Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-eastern Australia

Perspectives of Early Colonists

Fred Cahir, Ian D. Clark, Philip A. Clarke, Ian Clark, Philip Clarke

• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781486306114
• eBook ISBN: 9781486306138
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

Indigenous Australians have long understood sustainable hunting and harvesting, seasonal changes in flora and fauna, predator–prey relationships and imbalances, and seasonal fire management. Yet the extent of their knowledge and expertise has been largely unknown and underappreciated by non-Aboriginal colonists, especially in the south-east of Australia where Aboriginal culture was severely fractured.

Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-eastern Australia is the first book to examine historical records from early colonists who interacted with south-eastern Australian Aboriginal communities and documented their understanding of the environment, natural resources such as water and plant and animal foods, medicine and other aspects of their material world. This book provides a compelling case for the importance of understanding Indigenous knowledge, to inform discussions around climate change, biodiversity, resource management, health and education. It will be a valuable reference for natural resource management agencies, academics in Indigenous studies and anyone interested in Aboriginal culture and knowledge.

Cultural sensitivity
Readers are warned that there may be words, descriptions and terms used or referenced in this book that are culturally sensitive, and which might not normally be used in certain public or community contexts. While this information may not reflect current understanding, it is provided by the author in a historical context.

Chapter 1

Totemic life

Philip A. Clarke

The British colonists who settled in Australia from the late 18th century and the Indigenous peoples whose ancestors first arrived here over 50 000 years ago, had fundamentally different accounts of the Creation of the world and how it was first peopled. This meant that there were major differences in the ways that the two groups saw themselves in relation to the physical environment. While modern Western Europeans have seen themselves as having a separate existence from the ‘natural’ world, Aboriginal people consider that the social and physical aspects of their lives are closely intermeshed and therefore inseparable. In Aboriginal tradition, the actions of spiritual ancestors during the Creation gave a deep social relevance to the country, imbuing it with their power and in doing so humanised it. For this reason, in Aboriginal thought the land could never be seen as a total wilderness. Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge reflects the merging of the cultural and natural worlds.

Introduction

The first British colonists who arrived in Australia had a model of religion based on the major religions originating from the Middle East, like Christianity and Judaism, which were structured round the worship of a single high god. They therefore found it difficult to make sense of the Indigenous forms they encountered, which were based on multiple spirit ancestors who existed alongside a wide range of other spirit beings (see Chapters 2 and 3). Europeans in the 19th century considered Aboriginal religion to be an incoherent set of ‘superstitions’ that was mostly focused on magic (Dawson 1881, p. 49; Smyth 1878, vol. 1, pp. xviii, lx–lxi, 30; Taplin, 1879, p. 23). There was little or no appreciation of the depth and complexity of Indigenous mythologies, with one reminiscing Victorian colonist describing Aboriginal people subjecting themselves to ‘huddling up together in their loondthals (huts), and to the coarse, obscene, and lewd character of the stories in which are spent so many of their evenings round the camp fires’ (Beveridge 1883, p. 24).

In the late 19th century, European scholars became interested in recording Indigenous customs and traditions. This was partly because they could see that these were changing and because in many areas the Aboriginal life style was no longer a lived reality (Curr 1886–87; Smyth 1878; Taplin 1879; Woods 1879). In their accounts of Aboriginal culture, they generally mistook the Aboriginal spiritual ancestors as ‘high gods’ rather than a class of ancestral beings (Hiatt 1996). For instance, the missionary George Taplin in the Lower Murray of South Australia remarked that Ngarrindjeri people had ‘several times told me something about a bird making the world. Surely there cannot be a sort of fetishism amongst them’ (1859–79, 17–18 August 1859). Similarly, in Victoria the scholar Robert Brough Smyth noted that:

Birds and beasts are the gods of the Australians. The eagle, the crow, the mopoke, and the crane figure prominently in all their tales. The native cat is now the moon; and the kangaroo, the opossum, the emu, the crow, and many others who distinguished themselves on earth, are set in the sky and appear as bright stars (Smyth 1878, vol. 1, p. lx).

Researchers who were missionaries looked for analogous Indigenous beings in the beliefs of their convert communities upon which to graft notions of God and Satan (Clarke 1994; Kolig 1981, 1988; Swain 1991, 2000).

Aboriginal beliefs

With the development of anthropology as a discipline from the early 20th century, Europeans stopped seeing the religion of Australian hunter-gatherers as primitive, and began to acknowledge the depth and complexity of their traditions that were told in myth and song (Hiatt 1996; Strehlow 1970). It was recognised that in Aboriginal religion the totemic spiritual ancestors as a group performed heroic deeds during the Creation period, as they moulded and imparted spiritual power to the land, and then formulated the customs for all their descendants, both human and non-human, to ultimately follow (Hiatt 1975; Sutton 1988; Clarke 2003a, 2016a). In 1904, anthropologist Alfred Howitt published an account of the cultures belonging to the Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia he had worked with and remarked that:

A belief is common to all the tribes referred to, in the former existence of beings more or less human in appearance and attributes, while differing from the native race in other characteristics. Their existence, nature, and attributes are seen in the legendary tales which recount their actions (Howitt 1904, p. 475).

Aboriginal people believed that at the conclusion of the Creation, their ancestors took the shape of entities such as birds and other economically important animals, but many were also plants, atmospheric and cosmological phenomena or even human diseases. The totemic links that each person possessed gave them rights to country, of the type that lawyers and anthropologists would later refer to as native title (Peterson and Rigsby 1998; Sutton 1998a, 2003). The corpus of recorded Indigenous Creation narratives for south-eastern Australia is immense and therefore too large for adequate treatment in any one chapter, so for this reason only certain myth complexes are discussed below in order to demonstrate the intimacy of relationships between people and their associated totemic species.

Creation of country

Recorded accounts of the total landscape as it was believed to be during the Creation period are Utopian, concerning a golden age when food and water were easily procurable everywhere (Clarke 2014b, 2014c, 2015a). For instance, among the Buandik (Booandik) people of the south-east of South Australia it was believed that the bo-ong was one of the two soul spirits within each person, and upon death it would go up to the ‘cloudland’ (Skyworld) ‘where everything is to be found better than on the earth’ (Howitt 1904, p. 434). Among these people, it was said that a fat kangaroo was just like the kangaroo of the clouds (Smith 1880). At the conclusion of the Creation period, the paths that the ancestors had made during their travels on Earth became ancestral tracks, or songlines, which connect with mythological sites where according to Aboriginal tradition particular significant events had occurred. It was Aboriginal belief that many of their spiritual ancestors migrated from the terrestrial country into the heavens, sometimes through the Underworld (Elkin 1932, 1964, 1977; Clarke 2003a). In the heavens, the ancestors remained as ‘sky heroes’ who maintained their influence over the total landscape (Elkin 1977, p. 32).

In Victoria, it was noted that: ‘The progenitors of the existing tribes - whether birds or beasts or men - were set in the sky, and made to shine as stars if the deeds they had done were mighty, and such as to deserve commemoration’ (Smyth 1878, vol. 1, p. 431). It was believed that when the Creation drew to a close, this idyllic existence was restricted to the heavens, where the spiritual ancestors and deceased human spirits who had left Earth were able to continue their foraging activities in a land of plenty. People on Earth could recognise their ancestors in the night sky. According to colonist William Stanbridge, in north-western Victoria the people of Lake Tyrrell had beliefs concerning ‘Berm-berm-gle (two large stars in the fore-legs of Centaurus)’, which they identified as:

Two brothers who were noted for their courage and destructiveness, and who spear and kill Tchingal [Emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae]. The eastern stars of Crux are the points of the spears that have passed through him, the one at the foot through his neck, and that [one] in the arm through his rump (Stanbridge 1857, p. 139).

These brothers are the Brambimbula, who are two ancestors who were frequently recorded in the mythology of north-west Victoria and adjacent parts of the Mallee region in South Australia (Clark 2007a; Clarke 2009c; Hercus 1986; Howitt 1904; Smyth 1878).

Living people were generally barred from the Skyworld, although there were some exceptions to the rule, with healers (‘medicine-men’) being able to travel there to learn new songs and gain special knowledge of rituals from the spirits residing there (Elkin 1977). In the south-east of South Australia during the 19th century, a pangal (‘doctor’) was said to have spoken with the spirits of the dead by climbing a tree into the Skyworld (Smith 1880), with similar accounts coming from south-western Victoria of powerful ‘doctors’ and ‘sorcerers’ who claimed to have been regular visitors to the heavens (Dawson 1881). Stanbridge stated that in Victoria:

There are doctors or priests of several vocations; of the rain, of rivers, and of human diseases. The office is alleged to be obtained by the individual visiting, while in a trance of two or three days duration, the world of spirits, and there receiving the necessary initiation, but there are natives who refuse to become doctors, and disbelieve altogether the pretensions of those persons (Stanbridge 1861, p. 300).

Their crossing into the Skyworld was achieved by various means, such as by using a magic rope, climbing to the top of a large tree, walking to the top of certain high hills, or through their ritual power to pass through space itself (Howitt 1904; Elkin 1977; Clarke 1997, 2015a). In many cases, such travel was part of the initiation for healers who specialised in treating sicknesses caused by supernatural causes.

In the Lower Murray region, there was a tradition that the Supreme Male Ancestor, Ngurunderi (Nurunduri), had thrown out a line attached to his testicles to help guide his lost son from Earth towards the west and from there into the heavens (Clarke 1995b; Meyer 1846 [1879]). It was believed that after the close of the Creation period this method of finding the Skyworld remained, as it was recorded that ‘after death the [human] spirit wanders in the dark for some time, until it finds a string when … Oorundoo [Ngurunderi] pulls it up from the earth’ (Angas 1847b, p. 97). Across Aboriginal Australia it was traditionally believed that strings, sometimes described as threads in a web, were regularly used as means of conducting soul spirits into the Skyworld (Elkin 1977; Howitt 1904).

Legacy of the ancestors

For Aboriginal people, their spirit ancestors could simultaneously be seen as landscape features on Earth, such as a tree or a hill, and as celestial bodies, like stars in the Skyworld. For example, the large granite boulder formation on the coast at Papajara (the Granites) north of Kingston in the south-east of South Australia represented the physical bodies of the ancestral Emus who fought with the Brolgas, all also seen in the night sky (Clarke 1997, 2016a). Across Victoria, Bunjil the Eaglehawk (Wedge-tailed Eagle, Aquila audax) Ancestor was associated with the Skyworld and with particular mountains on Earth (Brumm 2010), which were probably both seen as connected regions. Bunjil (Buunjill) was variously seen as Fomalhaut or Altair in the night sky (Dawson 1881; Howitt 1884, 1886), and on Earth he was said to reside in ranges at the headwaters of the Yarra River (Fison and Howitt 1880) or at places such as in Western Port Bay (Barwick 1984) and at Lal Lal Falls near Ballarat (Clark 2002).

Recorded narratives of myth explain how ancestors became animals towards the end of the Creation. At Lake Tyrrell, it was documented by Stanbridge that:

Bunya (Oppossum [sic.]), (star in the head of Crux), who is pursued by Tchingal [Emu], and who, in his fright lays his spears at the foot of the tree and runs up it for safety. For such cowardice he became an opossum (Stanbridge 1857, p. 139).

As an animal, each ancestor’s behaviour continued in the Skyworld. For instance, in south-western Victoria, colonist James Dawson recorded that:

Hydra, ‘Barrukill,’ is a great hunter of kangaroo-rats [Dipodomys species]. On his right, and a little above him, are two stars – the rat, and his dog ‘Karlok’; above these again are four stars, forming a log; underneath are four other stars, one of which is his light, and three form his arm. The dog chases the rat into the log; Barrukill takes it out, devours it, and disappears below the horizon (Dawson 1881, p. 101).

Such myths document the behaviour of modern animal species, with possums being secretive and Kangaroo-rats living in hollows on the ground (Menkhorst and Knight 2001) and Dingoes (Canis lupus dingo) used as an aid to hunting (Cahir and Clark 2013; Hamilton 1972). Similarly, in south-western Victoria there is a myth concerning how a Snake Ancestor received venom from the Tortoise (Dawson 1889, pp. 106–7). It involved the Tortoise realising that he could no longer kill people after they had mastered drinking water by scooping it up by hand and throwing into their mouths, which meant that their heads would no longer be immersed in the waterholes and streams. In this way, people were able to see dangers in the water without exposure to themselves. The Snake, who was previously without poison, received the gift of venom because it gave him better chances to bite people as they walked in long grass.

The Creation mythologies can account for the physical traits and behaviour of contemporary species. From south-western Victoria, it is recorded that an ancestor, who had stolen a fish from a group of people camped at Dunkeld on the southern edge of the Grampians, was punished by being turned into a blue heron (White-faced Heron, Egretta novaehollandiae), which is largely a solitary species (Dawson 1881). In the Lower Murray of South Australia, a Ngarrindjeri version of the White-faced Heron myth has him being severely attacked by other bird ancestors, resulting in him ever after flying with his legs bent up underneath as if he is hurt (Clarke 1990).

Bird ancestors feature prominently in the recordings of Aboriginal mythology. For instance, a Victorian newspaper correspondent remarked that:

Birds and beasts figure in the tales, legends and folk lore of the Australian blacks as their gods. The eagle, the crow, the mopoke [boobook owl, Ninox boobook] and the crane [brolga] especially occupy prominent places. The kangaroo, opossum, emu and other Australian beasts are set in the sky and appear as bright stars (Anonymous 1888b, p. 2).

Many of the Creation ancestors were believed to have become species of bird, and due to their common ability of flight most would have been considered to have already had some access to the Skyworld (Clarke 2016a, 2016c). For instance, in south-western Victoria it was recorded that the Large Magellanic Cloud was called kuurn kuuronn, meaning ‘male native companion’ or ‘gigantic crane’ [Brolga, Grus rubicunda], while the Small Magellanic Cloud was gnaerang kuuronn, meaning ‘female native companion’ (Dawson 1881, p. 99). Related beliefs were recorded at Lake Tyrrell in north-western Victoria, with ‘Kourt-chin (Magellan Clouds). – The large cloud a male, and the lesser cloud a female Native Companion’ (Stanbridge 1857, p. 139). The people belonging to the clan of the ‘native companion’, along with the birds of this species on Earth, were both seen as the descendants of those ancestors who were present in the night sky.

Eaglehawk and Crow narratives

In south-eastern Australia, recordings of the mythology concerning the Eaglehawk and Crow/Raven are rich in ethnographic detail (Blows 1975, Clarke 2016a; Hercus 1971; Tindale 1939). Among the Ganai (Kurnai) people of Gippsland in eastern Victoria, anthropologists stated that:

… the Eaglehawk (‘Gwannumurung’) is greatly referenced. He is regarded as the type of the bold and sagacious hunter. His plumes and talons played a part in their necromancy. He figures in their tales in company with ‘Ebing,’ the little Owl [probably boobook owl, Ninox boobook] (Fison and Howitt 1880, pp. 322–3).

In contrast, the Crow Ancestor, variously known by onomatopoeic names such as Waa, Waak, Wak, Waku or Wark (Clarke 2016a), is generally portrayed as a thief (Maddock 1970). Most ethnographic sources describe the bird as a ‘crow’, although in virtually all cases the species involved would have been more accurately described as the Australian Raven (Corvus coronoides) (Clarke 2016a). Across western and central Victoria, the Eaglehawk Ancestor was recorded variously as Bunjil, Buunjill, Pund-jel and Pund-jil, being the attempts by different European recorders to write the same name (Howitt 1904; Maddock 1970).

Bunjil was a Supreme Male Ancestor and creator of both men and the physical world. The Woiwurrung (Woeworung) people of central Victoria celebrated him in their dance ceremonies, which according to anthropologist Alfred Howitt were based on mythology that:

… Bunjil held out his hand to the sun (Gerer) and warmed it, and the sun warmed the earth, which opened, and blackfellows came out and danced this corrobboree, which is called Gayip. At it images curiously carved in bark were exhibited. Usually Bunjil was spoken of as Mami-ngata, that is, ‘Our Father,’ instead of by the other name Bunjil. It is a striking phase in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Totemic life
• Chapter 2 Terrestrial spirit beings
• Chapter 3 Water spirit beings
• Chapter 4 Plant food
• Chapter 5 Animal food
• Chapter 6 Water
• Chapter 7 Fire in Aboriginal south-eastern Australia
• Chapter 8 Watercraft
• Chapter 9 Shelter: housing
• Chapter 10 Clothing
• Chapter 11 Wellbeing
• Chapter 12 Healing
• Chapter 13 Trade
• Chapter 14 Space
• Chapter 15 Time
• Conclusion: The future of Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge
• References
• Index