At Budj Bim in south-western Victoria, thousands of years of history are encapsulated in a labyrinth of waterways designed to trap and fatten eel.
Even on cool, still mornings when mist envelops the reed-fringed waterways, move quietly through the wetlands of Budj Bim and you will spot plenty of wildlife. Over here, a wallaby peers shyly through the dew-laden poonyart grass; over there a swallow, orOne of the wetlands’ most important inhabitants, however, is hiding away in the cool waters. For the Gunditjmara people, theor short-finned eel, was an essential food source for thousands of years.
“This is really breaking the stereotype around Aboriginal history,” says Ashleigh Bartley, a Bwgcolman Ewamian woman who is Visit Victoria’s Aboriginal tourism specialist. “As Aboriginal people, we have always known that we had complex systems of looking after country. Now people can go and see and experience it, and learn from traditional owners.”
The network was adapted to seasonal adjustments in the water flow, with kooyang of different sizes trapped in separate ponds before being harvested in specially woven baskets. Archaeologists have estimated that hundreds of tonnes of basalt blocks were excavated in its creation. The Gunditjmara had to remove hundreds of tonnes of basalt rock to create their network of waterways.
When the Victorian government finally relocated the Gunditjmara into reserves in the 1860s, some of them refused to leave their land, prompting the authorities to build a mission at Tae Rak.It wasn’t until 2007 that the native title rights of the Gunditjmara were recognised by the federal government, acknowledging their “strong and unrelenting connection to this area ... back through millennia”, and the traditional owners were able to manage their land once more.
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