The Edge of Memory

by Patrick Nunn

  … into the Country which we found diversified with Woods, Lawns and Marshes; the woods are free from underwood of every kind and the trees are such a distance from one another that the whole Country or at least a great part of it might be Cultivated [for food crops] without being obliged to cut down a single tree. 45

  This view was echoed by Sydney Parkinson, illustrator aboard the Endeavour, who was the first to draw the analogy between this landscape and ‘plantations in a [English] gentleman’s park’.46 As more was written about the Australian landscape, so its remarkable yet puzzling patchwork nature was increasingly remarked upon. In the early 1840s, Henry Haygarth described his discovery of the Omeo (Omio) Plain in Victoria:

  The gloomy forest had opened, and about two miles before, or rather beneath us … lay a plain about seven miles in breadth. Its centre was occupied by a lagoon … On either side of this the plain, for some distance, was as level as a bowling-green, until it was met by the forest, which shelved picturesquely down towards it, gradually decreasing in its vast masses until they ended in a single tree … By what accident, or rather by what freak of nature, came it there? A mighty belt of forest, for the most part destitute of verdure, and forming as uninviting a region as could well be found, closed it in on every side for fifty miles; but there, isolated in the midst of a wilderness of desolation, lay this beautiful place, so fair, so smiling, that we could have forgotten hunger, thirst, and all the toils of the road, and been content to gaze on it while light remained. 47

  It was not long before more prescient writers came to recognise that these landscapes were human-made, created by Australia’s Aboriginal peoples to provide them with a regular source of food. Writing in 1848, Sir Thomas Mitchell explained it clearly:

  Fire, grass, kangaroos, and [Aboriginal] human inhabitants, seem all dependent on each other for existence in Australia; for any one of these being wanting, the others could no longer continue. Fire is necessary to burn the grass, and form those open forests [grassland-savannahs – the gentlemen’s parks], in which we find the large forest-kangaroo; a person applies that fire to the grass at certain seasons, in order that a young green crop may subsequently spring up, and so attract and enable him to kill or take the kangaroo with nets. In summer, the burning of the long grass also discloses vermin, birds’ nests … on which the females and children, who chiefly burn the grass, feed. But for this simple process, the Australian woods had probably contained as thick a jungle as those of New Zealand or America, instead of the open forests in which the white men now find grass for their cattle, to the exclusion of the kangaroo, which is well-known to forsake all those parts of the colony where cattle run. 48

  Over tens of millennia, Aboriginal peoples learnt how to manipulate the landscapes of Australia to optimise their food-producing capacity. Within a few decades, in several places European settlers had undone this relationship, seduced by the Arcadian appearance of the grassland savannahs. They paid the price as – it could be argued – modern Australians continue to do today. For Aboriginal burning of the savannahs every few years was not only designed to maintain food supply, but also to avoid much bigger natural ‘burns’. Due to the climatic dominance of El Niño droughts, much of the Australian vegetation catches fire every seven years or so; it has evolved to do so. Yet the size of these natural fires depends on the amount of dry fuel load lying on the forest floor – what Cook called ‘underwood’ – for if there is a lot, the fire will burn fiercely and widely, threatening all living things. Aboriginal people knew this and understood that by deliberately burning these areas every two to three years, underwood would be prevented from accumulating sufficiently to fuel catastrophic bush fires.

  Not able or willing to recognise Aboriginal ingenuity, many early commentators on Australia saw instead a people who were neither sedentary nor farmers – the assumed hallmarks of civilised society – so concluded the country to indeed be Terra Nullius (nobody’s land). This provided a legal basis for colonists to drive Aboriginal peoples off lands from which they had subsisted for thousands of years; it was a short-sighted view,49 which failed to acknowledge that nomadism was far better suited to Australia’s environmental and climatic context than sedentism:

  Nomadism was clearly an adaptation to tracking the erratic availability of resources as they are dictated by ENSO. Nomadism has a great cost, for possessions must be kept to a minimum. The Aboriginal tool kit was thus rather limited, consisting of a number of usually light, mostly multi-purpose implements. Investment in shelter construction is likewise constrained by such a lifestyle, for there is no point in building large and complex structures when ENSO may [abruptly] dictate that the area be deserted for an unknown period at any time. 50

  Land from which Aboriginal peoples were displaced was commonly ‘bought’, then fenced – two alien concepts for Indigenous Australians – and used to graze sheep or to systematically plant crops. It was no longer deliberately and routinely burnt, which opened the door to periodic catastrophic bush fires of the kind that annually raze massive parts of Australia today.51

  In addition to fire, water is the other key to sustaining life in Australia. The Aboriginal people of Australia’s deserts not only had maps of waterholes (see colour plate section), but were far better equipped than later settlers to access water where there appeared to be none. One nineteenth-century story recollects that a European travelling through the Western Desert was close to perishing from thirst; ‘at the last gasp, he came to a clay-pan which, to his despair, was quite dry and baked hard by the sun’. He gave up hope, but not so his Aboriginal companion:

  … who, after examining the surface of the hard clay, started to dig vigorously, shouting, ‘No more tumble down, plenty water here!’ Struggling to the side [of his companion], he found that he had unearthed a large frog blown out with water, with which they relieved their thirst. Subsequent digging disclosed more frogs, from all of which so great a supply of water was squeezed that not only he and his [companion], but the horses also were saved from a terrible death! 52

  Such Aboriginal people were adept at recognising telltale marks made by these water-bloated frogs on the sides of clay pans, in which they might bury themselves for more than a year. Another technique involved stamping on the surface of the clay pan and listening for the faint croaks of the aestivating frogs below its surface.53 Yet despite such time-honoured ingenuity, the search for water by Aboriginal peoples during prolonged droughts was sometimes hopeless.54

  We have seen how over the course of perhaps 65,000 years Aboriginal people evolved a fine-tuned understanding of how to live well from Australia’s natural environment.55 Given that the complex, area-specific information – the law – could not expect to be effectively learnt anew by each new generation, Aboriginal Australians formalised instruction that was quality assured, allowing the effective cross-generational transmission of the Dreaming Library. But how long might this knowledge be expected to endure before its essence became obscure?

  Probably all of us have had pause to wonder at some point about the apparent superstitions of our parents’ generation or earlier. For me, it was the seemingly meaningless imperatives about never walking beneath a ladder leaning against a wall, or fully expecting days, nay weeks, of bad luck should a black cat cross my path. When I was growing up, I was understandably sceptical, even contemptuous, of such beliefs, but now I wonder whether in fact they might represent legacies of practical advice, once passed down from one generation to the next as a protection from harm. I cannot today comprehend what legacy the ladders and black cats might denote – and I do not believe my parents did – but of course this does not mean that these stories do not represent such a legacy.

  Every culture in the world has such legacy stories, many of which – particularly those with spiritual dimensions – have come to define particular groups. In richer societies where global networks dominate the local ones, most such stories are today mere anthropological curiosities. Yet in many poorer parts of the world,
where people depend more on local than on global networks, such stories are important keys to unlocking local knowledge. Consider the 3,000 people who live on Savo Island (Solomon Islands, South-west Pacific Ocean), the top third of an active andesitic volcano that has erupted spectacularly three times since ad 1567. The people of Savo have many stories about the precursors of eruption that helped their ancestors evade its worst effects. These stories include the filling with water of the usually dry volcanic crater, an increase in geothermal activity and – intriguingly – the shrinking of the island through wave erosion of the loosely consolidated volcanic sediments produced by the last eruption. The stories tell that once the coastline has been eroded back to the foot of the hills, then another eruption is due – a unique empirical chronometer for eruption recurrence.

  From this and many other examples, it is clear that the utility of such stories and the information they contain is context specific. As long as the people of Savo remain on their island, dependent on its abundant natural resources, knowledge of when their way of life is periodically threatened by eruption will be maintained. But as soon as people living on Savo become detached from the local, perhaps through the introduction of imported foods and digital communication networks (as is happening throughout the Pacific Islands), then local knowledge of that kind will inevitably be devalued and replaced by a dependency on external knowledge. This is likely to involve scientific ways of predicting and warning of imminent eruptive activity.

  A good example of the enhanced vulnerability of comparatively isolated communities in poorer countries following loss of traditional knowledge for coping with disaster is the smong tradition of Simeulue Island (Indonesia). This tradition teaches that when the ground shakes, people should drop everything and run for the hills, because a massive wave – a tsunami – is likely to soon sweep across the coast. The smong saved countless lives on Simeulue during the great Indian Ocean Tsunami in December 2004, which involved waves of 10m (33ft) high, whereas the death toll along neighbouring coasts where there were no such traditions was far greater. In the aftermath of this phenomenal tsunami, there was a flurry of global interest in improving scientific early-warning systems of such events in order to reduce their human impact. Yet even if that communication were optimal, it would still take at least 15 minutes, probably much longer, from the time of the earthquake to the earliest time people in danger zones could receive the first warning. That would not have been much use on Simeulue in 2004, for the first wave washed over the coastal settlements just 10 minutes after the earthquake was felt. The smong and similar culturally embedded traditions are clearly superior for communities closest to the epicentres of such massive earthquakes.56

  For Aboriginal Australians, occupying an ocean-bounded continent in effective isolation from the rest of the world for perhaps 65,000 years, the cultural context may have evolved only very slowly compared to other, less isolated parts of the world. This meant that the content of important stories would not necessarily attenuate in the way it might in more rapidly evolving cultures with more permeable borders. In other words, geographical isolation is key to cultural homogeneity, which in turn nurtures the development of effective and enduring strategies for coping with environmental stresses.

  Yet if cultures have been remarkably static in Australia for much of the last 65,000 years or so, the same cannot be said of environments. It is probable that Aboriginal knowledge stories were adapted to environmental change, with the books in the Dreaming Library being periodically revised. Key to this is appreciating how slowly much of this change occurred, giving successive generations of the peoples of the land ample time, you would think, to adapt their stories to the changing conditions.

  When we cast our gaze back across the last 65,000 years of our planet’s history, the single most significant event to have occurred in every part of the world was the last ice age. Not only was it cooler than it is today, with the ocean surface being correspondingly lower, but in much of tropical Australia the coldest times of the last ice age were also drier. Already adapted to life on the second-driest continent, many Aboriginal groups evidently found ice-age aridity too much to cope with, for they are known to have abandoned some of the continent’s most arid areas during the coldest and driest part of the last ice age, their former inhabitants clustering into refugia where there was sufficient water and food for them to survive.57

  When the ice age ended, Australia’s climate became warmer and wetter, and its inhabitants reoccupied almost every corner of this vast continent.58 It is likely that most of the Aboriginal stories to have survived until today, discussed in the next chapter, were refashioned during this time of climatic amelioration to reflect the new environmental conditions and the concomitant possibilities they presented for human survival. It is also probable that some of the environmental processes that gave birth to these new conditions – like the rise of the ocean surface – became etched into Aboriginal storytelling, an essential element of the law that provided people with a context for understanding the range of new environmental possibilities. It is to these transformative processes that we now turn our attention, one type of which – sea-level rise – is the principal subject of the Aboriginal stories related and analysed in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Australian Aboriginal Memories of Coastal Drowning

  One of the most common extant mythical characters in Australian Aboriginal cultures is the Rainbow Serpent, about which innumerable stories have been told and which has been represented in artworks, perhaps most enduringly in rock paintings, for at least 6,000 years. The original Rainbow Serpent came from the sea, and upon occupying the land had many progeny that made it their home.1 Stories about the Rainbow Serpent tell of how it winds its way across the land, wrapping its coils around the hills, shimmying across or beneath the land, furrowing the plains with its sinuous body to create meandering watercourses. At rest, it is often portrayed as the landscape itself, its head and body recognised in the topography. Sometimes it is seen in the sky, whirling and diving, with lights emanating from its body bathing the lands below in a kaleidoscope of colour. The Rainbow Serpent is often portrayed as the guardian of the land, embodying the spirits of the ancestors, the essence of Aboriginal culture, zealous in the stewardship of its integrity, and sometimes visiting a terrible revenge on those who disobey the law.

  Its singular form and behaviour have often led to the Rainbow Serpent of Aboriginal storytelling being characterised as a composite being, formed from different parts of real creatures. Yet other research suggests that it is almost an exact representation of the pipefish Haliichthys taeniophorus, or one of the sea horses that might have been among the more striking creatures, least familiar to local inhabitants, to have washed up on the shores of northern Australia when the postglacial sea level ceased rising 6,000–7,000 years ago. It is therefore perhaps no coincidence that this is the time at which Rainbow Serpent imagery appears in Australian rock art in its fullest developed form.2 What such research implies is that oral traditions informed artistic expression that in turn contributes to their recollection.

  The idea that the enduring tradition of the Rainbow Serpent in Australian Aboriginal cultures originated with observations of a memorable event (or events) is in keeping with ideas about the origins of many myths – those that are termed euhemeristic. It would be imprudent to claim that all myths are euhemeristic since that would leave no room for human invention, but in recent decades the euhemeristic nature of many myths has become increasingly apparent. As a result, the long-assumed fictional nature of many myths has been challenged. Part of this is due to the impartial scrutiny of particular myths by scientists, especially geoscientists, which led to the demonstration that non-literate cultures had preserved information about certain events and phenomena that science had overlooked, largely because the conventionally admissible evidence appeared fragmented and difficult to reconstruct. Some examples were given in Chapter 1 – those of the Klamath stories abou
t the death throes of Mt Mazama, and of the people of the Sirente about a meteorite fall – but there are many more. They include the linking of the Delphic Oracle in Ancient Greece to surface emissions of hallucinogenic gases,3 geological explanations for abrupt disappearances of islands in the Pacific Ocean basin,4 and even the possibility that sightings of the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland were merely expressions of the effects of strong earthquakes agitating the lake-surface water.5

  While Australian Aboriginal cultures differ from many elsewhere in the world in terms of their superior replication fidelity and the longevity of their traditions, the importance of preserving memories to allow future generations to understand their people’s journeys is shared by every cultural group – literate or non-literate. Pre-colonisation Aboriginal cultures were non-literate, yet had rich oral and artistic traditions that provided vehicles for intergenerational transmission of stories. Given that these cultures have been massively altered by the Europeanisation and subsequent globalisation of Australia, we owe much of our knowledge about their original content and depth to

  …curious, observant, and relatively unprejudiced individuals in all parts of Australia [who] wrote down descriptions of Aboriginal ceremonies, recorded versions of Aboriginal myths and tales and sometimes gave the texts and even occasionally the musical scores of songs. 6

  However abhorrent we might today find the attitudes of many colonising peoples towards the indigenes – not something unique to Australia – we should yet be thankful that such ‘curious’ persons existed, prepared to make an effort to understand and record the wisdom of Aboriginal people before it became diluted or even forever lost. Some Anglo-Australian recorders of Aboriginal stories understood the responsibility they had for proper engagement and accurate recording. One such individual was James ‘Jimmy’ Dawson, who settled in Australia in 1840 at the age of 34 and, while running the Kangatong cattle and sheep station in Victoria, studied local Aboriginal culture. He described his approach in his 1881 book: