by Graham Seal
The hawk was very unfortunate in his hunting. He stalked a kangaroo many miles, and then lost sight of it in the thickly wooded hills. He then decided to try the river for some fish, but the crow had made the water muddy and frightened the fish, so again he was unsuccessful. At last the hawk decided to return to his gunyah [shelter] with the hope that the crow would secure some food, which they had previously agreed to share. When the hawk arrived, he found that the crow had been there before him and had prepared and eaten his evening meal. He at once noticed that the crow had failed to leave a share for him. This annoyed the hawk, so he approached the crow and said: ‘I see you have had a good hunt to-day. I walked many miles but could not catch even a lizard. I am tired and would be glad to have my share of food, as we agreed this morning.’
‘You are too lazy,’ the crow replied. ‘You must have slept in the sun instead of hunting for food. Anyhow, I’ve eaten mine and cannot give you any.’
This made the hawk very angry, and he attacked the crow. For a long time they struggled around the dying embers of the camp fire, until the hawk seized the crow and rolled him in the black ashes. When the crow recovered from the fight, he found that he could not wash the ashes off, and, since that time, crows have always been black. The crow was also punished for hiding the food which he could not eat by being condemned to live on putrid flesh.
Great floods
Indigenous tradition contains many stories of great floods. From Arnhem Land to coastal Queensland, in South Australia, Gippsland and into Western Australia, legends of catastrophic floods have been widely collected. Many of these stories seek to provide explanations or rationales for the way in which the natural world is organised. This one from southeastern Australia also involves Eaglehawk and Crow, as well as many other animals. Its theme is timeless and universal and could well speak to some modern Australian issues.
The animals, birds, and reptiles became overpopulated and held a conference to determine what to do. The kangaroo, eaglehawk, and goanna were the chiefs of the three respective groups, and their advisors were koala, crow, and tiger-snake. They met on Blue Mountain.
Tiger-snake spoke first and proposed that the animals and birds, who could travel more readily, should relocate to another country. Kangaroo rose to introduce platypus, whose family far outnumbered any others, but the meeting was then adjourned for the day.
On the second day, while the conference proceeded with crow taunting koala for his inability to find a solution, the frilled lizards decided to act on their own. They possessed the knowledge of rainmaking, and they spread the word to all of their family to perform the rain ceremony during the week before the new moon. Thus would they destroy the over-numerous platypus family.
They did their ceremonies repeatedly, and a great storm came, flooding the land. The frilled lizards had made shelters on mountains, and some animals managed to make their way there, but nearly all life was destroyed in the great flood.
When the flood ended and the sun shone again, the kangaroo called the animals together to discover how the platypus family had fared. But they could not find a single living platypus. Three years later, the cormorant told emu that he had seen a platypus beak impression along a river, but never saw a platypus.
Because of the flood, the platypuses had decided that the animals, birds, and reptiles were their enemies and only moved about at night. The animals organized a search party, and carpet-snake eventually found a platypus home and reported its location back to the others. Kangaroo summoned all the tribes together, even the insect tribe. Fringed lizard was ejected for doing mischief; he has turned ugly because of the hate he dwells upon. The animals and birds found they were both related to the platypus family; even the reptiles found some relationship; and everyone agreed that the platypuses were an old race.
Carpet-snake went to the platypus home and invited them to the assembly. They came and were met with great respect. Kangaroo offered platypus his choice of the daughter of any of them. Platypus learned that emu had changed its totem so that the platypus and emu families could marry. This made platypus decide it didn’t want to be part of any of their families. Emu got angry, and kangaroo suggested the platypuses leave silently that night, which they did.
They met bandicoot along the way, who invited the platypuses to live with them. The platypuses married the bandicoot daughters and lived happily. Water-rats got jealous and fought them but were defeated. Platypuses have tried to be separate from the animal and bird tribes ever since, but not entirely successfully.
Firestick farming
When Europeans came to Australia they were surprised to find that much of the country had a park-like appearance. Many observers described the regular patterns of land management in terms of English gardens and grand estates. They saw carefully defined demarcations between bush, grassland and watercourses and wondered how people they usually considered to be ‘savages’ could have evolved and maintained such an advanced and effective system for managing their harsh environment and for surviving, even prospering, in it.
Those who took the time and trouble to look into this unexpected feature of the unknown south land soon discovered the Aboriginal skill with fire. One of the most perceptive and knowledgeable of all the European explorers was Ludwig Leichhardt. He disappeared during an attempt to cross the continent from east to west in 1848 and his fate remains a mystery today, but in the journals of his previous expeditions he recorded what he saw of ‘firestick farming’, as this method of environmental resource stewardship has become known. On his journey from Moreton Bay to Port Essington in 1844–45, a distance of almost 5000 kilometres, Leichhardt documented his firsthand experience of management by flame.
The natives seemed to have burned the grass systematically along every watercourse, and round every water-hole, in order to have them surrounded with young grass as soon as the rain sets in. These burnings were not connected with camping places, where the fire is liable to spread from the fire-places, and would clear the neighbouring ground. Long strips of lately burnt grass were frequently observed extending for many miles along the creeks. The banks of small isolated water-holes in the forest, were equally attended to, although water had not been in either for a considerable time. It is no doubt connected with a systematic management of their runs, to attract game to particular spots, in the same way that stockholders burn parts of theirs in proper seasons; at least those who are not influenced by the erroneous notion that burning the grass injures the richness and density of the natural turf. The natives, however, frequently burn the high and stiff grass, particularly along shady creeks, with the intention of driving the concealed game out of it; and we have frequently seen them watching anxiously, even for lizards, when other game was wanting.
Leichhardt was frustrated by those settlers who could not or would not see that this fire regime was the correct way to manage the country and wrote elsewhere: ‘I longed to move those stupid enemies of fire onto such a plot of young grass to hear lectures alternately from horses, sheep, oxen and kangaroos about the advantages of burning the old grass.’
Leichhardt’s concerns, as well as those of a few others, had little impact on the development of agriculture and land management. But the issue remains very much alive today as increasingly devastating bushfires roar across the land and we search for ways to minimise them.
‘The landscape looked like a park’
In September 1853, squatter John G. Robertson of Wando Vale responded to an invitation from Governor La Trobe to detail his experiences on the new land. Robertson had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) in 1831 and ‘like many of my countrymen, with a light purse—one half-crown and a sixpence was all my pocket contained’. By his own account he worked hard for three years and saved the considerable sum of 3000 pounds, which allowed him to set up as a farmer in Victoria. At the end of a very lengthy account, the tough squatter tells how his land has begun to change under the impact of agriculture.
The few sheep at first made l
ittle impression on the face of the country for three or four years; the first great change was a severe frost, 11th November 1844, which killed nearly all the beautiful blackwood trees that studded the hills in every sheltered nook—some of them really noble, 20 or 30 years old; nearly all were killed in one night; the same night a beautiful shrub that was interspersed among the blackwoods (Sir Thomas Mitchell called it acacia glutinosa) was also killed. About three weeks after these trees and shrubs were all burnt, they now sought to recover as they would do after a fire.
This certainly was a sad chance; before this catastrophe all the landscape looked like a park with shade for sheep and cattle. Many of our herbaceous plants began to disappear from the pasture land; the silk-grass began to show itself in the edge of the bush track, and in patches here and there on the hill. The patches have grown larger every year; herbaceous plants and grasses give way for the silk-grass and the little annuals, beneath which are annual peas, and die in our deep clay soil with a few hot days in spring, and nothing returns to supply their place until later in the winter following. The consequence is that the long deep-rooted grasses that held our strong clay hill together have died out; the ground is now exposed to the sun, and it has cracked in all directions, and the clay hills are slipping in all directions; also the sides of precipitous creeks, long slips taking trees and all with them. When I first came here, I knew of but two landslips, both of which I went to see; now there are hundreds found within the last three years.
A rather strange thing is going on now. One day all the creeks and little watercourses were covered with a large tussocky grass, with other grasses and plants, to the middle of every watercourse but the Glenelg and Wannon, and in many places of these rivers, now that the only soil is getting trodden hard with stock, springs of salt water are bursting out in every hollow or watercourse, and as it trickles down the watercourse in summer, the strong tussocky grasses die before it, with nil others. The clay is left perfectly bare in summer. The strong clay cracks; the winter rain washes out the clay; now mostly every little gully has a deep rut; when rain falls it runs off the hard ground, rushes down these ruts, runs into the larger creeks, and is carrying earth, trees, and all before it. Over Wannon country is now as difficult a ride as if it were fenced. Ruts, seven, eight, and ten feet deep, and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with tussocky grass like a land marsh.
I find from the rapid strides the silk-grass has made over my run, I will not be able to keep the number of sheep the run did three years ago, and as a cattle station it will be still worse; it requires no great prophetic knowledge to see that this part of the country will not carry the stock that is in it at present—I mean the open downs, and every year it will get worse, as it did in V.D.L.; and after all the experiments I worked with English grasses, I have never found any of them that will replace our native sward. The day the soil is turned up, that day the pasture is gone for ever as far as I know, for I had a paddock that was sown with English grasses, in squares each by itself, and mixed in every way. All was carried off by the grubs, and the paddock allowed to remain in native grass, which returned in eight years. Nothing but silk-grass grew year after year, and I suppose it would be so on to the end of time. Dutch clover will not grow on our clay soils; and for pastoral purposes the lands here are getting of less value every day, that is, with the kind of grass that is growing in them, and will carry less sheep and far less cattle. I now look forward to fencing my run in with wire, as the only chance of keeping up my stock on the land.
Captain Cook’s Law
As well as the myths of creation and the ancestors, Aboriginal tradition includes more modern stories, or cycles of stories. One of these concerns Captain James Cook, still sometimes said to be the ‘discoverer’ of Australia. While Cook is a venerated figure in the history of navigation and maritime exploration, and rightly so, he has a much more negative image in Indigenous legend. In these stories, recorded f rom Aboriginal tellers around the country, Captain Cook arrives from the sea bringing disruption and violence.
In one version of the tale told in the Kimberley region, Cook uses gunpowder against Aboriginal people and then returns to his homeland claiming that the land is empty and can be settled. This is ‘Cook’s Law’, by which the country is unfairly colonised and which is in direct contradiction to the traditional law and order of the original inhabitants.
In northern Queensland, Cook is depicted as a violent marauder who deceives the local people into showing him the place where they camp. This knowledge enables him to establish the cattle industry and also brings about massacres of Aboriginal people.
The Northern Territory story similarly revolves around Captain Cook stealing the land, violently oppressing the people and bringing a ‘law’ of dispossession. An Arnhem Land variation on this theme has two Captain Cooks arriving. The first is a good one who fights with an evil figure called Satan and wins. The victorious Cook returns to Sydney where he is rejected by his own people and dies. He is then followed by a whole lot more Captain Cooks who make war on the people.
The Indigenous people of the Bateman’s Bay area in New South Wales tell simply of Cook coming with gifts of clothes and hard biscuits. He then sails away and the not so lucky receivers of his gifts cast them into the sea in disgust. Interestingly, this closely parallels the reactions of the Aborigines Cook did encounter during his voyage along the east coast: the newcomers’ gifts were politely received but then discarded, as the Aboriginal people had no use for them.
Another Queensland tradition has it that Cook and his companions were seen not as intruders and murderers but as the returning spirits of the ancestors. These ghosts offered drugs, food and drink to the local people in the form of tobacco, beef, flour and tea. These were prepared in the European manner: the tobacco in a pipe, the beef salted and boiled, the flour baked and the tea in a kettle or billy. The Aboriginal people did not like the pipe, the tea or the bread. But the boiled beef was considered edible as long as the salt was washed away. Cook then took his men and sailed away to the north, leaving the Aboriginal people in dismay as the spirits of their ancestors disappeared.
The corners
There is a place where you can celebrate New Year three times. Called Poeppel or Poeppel’s Corner, it is in the middle of nowhere, lying where the boundaries of Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory intersect—to be precise, at latitude 26 degrees S and longitude 138 degrees E.
In 1880, Augustus Poeppel identified this important point and drove a small tree trunk into the exact spot. Born in Germany, Poeppel had previously worked in a number of Australian colonies and in New Zealand. Later, his work in the outback led to him suffering from trachoma and the eventual loss of an eye. He was forced to retire and died in 1891 aged only 52. The original ‘Poeppel’s Peg’ is now in the Migration Museum, South Australia, where it is known as ‘Poeppel’s Corner Post’, a memento of the heroic feats of surveying undertaken in the colonial era and of their significance for the expansion of the Australian frontiers.
The vast expanse of land that lay beyond the western border of Queensland was almost totally unknown, an emptiness that swallowed the explorers Burke and Wills. When rescue parties went out to find them they stimulated interest in the region and settlement slowly began in the Barcoo, the Cooper, then Diamantina and the Channel country. By the 1870s it was necessary to draw some boundaries to prevent disputes between settlers, and the developing trade in the region also meant that customs barriers were needed, so the exact location of those borders had to be marked. Each colony set up its own customs departments to ensure collection of duties whenever their borders were crossed.
Poeppel and his team were in some of the continent’s harshest land. They struggled across its hot, dry plains surviving on salt beef, damper and the kindness of Aboriginal people who showed them where to get water. They finally reached their goal late in 1880 and marked it with the timber post that came to be known as ‘Poeppel’s Peg
’. It had to be moved later due to a slight measurement error and the original intention of establishing the corner between Queensland and South Australia failed, but Poeppel’s accomplishment was hailed nevertheless as a great feat of surveying.
Poeppel’s Corner has been the focus of an extended controversy, though. There has been a suggestion, based on evidence from the 1936 visitor Edmund Colson, that Poeppel tried to conceal his calculation error, committed because he was over-fond of the grog. The more or less official story goes that Poeppel’s measuring tape somehow stretched, causing the error.
After the original survey party left, very few people went to Poeppel’s Corner. There were visits in 1883, 1936 and again during the 1960s, but by then the post was rotten and termite-eaten and needed to be removed for conservation. In 1966, the Leyland brothers proved that the Simpson Desert could be accessed with four-wheel-drive vehicles and the area was subsequently opened up to tourism, and the corner is now quite frequently visited.
There are other ‘corners’ established by survey along many state borders. Surveyor-General’s Corner lies on the intersection of the South Australian and Western Australian borders. Haddon’s Corner is found where the northern boundary of South Australia turns south, and Cameron’s Corner is on the same southerly line at the point where it joins the New South Wales and Queensland borders. These spots are also popular with four-wheel-drive tourists and are tangible memorials to the carving up of the continent.
2
Upon the fatal shore
The first day that we landed upon the fatal shore,
