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| ISBN-13: | 9781107290006 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/10/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 50 MB |
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Cambridge University Press
978-0-52186-977-5 - A History of Victoria - by Geoffrey Blainey
Index
I
A Turban of Feathers
When the Aboriginals reached Victoria the land was not as we know it. That exposed part of the coast which is now pounded by surf was silent and dry. No waves rolled majestically towards the beach at Lorne and Portsea and Lakes Entrance.
Those dark people who first roamed near the site of Melbourne had to make a long journey in a canoe if they wished to reach the sea. There was no Port Phillip Bay: the present bed of the bay was dry and across that land flowed the Yarra. A piece of tree has been found in the bed of that old river, and the tree was alive only 8000 years ago. The big ships which now enter the bay tend to follow that old Yarra bed, close to the Mornington peninsula.
If Aboriginals canoeing down the old Yarra had reached the twin cliffs which we now call Point Nepean and Point Lonsdale, they would still have been far from the sea because Bass Strait did not exist for most of the human history of Victoria. The Yarra then flowed across the Bass Plains towards the south west, where it must have met the River Tamar, flowing from the present Launceston and northern Tasmania. Where the Yarra and Tamar joined would have been a swirl of waters more dramatic than the junction of the Murray and the Darling, especially when the rivers ran strongly. At times the Tamar was the larger river becauseit carried away, in late spring and summer, the melted ice from the cold mountains of northern Tasmania. So the combined waters of Tamar and Yarra seemingly flowed west, in a valley between the high ground of the present King Island to the south and the present Cape Otway to the north. Somewhere to the west of King Island this powerful river ran into the Southern Ocean.
About 50 000 years ago, in the early Aboriginal era, the level of sea everywhere in the world was lower than today. With the sea more than 400 feet below the present levels, land bridges joined countries which are now severed by ocean. An Aboriginal could walk from Victoria to Tasmania, swimming a river here and there, and he could also walk from Victoria to New Guinea, for Torres Strait did not exist and the Gulf of Carpentaria was a plain. The seas separating the continent of Australia and New Guinea from the nearer islands of the Indonesian archipelago were often narrow, and when the Aboriginal pioneers had made their slow, island-hopping trek across that archipelago towards Australia they did not have to cross long stretches of water. The sea was so low that the island of Bali was part of Asia. In Europe, people could walk from England to Holland or from Scotland to Denmark. It was also possible to walk from eastern Siberia to Alaska, without encountering slippery impassable ice, and that was probably how the Americas were found. That discovery came long after the discovery of Australia.
The place now called Victoria was intensely cold in winter. Between 40 000 and 20 000 years ago those Aboriginals living on the Victorian foothills experienced the intense winter cold which Mt Kosciuszko now experiences. As the deep snow and ice of winter covered many of Victoria’s higher mountains, the thaw in spring and early summer must have swelled the rivers running into the Murray. On the other hand the Mallee probably had a kinder climate, and lakes which now are salty were filled with fresh water, and their banks for much of the year teemed with wildlife, and fish and mussels abounded. In the Western District, too, the lakes were larger, and at one time Lake Corangamite overflowed into the Barwon. On those western plains the winter winds must have been bitingly cold.
Tasmania had permanent ice and glaciers, and the Antarctic was much larger and therefore closer to Tasmania, and some of its icebergs might well have drifted close to the southern Australian coast. There can be no doubt that Aboriginals lived in Tasmania at least 20 000 years ago. One of their shelters has been excavated in a cave overlooking the Franklin River which, in that epoch, drained a bleak terrain dominated not by rainforest but by the scrawny plant life of the tundra.
Enormous quantities of water were locked up in the ice at both ends of the world. Areas of land that now yield annual harvest were covered with ice for much of the year. About 17 000 years ago there came slight signs of a warming. In the following few thousand years the world’s climate slowly became warmer, the permanent ice began to melt, and the level of the oceans became higher. About 12 000 years ago the warming accelerated. In places where the plains rolled gently down to the sea, the rising waters were shatteringly intrusive. In the Great Australian Bight it is believed that over a period of 4000 years the sea invaded the flat lands at a rate of about one mile in every twenty-five years. In the lifetime of old people on the Victorian coast many familiar landmarks would have been flooded: the rock pools where as children they had dived for abalone, the little gully where they built a windbreak in winter, the trees in which they hunted the possums, the native well where fresh water was drunk, the patch of ground where edible grains were gathered at a certain time each year, and the seashore cave on which they painted symbols and animals. In the span of several thousand years a whole tribal territory could be flooded or made uninhabitable.
The rising seas continued to lap new areas, forming islands and inlets and rips and salty marshes, and then redrawing the map by drowning a young coastline and creating another. The Yarra–Tamar river became shorter as the seas rose higher. About 14 000 years ago the sea cut off King Island from Cape Otway. The sea, still rising, separated Wilson’s Promontory from Flinders Island about a thousand years later. Another thousand years passed, and Tasmania was almost completely cut off from Victoria.
Bass Strait was still far from its present shape, but it was now a strait and becoming wide. Some tribal territories must have been cut into two or three separate pieces, or even drowned completely, by the incoming sea. A tightly knit group of people with their own pride, their own language or dialect, their own marriage patterns, and religion, were pulled apart by the sea. For some centuries those members of the same tribe who lived on opposite sides of the narrow waters could have continued to congregate, periodically, by paddling across the strait in tiny canoes in order to meet relatives and perform ceremonies. As the straits became wider, and the strong winds whipped up that wider expanse of water, many Aboriginals crossing to and fro must have been drowned. Slowly the distant shore receded, while still seen on clear days. Finally all contact ceased.
The Tasmanians were completely isolated, and remained so for more than 10 000 years. When the first European explorers – Dutch and French and British – arrived they found a society and people who were very different from those in Victoria. The Tasmanians had no boomerang and did not have that half-domesticated dog, the dingo, which helps to explain why the Tasmanian tiger and the Tasmanian devil survived there long after becoming extinct in Victoria. Likewise the languages spoken by the 4000 or 5000 Tasmanians were different from those on the opposite shore, and even the people themselves seemed so different in face and physique that early observers thought that they must have immigrated long ago from Africa or Melanesia.
The Tasmanians were often described as a light black, and often as brown, though the brown perhaps came partly from the ochre with which they decorated their body. Their lips were full and their nose broad. Their black hair grew in tightly coiled locks and had a woolliness which was unlike that of mainland Aboriginals. They were small in build though few adults were as small as Trucanini, the last full-blooded Aboriginal in Tasmania, who was said to have been only 4 feet 3 inches high when she died in 1876. A likely explanation of why the Aboriginals in Tasmania so differed, physically, from those in Victoria was that the Tasmanians were originally mainland Aboriginals who were subjected to micro-evolution in the course of a long isolation. Certain characteristics, initially present perhaps in small numbers of people, had become predominant. At the same time there is increasing evidence that in the course of the millennia several waves of immigrants reached Australia. If this is true the Tasmanians might have represented an earlier wave.
There were even marked differences in people living in Victoria and the Riverina. Excavations in northern Victoria, at Kow Swamp near Cohuna, have discovered the remains of people whose skulls were more rugged than those of other Aboriginals living in the region at that time. Those who were buried at Kow Swamp about 10 000 or 13 000 years ago had strongly sloping foreheads, large teeth and jaws, and a small ridge of bone above the eyes. In profile they seemed to belong to a slightly earlier period in the evolution of the human race, and yet within a few days’ journey of them were living Aboriginals who resembled many of the present-day Aboriginals. Whether the Aboriginals of Kow Swamp eventually died out or simply intermarried is a puzzle to which no confident answer can be offered. Whether they were really so different is still debated hotly by anatomists and archaeologists.
Meanwhile, the seas continued to rise. They lapped what are now the Port Phillip Heads and eventually formed that wide bay inside; they quietly flowed into Westernport; they entered the Gippsland lakes; and everywhere the Victorians retreated. For about 11 000 years the seas had been rising, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly. About 6000 years ago they came close to their present shores.
The Victorians who lived far from the sea could not escape the effects of this momentous event. Groups who had lost their territory must have been slowly driven inland, and many regroupings, violent or peaceful, must have been made. Even Aboriginals far from the intruding seas were affected by the changing climate. The Mallee was a casualty of the first warming phase which came with the rising seas. As the climate became drier, the vegetation suffered in that region of marginal rains. The lakes were empty for part of the year and the wind blew the light soil into great dunes. A dryness such as the Mallee has not experienced in the European era gave way to a moister period. The evidence suggests that 10 000 years ago Victoria was moister than today. About 8000 years ago it was probably warmer than today. Such changes in heat, rainfall and the flowing of the rivers affected the animals, fish, insects, and plant foods on which the Aboriginals depended.
Neither the landscape nor the people were unchanging. During the long Aboriginal epoch, volcanoes erupted in south-western Victoria and just across the present South Australian border. To the south of Hamilton, both Mount Napier and Mount Eccles poured out molten lava which flowed towards the sea: from Eccles the lava flowed about thirty miles and, if the season was summer, must have set fire to surrounding grasses and bushes. Further west, Mount Schank erupted some 18 000 years ago and the crater of Mount Gambier marks an eruption of a mere 4000 to 4300 years ago. That seems only yesterday on the human clock of this land: if the Aboriginal history is divided into a twelve-hour clock, that eruption must have come at the start of the last hour.
Tower Hill, close to the western Victorian coast, erupted 6000 or 7000 years ago, and the cloud of ash settled to the east of the crater, burying an Aboriginal axe abandoned maybe in haste. Further east at Red Rock, near Lake Colac, another eruption could have been as recent as 4000 or 5000 years ago. In addition another six volcanoes in Victoria were probably alive in Aboriginal times. These eruptions, though frightening to the thousands of Aboriginals who saw them, did not last long. The volcanoes, once they cooled, erupted no more.
Victoria, when the first Europeans arrived, was apportioned between some thirty-three tribes, and in addition certain strips along the border belonged to tribes whose main territory lay in South Australia and New South Wales. Each tribe had its own language or distinctive dialect. Each tribe had its own customs, rituals and laws. Each tribe believed that its land was unique and superior to all other places. The patriotism, the sense of belonging, of the average Aboriginal was probably far in excess of that of even the typical fourth-generation Australian today. As Professor T. G. H. Strehlow argued, few white Australians can understand the affection felt by Aboriginals for their own soil, rocks, trees, animals and sacred sites. For Aboriginals the spirits who had created the earth and all its living creatures were still alive, and the landscape and all living things testified to a divine presence.
The Aboriginals were not united. Enmities thrived, and tribes used derogatory names against their neighbours. Thus the Bunurong, whose territory embraced Westernport and the Mornington peninsula, were referred to as the Thurung by the tribe to the east: that was the word for the tiger snake. The Bunurong people were said to sneak up on their enemies like a snake, and kill them. Some names were simply descriptive. The Jupagalk near the Mallee were known to a neighbouring tribe as ‘people of the native box country’, while those who occupied the site of Melbourne and the country stretching from Macedon to Warragul were known as the ‘white gum people’ or the Wurundjeri.
The typical tribal territory occupied about 2000 square miles or an area of say fifty miles by forty miles. At one extreme the Tatungalung, near Ninety Mile Beach and the Gippsland lakes, occupied only about 700 square miles, while the Jaara of the Avoca and Upper Loddon rivers occupied about eight times as much territory. Within each territory the inhabitants spent most of their life in small groups embracing a few families and maybe ten or twenty people in all. They were nomads living off the land, and their migrations were based on the seasons and were purposeful and systematic.
As a group might move camp forty times in the course of a year its shelters were meagre, being sometimes made of boughs and sometimes a mere windbreak. The most elaborate shelters were on the western volcanic plains and were so soundly built, with turf roof and wooden frame, that it was later said that a horse and rider could tread on them safely.
Normally the Aboriginals were naked. The list of ornaments and apparel worn at one time or other by men and women in the various tribes would fill many pages, but not often were these pieces of decoration or apparel worn. The first British settlers in Port Phillip Bay in 1803 observed that Aboriginals from the Bunurong tribe were normally naked and they concluded erroneously that any man who wore a little clothing was a chief: in fact an Aboriginal tribe had neither a king nor chieftains. One light-complexioned, handsome young man was assumed to be a king, for he wore a large cloak made of small animal skins and ‘a beautiful Turban of feathers’. Further around the bay another member of the Bunurong tribe wore a head-dress made of cockatoo and parrot feathers and kangaroo teeth. When the feathers were freshly plucked, they must have presented a dashing spectacle. Women, too, were seen with feathers in their headgear, but nothing so concealing as a feather was usually worn below the neck. After the first Europeans arrived, most Aboriginals were given clothes and blankets to hide their nakedness. They did not understand the dangers of wearing wet clothes or lying on a wet blanket, and chills and pneumonia and influenza were to wipe out hundreds of them.
In many tribes both the women and men decorated themselves with a bone or reed, protruding from both ends of the pierced septum of the nose. On the lower Murray, in the vicinity of Swan Hill, the hole in the septum was made by a sharpened bone taken from the thighbone of an emu, and in some tribes the bone worn in the nose of women was shaped from the leg of a kangaroo. In length, the horizontal bone ranged from about three inches to perhaps a dozen inches. On ceremonial occasions, white and red ochres – possibly traded over a long distance – were vividly painted on the naked body, painted so lavishly that sometimes more of the body was painted than unpainted.
Their best possum-skin cloaks were magnificent. One preserved in Museum Victoria is made of eighty-one possum skins; it must have been heavy for people who liked to travel lightly. Before the cloak was assembled each skin had to be stretched, and the inside scraped clean with a chip of basalt or a sharp mussel shell. In sewing the skins neatly together the Aboriginals usually worked from right to left, and their needle was a bone and their thread was made of animal sinew or plant fibre. Many of these warm cloaks were ornamented on the inside with drawings: the actual animal skin was worn against the Aboriginal’s own skin and the fur was exposed to the weather, like a decorative fur worn by wealthy western women in modern times. The possum-skin cloak, usually square, had no sleeves, and could be fastened in front by a skewer. Other items sometimes worn by Aboriginals were necklaces, armbands and loin aprons made of animal skin, and a forehead band perhaps jauntily capped by the feather of a lyrebird, brolga or eagle.
Few of the objects which they made for daily life have survived. Victoria, moreover, is deficient in examples of Aboriginal rock art. Many rock carvings and paintings have been discovered within the granite country of the north east, but the granite chips and weathers easily, and only a tiny fraction of the art once visible in that district has survived. The suitable sites for long-lasting rock art are in sandstone and limestone, and protected by caves or an overhanging ledge, but Victoria has few such sites. Most of the known sites are in the Grampians where the finest known gallery, the Glenisla rock shelter, displays stick figures painted probably by a finger dipped in red and, occasionally, white and yellow ochre. Archaeologists who excavated the floor of this rock shelter found the remains of many camp fires and the bones of bandicoot, rat kangaroo and other animals which were cooked at countless meals in the last three thousand years.
We imagine that the Aboriginals were essentially hunters. When depicted they usually carry a spear and a boomerang. As we eat no fruit or vegetable eaten in Aboriginal times in Victoria, we assume that plant foods did not exist or were too hard to find. It is likely, however, that most Aboriginals gained more energy from plant foods than meat. They could call on an astonishing variety of such foods. On Wilson’s Promontory, on soil far from fertile, about 120 edible plants can be found, and more than 100 of them were known to Aboriginals. Many plants which we see every day and would not dream of eating were valued. They ate the underground stems of the Austral bracken – so plentiful on the Gippsland hills – and pummelled them into a paste and roasted them. They ate the tiny carrot-shaped roots of the yam-daisy whose delicate yellow flower resembles a dandelion; they ate the shoots of the bulrush and the seeds of the old-man saltbush; and they ate a wide variety of nuts, roots, seeds, greens, flowers and fruits. Women gathered these foods, and their main instrument was a strong stick, sharpened at each end and used like a lever or crowbar to dig out the roots. The typical digging stick was taller than a woman and gave her a long reach if she took her part in a fight.
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