Landscape Architecture Australia
Entangling time and space
Aunty Eileen Alberts takes RMIT University academic Jock Gilbert on a journey through time and place on Country in the UNESCO World Heritage-listed cultural landscapes of Budj Bim in western Victoria.
A journey through time and place on Country at the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape in western Victoria. Words by Aunty Eileen Alberts and Jock Gilbert.
During an afternoon spent yarning at the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, Aunty Eileen Albert and Jock Gilbert explored the ways that Gunditjmara culture is successfully underpinning the development of sustainable enterprise in a landscape that acknowledges and draws on the past, the present and the future.
This article takes the form of that yarn – a circular conversation grounded in place but traversing topics and time in a sometimes non-linear narrative structure.
As we stand slightly off the formed track in the Tyrendarra Indigenous Protected Area in the southern component of the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, Aunty Eileen Alberts points out the large volcanic tumuli – pressure ridges formed by the accumulation of lava flow – lying egg-like across the near-distance. Tyrendarra is owned by the Winda-Mara Aboriginal Corporation and is part of Gunditjmara Country. Aunty Eileen is Gunditjmara; this is her Country2 and there is an inherent obligation for its care.
The track winds away from the water courses and through country that is slightly drier looking and more open, revealing the cleared paddocks and blue gum plantations of the rich volcanic dairying country, emblematic of the region now. The large domes of the tumuli rise out of the ground like small hills and become more apparent once they are pointed out, more numerous once one knows how to look. As eggs embedded in the landscape, the probability of ancestral creator beings revealing themselves in the landscape is made manifest, along with the cultural implications binding people to landscape through Country – Gunditjmara people are people of Country. This is a relationship of mutual care, caring for Country ensures that Country cares for people. The Gunditjmara people care for this Country through an active network of related enterprises, which includes ranger land management programs, weaving groups, agricultural businesses and related health and social enterprises.
The lava flow associated with the volcanic eruption some 30,000 years ago when Budj Bim revealed himself created a complex hydrological system. Water flow was naturally directed above and below ground as it made its way through the richly forested landscape towards the coast in a seasonally ephemeral system of ebb and flow with
Lake Condah as central reservoir. It is a hydrology intrinsically linked, through its creation, to the network of life and culture that it both supports and is supported by. Kooyang thrive here and occupy an integral part of the ecosystem. They reach maturity in the rivers and shallow stream system of Gunditjmara Country before making their way downstream to the Southern Ocean and on to their spawning grounds off Vanuatu in the Pacific Ocean. The next generation of elvers (juvenile eels) then make the relentless return journey, driven by an evolutionary force to travel upstream to the freshwater lands of the Gunditjmara.
Gunditjmara people have manipulated the landscape and its hydrology for thousands of years. Subtle interventions on a large scale through the placement of rock and the rechannelling of stream courses allowed their management of the landscape to afford greater, more consistent availability of highprotein eel. Channels were diverted and weir walls built to facilitate the trapping of eels in a live storage system, providing a year-round resource. These manipulations work with the topography and hydrology of the landscape so that the resource is secured across generations. Clear evidence of house and community building remain in the landscape today in association with the manipulated landscape; clearly culture, community and landscape were bound together in a mutually informing relationship, practiced with care across generations.
Eel trapping has been central to Gunditjmara people’s culture and life for millenia. For nearly 200 years, this culture was officially denied – both explicitly and implicitly.
Kerrup Jmarra people are the Gunditjmara people of Lake Condah. The Eumeralla Wars were fought by the Gunditjmara people for more than 20 years, until the late 1860s. A lot of massacres took place in that time; thousands of people died. The government built a mission at Lake Condah in 1867 to house Gunditjmara people for their “protection.” On the mission, our people weren’t allowed to practise culture or language – the children would be removed if we did. The mission was closed in 1918 and people were forcibly expected to integrate into the community without support. Many Gunditjmara people stayed on in the mission buildings, because that was then their home. Nan and Pop rebelled against mission life – they moved a two-room house from the mission out to Little Dunmore where I grew up, playing on the lava flow with my extended family, hearing stories, learning to hunt, on Country. In the late 1950s, the government destroyed the mission buildings to further enforce integration. Our people were often forced to live on the edges of town, in the bush.
Eel trapping has been central to Gunditjmara people’s culture and life for millenia. For nearly 200 years, this culture was officially denied – both explicitly and implicitly.
The circular house foundations still found around the eel traps were explained away (if explained at all) as being natural outcrops, in multiple colonial and later records and surveys. Large, charred and hollow trees, perfect for smoking eels and associated with both traps and houses were considered merely coincidental.
While eel trapping at Budj Bim was primarily facilitated through large-scale landscape manipulation, including the re-direction of existing water courses and excavation of new channels, the trapping relied on the construction of low stone weir walls at strategic points across the flow. These weir walls included semi-circular notches for the insertion of woven baskets. The baskets are pieces of great beauty and utility – they consist of a large flange at the opening that fit against the stone wall when inserted into the notch and then a long narrowing tubular section which would lie in the direction of water flow and eel travel. For the eels, their relentless up-steam travel is blocked by the stone wall with the only possible route through the wide basket opening. They then become trapped and are easily harvestable from the narrow tube in which they are unable to turn. The long tube also then acts as a receptacle, with eels stored until they are able to be collected. The baskets are woven from native grass, flattened and worked with a kangaroo-bone tool. Weaving is a group and multi-generational undertaking; stories of Country are shared through the weaving with children absorbing both technique and Story3 through the process. Country is literally woven into these beautiful baskets.
On the mission our people weren’t allowed to weave or practice culture or use our language – they knew that if they did, their children would be taken away, the youngest first. Aunty Connie Hart was a naughty kid, as a girl in the 1920s she would secretly peek and watch her mother weave and sometimes be able to secretly pick up the tools and make a couple of stitches by copying work when no-one was round, teaching herself the technique. Her mother was a great weaver but had worked as a child-maid on the mission and her real fear of losing her children stopped her from sharing the weaving tradition. Aunty Connie shared that fear. Thirty years ago, I asked her to teach us to weave and she refused for a number of years. When she finally agreed to share that knowledge, she would make sure the door was locked and the blinds were down, so no-one would see us. But we started weaving baskets again and we share that knowledge with anyone who wants to join us. Sharing that knowledge keeps it alive for all generations. Weaving is a way of knowing Country; it’s an active relationship to Country and it gives us that feeling. You have to know when the right grass is ready to be woven, when it’s ready to burn. These things are changing, Country is changing, knowledge changes, climate is changing. We can feel that.
The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape was added to the National Heritage List in 2004 and to the World Heritage List in 2019, the
latter at a celebratory event in Azerbaijan involving Elders and Traditional Owners from the various groups within Gunditjmara Country. At Lake Condah mission, a beautiful keeping place for artefacts and stories and an administrative centre has recently been completed, with plans underway for a permanent memorial. As we stand on the western shore of Lake Condah, Aunty Eileen points out the site on which construction of a visitor centre and cafe has begun. It will sit between a regimented monocultural blue gum plantation and the regenerated forest of the lava flow, in which the channels, eel traps and village foundations persist as testament to the cultural interconnections which have always and continue to constitute Gunditjmara Country. The Budj Bim rangers have planted thousands of native trees, shrubs and grasses to contribute to the regeneration of Country. These will provide a setting for the cafe , but this work is also an active way of knowing Country, knowing when plants flower, when seeds are ready, when eels are ready for harvest. Of course, eel will be central to the cafe menu; a clear demonstration of connection to Country through enterprise development, which is infused with the past, embedded in the present and looking confidently to the future. 4
You can’t look after Country without knowing Country; to know Country you have to feel Country. To know Country you have to have an active relationship to Country – it might be caring for Country, like the rangers, it might be basket weaving, it might be harvesting eels. You can’t feel Country without knowing Country and you can’t look after Country without feeling and growing Country. Gunditj Mirring people are people belonging to Country.
1. Short-finned eels in the Gunditjmara family of languages. 2. By contrast with concepts of landscape or space, the concept of Country draws no distinction between the human world and its activities and the environment. For further reading, see Jock Gilbert and Sophia Pearce, “The Landscape of Country,” 1 August 2019, Landscape Australia website, https://landscapeaustralia.com/ articles/the-landscape-of-country/ (accessed 12 February 2021) 3. Janet McGaw and Anoma Pieris in Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures (Routledge, 2015) draw on the work of professor Marcia Langton and others in describing “Story” (as opposed to “story”) as a “spiritual power that is ubiquitous in particular persons and places … an essence that is immutable” and which is enmeshed within the concept of Country through a living relationship: ‘to be’ is to know one’s Story and to enact it‘on Country.’” For further reading see Jock Gilbert and Sophia Pearce, “The Landscape of Country,” 1 August 2019, Landscape Australia website, https:// landscapeaustralia.com/articles/the-landscape-ofcountry/ (accessed 12 February 2021) 4. For further reading, see: “Budj Bim Cultural Landscape,” UNESCO website, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577 (accessed 12 February 2021); “Indigenous Beginnings,” Glenelg Libraries website, http://glenelglibraries.vic. gov.au/historictreasures/stories/our-rich-indigenoushistory (accessed 12 February 2021); and “Colonial Frontier Massacres Map,” The Centre For 21st Century Humanities website, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/ colonialmassacres/map.php (accessed 12 February 2021)
Weaving is a way of knowing Country, it’s an active relationship to Country and it gives us that feeling. You have to know when the right grass is ready to be woven, when it’s ready to burn.