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| Kulin people, probably Wurundjeri, wearing possum-skin cloaks somewhere near colonial Melbourne. |
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| Photo by Fred Kruger, c. 1870, reproduced with permission of the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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| Indigenous survivor of the colonisation process, Wombeetch Puyuun, posing for a nineteenth century camera, probably at Camperdown, on Victoria's basalt plain. |
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| Photographer and date unknown. Contributed by Camperdown and District Historical Museum, Camperdown. |
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Once upon a time, when volcanoes were still erupting, when magma was still exploding incandescent from deep within the earth, the first peoples began telling the first stories about south-eastern Australia's great basalt plain, in what is now the state of Victoria.
They sang and danced their stories at their great meetings and around their fires and stone ovens; they painted them onto their own bodies, and the walls of their caves and rock shelters; they wove them into baskets made from flax lilies and reeds, carved them into shields and boomerangs, incised them into the marsupial skins they stitched together as cloaks; and they passed them on to their children and grandchildren.
The first peoples carried their stories with them when they harvested murrnong and cumbungi; hunted kangaroos and wallabies; cleared their fish traps; mined silcrete or greenstone from their quarries and chipped the raw stone into finely crafted tools; ground the seeds of http://www.redreaming.info/DisplayStory.asp?id=8 into flour; and even when they played their traditional form of football. The stories they told bound them to the plain and gave their lives meaning, defining their relationships with one another and all the other species they shared their country with.
Archaeological deposits at the confluence of the Maribyrnong River and a small tributary near Keilor, and at other sites, give dates suggesting that people have inhabited Victoria's basalt plain for between 26,000 and 45,000 years, a period that represents several thousand generations of Aboriginal story-tellers. Throughout this time the first peoples adapted their lifestyles to global changes in climate and the associated rises and falls of sea levels, as well as to disruptions caused by the often-violent volcanic eruptions that created the plain itself. But the most profound changes they had to adapt to were those imposed by European 'squatters' in the early 19th century. Many of the survivors of the ensuing frontier conflicts were quickly, and often violently displaced from their traditional country and forced to live in reserves and missions managed by European missionaries and 'protectors'.
As the external world changed around them, so did the stories the Aboriginal peoples told about their plain. Their stories continue to evolve as the descendants of the first peoples maintain and assert their ongoing cultural identity, honour their own heroes and heroines, such as Wombeetch Puyuun, Tullamarine and Chuurneen, and celebrate their cultural survival.
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| Aboriginal quarry on the Maribyrnong River, Melbourne, from which traditional owners of the basalt plain mined silcrete, a fine grained silica rock, to manufacture spear points, blades and other tools. |
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| Mike Daffey, 2000. |
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What are your stories about the first peoples of Victoria's basalt plain?
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay.
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