Aboriginal farm near Mount Franklin. Picture Credit: Culture Victoria.
Australian
Aboriginals. The First Farmers . A New Australian History.
It seems that what we have been taught about the Indigenous
Australians is not true, & this puts a whole new perspective on our history
& the resultant Living History in Australia.
“Gammage argues, the first Australians worked a complex system of
land management, with fire their biggest ally, and drew on the life cycles of
plants and the natural flow of water to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant
foods throughout the year. They managed, he says, the biggest estate on Earth”.
“Indigenous historian Bruce Pascoe has spent years looking through
these incredible accounts and found the first white settlers documented how
Aboriginal people built homes, villages, parks, dams and wells, selected seeds
for harvesting, ploughed fields, irrigated crops and preserved food in vessels”.
“Aboriginal people were the first culture on earth to bake, evidenced
by unearthed grindstones from 30,000 years ago, meaning Aussies beat the
ancient Egyptians by more than 15,000 years”.
“It has been purposefully left out of our history,” he said. “The
misconception that Aboriginals were hunter-gatherers has been institutionalised
and we are all suffering from that institutionalisation today — not just
Aboriginal people but the whole country.”
When explorer George Grey first entered the Victoria District of the
central west coast of Western Australia in 1839, he noted yam fields of square
kilometres in extent. One tract "extended east and west as far as we could
see". Further south he recorded that "the whole of this valley is an
extensive warran [yam] ground".
A few years later Augustus Gregory, a surveyor who later became a
famous explorer and Surveyor General of Queensland, stated that the local
Aboriginal population "never dug a yam without planting the crown in the
same hole so that no diminution of food supply should result".
Another colonial explorer, Lt. Helpman, commented in 1849 that the
Nhanda and Amangu "are a fine race of men but seem to depend entirely upon
warran and gum, of which they have great abundance".
Grey also reported four villages in the region, two of which he
observed at Hutt River the day after encountering the yam fields. He wrote:
"In this distance passed two native villages, or, as the men termed them,
towns". These villages comprised dwellings that were "very nicely
plastered over the outside with clay, and clods of turf," and which Grey
thought "were evidently intended for fixed places of residence".
According to Helpman, these dwellings were "well plastered
outside and the timber which formed it was about 6 in. [15 cm] thickness, about
6 ft. [1.8 m] high inside and capable of holding ten persons easily".
