by Patrick Nunn
For a community sufficiently large to be organised and competitive to have lived on Brue Reef, this 12ha (30 acre) island would have had to be at least 4m (13ft) above the ocean surface. Such a vision becomes altogether more believable if we suppose that the sea level at the time Jul and his predatory kin lived was perhaps 10m (33ft) lower than it is today.
We now move down the coast of Western Australia to the city of Perth, founded in 1829 on the banks of the Swan River, the traditional land of the Noongar people. Off its mouth lie three islands – Rottnest, Carnac and Garden – that are said once to have been connected to the mainland (Figure 3.8).
Figure 3.8 Off the mouth of the Swan River, Western Australia, lie the islands of Rottnest, Carnac and Garden.
There appears to be just one extant version of this story, although it has been repeated numerous times in different contexts. It is a good example of the narrative type of story, and was in fact recorded merely as part of an appendix in George Fletcher Moore’s 1884 Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia, which – notwithstanding its gung-ho title – amply demonstrates the author’s sympathetic understanding of Aboriginal culture. The story goes
… that Rottnest, Carnac and Garden Island, once formed part of the mainland, and that the intervening ground was thickly covered with trees; which took fire in some unaccountable way, and burned with such intensity that the ground split asunder with a great noise, and the sea rushed in between, cutting off these islands from the mainland. 75
It is probable that Moore, ‘a religious man of strong convictions’ according to his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, spiced up the original narrative; the image of the ‘ground splitting asunder with a great noise’ has biblical resonance and is probably not an authentic detail of the Aboriginal story. Yet the bare fact of these islands – Rottnest is now some 20km (12 miles) offshore – having once been part of the mainland is something that is consistent with many other stories discussed in this chapter for other parts of the Australian coastline. So how might it ever have been so?
As for Kangaroo Island and several other islands off the Australian mainland, it has long been known that people lived on Rottnest (or Wadjemup) – the largest and highest of the three islands – in pre-colonial times, yet it was uninhabited at the time of the first written accounts of it. The first estimate of the date of the earliest human occupation of Rottnest was based on measurements of the ages of land-snail shells within ancient sand dunes burying artefact-bearing soils, and was calculated as being in excess of 50,000 years ago – and perhaps as long ago as an improbable 125,000 years. As is often the case, recent research has established a more probable time for the formation of the artefact-bearing soils as between 10,000 and 17,000 years ago.76 Were this the case, then Rottnest would not have been an island but would have been attached to the mainland because of the lower sea level. The reason why Rottnest had no Aboriginal people living there at the time of European colonization of Australia is probably similar to those of its offshore islands. Either a residual population stayed there after the island was cut off from the mainland and died out because of a lack of resources and its inability to survive periods of extreme weather, particularly drought on limestone Rottnest, or the place was abandoned as it was becoming an island because its inhabitants feared a future in isolation. Justifiably so.
If we accept the detail in the story that Moore recorded about the land connection being ‘thickly covered with trees’, it does suggest that it was well above the high-water mark and perhaps significantly beyond the reach of sea spray. This condition would be adequately met were the ocean surface 10m (33ft) lower than it is today, although a narrower, meandering land connection between Rottnest and the mainland would also have existed when the sea level was just 5m (16ft) lower than it is today.
Around 15km (9 miles) off the south-west corner of Australia lie two prominent rocks. Named the White-topped Rocks, perhaps because they are plastered with seabird excrement, they are a well-acknowledged aid to navigation in these sometimes unsettled waters. There is a single Aboriginal tradition, perhaps collected as early as 1844, about these rocks that goes as follows:
… in those olden days there was a large plain extending from the main land out to the White-topped Rocks, about nine miles [14km] out from Cape Chatham. On one occasion two women went far out on the plain, digging roots. One of the women was heavy with child, and the other woman had a dog with her. After a while they looked up, and saw the sea rushing towards them over the great plain. They both started running towards the high ground about Cape Chatham, but the sea soon overtook them and was up to their knees. The woman who had the dog picked it up out of the water and carried it on her shoulders. The woman who was advanced in pregnancy could not make much headway, and the other was heavily handicapped with the weight of the dog. The sea, getting deeper and deeper, soon overwhelmed them both, and they were transformed into the White-topped Rocks, in which the stout woman and the woman carrying the dog can still be seen. 77
The critical omission, common in giant-wave (tsunami) stories, that the sea did not subsequently retreat from the land it inundated, implies that this story may also be an authentic memory of coastal drowning in this area. If this is indeed the case, then for the sea floor between the mainland and the White-topped Rocks to have been dry, the sea level would need to have been 55–60m (180–200ft) lower than it is today.
The next example, further to the north-east, comes from Oyster Harbour, a tidal inlet with a narrow, deep entrance – a smaller version of Port Phillip Bay (described earlier) – which is shown in Figure 3.9.
Figure 3.9 Oyster Harbour.
The story comes from Captain Collet Barker, an army officer who in 1829 became commander of the military settlement at King George Sound, now the town of Albany. Barker was an energetic recorder of Aboriginal place names and traditions, in which context he recorded the only known such story about the origin of Oyster Harbour.78 It begins with a woman going into the ‘bush’ to search for food and calling out to her husband, who was sitting by their cooking fire. When she found a particular type of snake, a ‘Quoyht’ as rendered by Barker, the man was happy, but when she returned empty-handed, her stomach full of this great delicacy, he became enraged. He struck her, broke her leg, then ran away:
She becomes sick & dragging herself along in the line where the King’s River now runs, reaches Green island, where she dies … Her body became putrid & an easterly wind setting in is smelt by a dog at Whatami ... He follows her track & arrived at the place, commences scratching, which he continues so long that he digs a great hollow & the sea comes in & forms Oyster Harbour.
Like the story relating to Port Phillip Bay, this one may echo events far more recent than the period of postglacial sea-level rise – but it may not. It may simply be that the narrow entrance to Oyster Harbour became blocked, as such narrow gaps often do, as a result of which the inlet dried up, a situation that might have continued for so long that local people regarded it as normal. Then, perhaps during a storm, the entrance was breached and the ocean poured in. Alternatively, it might be more like the situation at Spencer Gulf, where the rising sea level overtopped the entrance to a lowland, perhaps marshy area, and flooded it rapidly.
In the first, more conservative scenario, the sea level would not need to be any different from today’s, but it would have to have been at least a few metres lower for the latter to be true; an ocean surface 4–10m (13–33ft) below its present level would adequately account for the progressive flooding of the area, and the formation of the inlet and its later submergence.
The next story is very similar, reflecting the prevalence of coastal inlets with narrow entrances along this part of the Australian coast. At Bremer Bay, a brackish-water lagoon named Wellstead Estuary is blocked at its seaward entrance by a barrier beach, a thick plug of sand through which water can slowly seep, but which effectively prevents the ocean from reaching the estuary and vice versa
. Many such barrier beaches formed when the sea level was rising after the last ice age, with waves driving sand into massive heaps at the heads of bays like Bremer Bay. Such barriers can endure for thousands of years, and in some parts of the world they have long been populated. Parts of iconic Cape Cod in Massachusetts, USA, for example, where many houses are built on unconsolidated barrier beaches, are likely this century to experience ‘widespread and catastrophic destabilization … resulting in significant land losses and salinization of freshwater environments’ as a result of sea-level rise.79
Similar to today, at the time of the Aboriginal story about Bremer Bay there was ‘a large shallow lake not far from the sea’. The local people were spearing so many fish there that the birds were going hungry, so their leaders – the willie wagtails – implored Marget, a water spirit, to help. Innately indolent, Marget declined to assist, so
… a number of the Willy Wagtails got a long, slender stick, and drove it into one of the mud springs near the lake … The stick slowly sank in the ground … and disappeared, but they got another thicker stick and put it on the top, and did the same thing over again. This time the bottom stick touched the sea which ran under the lake and the water gushed up and ran into the lake.
Stirred into action by the birds’ initiative, Marget went to their aid so that ‘the sea bubbled and roared through the hole in the lake made by the long sticks’. But the people were not deterred by what had happened, so the willie wagtails again pestered Marget, ‘who made the hole bigger … and the sea roared in harder than ever, making the lake overflow’, which caused people to flee the area.80
Barrier beaches are occasionally breached, invariably re-forming subsequently, so the existence of a sizeable plug of sediment at the entrance to Wellstead Estuary today is no proper measure of either its longevity or its stability. Such breaches may occur during floods or storms, and certainly do not require a sustained change in ocean level. That said, the details in this narrative about there having once been a lake into which the sea roared are consistent with the sea level rising above a particular threshold and entering for the first time an area of low ground, occupied perhaps by a freshwater marsh that local people valued as a source of sustenance. A sea level around 3m (10ft) lower than today would have rendered such a scenario true.
Almost at the end of our circumnavigation of Australia, we now move east again to one of its most forbidding coasts, that of the Nullarbor Desert.81 The word Nullarbor is not an Aboriginal one, but derives from Latin and means ‘no trees’, still an accurate characterisation of the appearance of this extraordinary landform that covers a bit over 2,000km2 (772mi2), about the size of Kansas, USA, or England and Scotland combined. The limestone geology of the Nullarbor surface tells us that it was originally a part of the ocean floor that, around 14 million years ago, was pushed upwards above the ocean surface. Exposed for the first time to the agents of subaerial weathering and erosion, especially wind, its surface irregularities became smoothed and it began to look as it does today – a vast, flat, treeless plain stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction.82 Except south.
The southern fringe of the Nullarbor, where it meets the sea in the Great Australian Bight, forms a spectacular set of steep cliffs 50–90m (165–295ft) high, which – in most places – drop to the edge of the ocean itself. There is no coastal flat, just pockets of fallen rocks waiting to be pulverised and removed by the waves that smash relentlessly into the bases of these cliffs, causing them – over many hundreds of years – to slowly recede. The only significant exception to this along the 800km (500 mile) length of the Nullarbor coast is the Roe Plains, a low coastal flat that affords us a glimpse of how the area looked when the sea level was lower during the last ice age.83
Aboriginal people have occupied the Nullarbor for tens of millennia, their societies evolving a resilience to the harsh conditions that few others could emulate. The Wati Nyiinyii (or Zebra Finch) people of the Nullarbor have a tjukurrpa (oral story) that tells of an old man journeying through the desert, deliberately uprooting every mallee eucalypt tree he comes upon. This was something that threatened the survival of the entire community, for Aboriginal people wanting to drink would often dig up part of the long roots of the tree, and chop them into short lengths before draining the water they contained into bark containers: a practice that would not kill the tree yet would slake their thirst.84 Uprooting a mallee was reckless, and in the story all the water that was lost as this perverse old man continued on his way drained into the ground, just what happens in limestone country, ‘creating a huge flood to the south’, where the Nullarbor cliffs lie. The Wati Nyiinyii were obliged to travel en masse to the coast at Eucla to try and stop the encroaching flood:
The Wati Nyiinyii then pour over the Eucla escarpment, rather like an army of ants … Once the Wati Nyiinyii reach the sea, they begin bundling thousands of spears to stop the encroaching water. These bundles were stacked very high and managed to contain the water at the base of what is today the Nullarbor (or Bunda) cliffs. 85
This story may be a recollection of a time when the sea level was lower and a great plain, now covered with ocean, stretched out from the base of the Nullarbor cliffs. As the sea level rose, local groups like the Wati Nyiinyii could not fail to see what was happening: ‘individuals thirty years old might have lived through the destruction of a mile [1.6km] of their coastal territory’.86 Searching for an explanation they sought, as is common, one involving inappropriate life-threatening behaviour that deserved retribution. Yet so concerned were the Wati Nyiinyii at the loss of land that they may have attempted various practical and supplicatory responses, the former including construction of a wooden fence (with spears used as pickets) to try and halt the ‘encroaching water’ at the cliff foot.
Given the imprecision of the story and the comparatively gentle slope of the sea floor beyond the Nullarbor cliffs, it is difficult to know how far offshore the shoreline might have been at the time when the Wati Nyiinyii first noticed it moving landwards. Were the sea level 10m (33ft) lower, the shoreline would be several kilometres further south here; were the sea level 50m (164ft) lower, the shoreline would lie tens of kilometres off the modern shoreline.
The final story to complete our narrative circumnavigation of Australia comes from Fowler’s Bay. To Matthew Flinders, sailing east along the south coast of Australia in January 1802, this bay was the first point of shelter in several hundred kilometres. Flinders reported that the ‘botanical gentlemen’ on board ‘landed early on the following morning to examine the productions of the country [yet] found the scantiness of the plants equal to that of the other productions; so that there was no inducement to remain longer’.87
Like MacDonnell and other bays along the south coast of the continent, Fowler’s Bay is formed by a resistant hard-rock headland protecting an arcuate bay, the hinterland covered with scrub typical of areas fringing Australia’s southern deserts. Several versions of a story recalling a time when the coast here became drowned are extant. A detailed one is told by the Bidjandjara people of the Great Victoria Desert.
Malgaru and Jaul were two brothers travelling south from the ‘desert’ country … Margaru, the elder, had a kangaroo skin waterbag, as well as two firesticks; but he would not give the other any water. Jaul became thinner and thinner, and his throat more parched. Eventually they came to a place near the south coast – Biranbura, west of Fowler’s Bay. There was nothing but dry land there. Malgaru hid his waterbag under some rocks, which were dry at that time, although the sea now breaks over them. There the two brothers quarrelled. Malgaru went out hunting, but as soon as he was out of sight Jaul rushed to the waterbag. In a hurry to get at the water he jabbed at the taut skin with his club, making a hole in it. Water poured out. Malgaru came running back and tried to save the bag, but he could not stem the onrush of water. It spread across the land, drowning them both, and forming what is now the sea. 88
As with the Nullarbor story, it is impossible to know where t
he shoreline might have been relative to the modern one when the sea level was first seen to be rising. For the shoreline to be 70–100m (230–330ft) seawards of today’s, the sea level would need to be about 10m (33ft) lower. A sea level 50m (165ft) lower would see 1–2km (½–1¼ miles) of sea floor emerge here.
Twenty-one groups of stories recalling the drowning of the Australian coast have been related in this chapter. While showing diversity of form and detail, they all report the same thing – that people witnessed a time when the coastline was much further out to sea than it is today, when what are now offshore islands were part of the mainland, and when now-submerged landscapes were dry and occupied by particular types of animal and vegetation. Had these stories all come from a smaller land mass, where the people relating them had routinely mixed with one another, then one might reasonably suggest that they had perhaps come from a single source – perhaps the memory of an event confined in time and space that had not affected the whole land mass, or indeed, other places beyond its shores. Yet with a country the size of Australia – pretty much the same as the conterminous United States or Europe – no such assumptions are possible. Not only are the stories localised, in the sense that they refer to the geography of the areas in which they were collected, but their original tellers were effectively isolated from each other, and had been for tens of millennia – rather as the native inhabitants of Oregon and Florida, or Scotland and Turkey, were in pre-modern times.
