.64 Augustus Gregory recalled,
On Cooper’s Creek, the natives reap a Panicum grass [millet]. Fields of 1,000 acres are there met with growing this cereal. The natives cut it down by means of stone knives, cutting down the stalk half way, beat out the seed, leaving the straw which is often met with in large heaps; they winnow by tossing seed and husk in the air, the wind carrying away the husks. The grinding into meal is done by means of two stones . . . sometimes dry and at others with water into a meal.65
On the Darling Mitchell found Native Millet
pulled, to a very great extent, and piled in hay-ricks, so that the aspect of the desert was softened into the agreeable semblance of a hay-field. The grass had evidently been thus laid up by the natives, but for what purpose we could not imagine . . . we found the ricks, or hay-cocks, extending for miles . . . All of the grass was of one kind, a new species of Panicum . . . not a spike of it was left in the soil, over the whole of the ground.66
Millet heads at different times, so people pulled or cut and stacked it when most heads were full but most stalks green. Near Lake Narran (NSW) they
made a brush-yard and the grass was put in . . . fire was set to the grass which was full in the ear yet green. While the fire was burning the blacks kept turning the grass with sticks all the time to knock the seeds out. When this was done, and the fire burnt out, they gathered up the seed into a big opossum rug.67
Elsewhere they spread stalks to d
ry, threshing when the grain ripened, and piling up straw ‘like hay cocks’.68 On the Narran, Mitchell saw
Dry heaps of this grass, that had been pulled expressly for the purpose of gathering the seed, lay along our path for many miles. I counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths, and the same grass seemed to grow back from the river, at least as far as the eye could reach through a very open forest.69
‘Through this grass only . . . as far as the eye could reach.’ This was no casual sowing. On overflow land, where each flush brings fresh debris, it also suggests weeding. This was a grain template.
Grain was also cropped on floodplains off the rivers. With Sturt west of the Darling, Brock saw a crop, probably millet, ‘quite like a harvest field. The seed which supplies the natives with a nutritious food grows here in season in great quantities. In every hollow we found the remains of the natives’ labour in the shape of straw, from which they had beaten out the seed.’70 Sturt too saw ‘a boundless stubble the grass being of the kind from which the natives collect seeds’.71 Even remote claypans might be cropped, and perhaps seeded. In 1857 William Suttor crossed ‘the great, almost treeless, level plain’ from the lower Lachlan towards the Darling:
Our camp for the night was on a low sand ridge covered with hopbush scrub. It stands like an island in the level waste and had been visible on the horizon for hours before we reached it. There is a small morass close by where the wild blacks have scooped out a small hole, which was filled with rain water. We were about 100 miles from anywhere. The wild blacks had been here lately, as we learned from the heaps of grass straw scattered about, from which they had thrashed the seeds . . . We pitched our tents and made luxuriant beds of the grass straw.72
