B.A. (Hons), Ph.D, FSA Scot
@benvwilkie
bvwilkie@gmail.com
Unpublished research note, November 2019.
Robert B. Smyth, a mining engineer and early geologist,
asked in his 1878 ethnological study, The Aborigines of Victoria, “How did the
Aborigines of Australia first get fire? Probably they were never without it.”
He observed, from his knowledge of the natural world, that “Far back in
geological times there were active volcanoes in Victoria; and in the Miocene
and Pliocene periods the southern and western parts formed an archipelago; the
Pliocene sea was dotted with islands, and many active points sent upwards tall
columns of smoke. Immense rivers of molten lava flowed towards the ocean with
which they were at war … Whether or not these islands were peopled, we shall, in all likelihood, never know.”
Moving towards more recent times, as he saw it, he wondered
if Australia’s first inhabitants had, indeed, lived – and died – in times of
volcanic activity. Smyth observed how “we find, in the places where the
volcanic fires lingered until the land took the shape we now see, thin beds of
volcanic ash overlying the natural grass-grown surface” and speculated that “it
is not impossible – it is even probable – that in such spots there may be
discovered relics of the ancient inhabitants of the soil.”
Nineteenth century European observers such as Smyth were evidently attuned to the volcanic history of Victoria. The Newer Volcanics Province covers a 15,000 square kilometre area extending west between Melbourne in central Victoria to Mount Gambier just across the border in South Australia. Volcanic activity has transformed the landscape; there are over 400 eruption points in the region, and volcanic features range from lava shields and scoria cones to some of the most important maar volcanoes in the world, along with lava flows and walkable lava tubes. The youngest eruption is at Mount Gambier, 5000 years ago, and the area is still considered active. Smyth, in his time a man with a national and international reputation as a geologist and meteorologist, could hardly fail to recognise the marks of volcanism upon the landscape.
These curious observers also pondered what Aboriginal Australians
knew of this past. Smyth himself recorded how “The Aborigines point to some of
the recently extinct volcanoes, and say that fire came
from them once.” He had also been told by “Some amongst those who came first to
the colony” – that is, by some of the first European colonists in the Port
Phillip District – that the Aboriginal people they had spoken to “designated
hills known to have been once active points as Willum-a-weenth
– the place of fire – and described them as in former times giving forth smoke
and steam.”
Willum-a-weenth was likely a name
given to volcanoes by the Indigenous people who lived around the Yarra River
and present-day Melbourne, at the very eastern extremities of the Newer Volcanics Province. They spoke Woiwurrung.
In one compendium of ‘Yarra Yarra Tribe’ language
from 1859, the word for a dwelling was, indeed, ‘willam’,
while fire was ‘weenth’. Another observer had wrote
out the Woiwurrung word for fire as ‘wein’, while yet another recorded it as ‘wien’. That a word
for ‘fire’ might be included in the names for volcanic landscape features that
had not been active for many thousands of years was indeed interesting. In the
final analysis, however, Smyth was sceptical that any Victorian Aboriginal
people had ever witnessed volcanic activity. Based on what his early though
incomplete understanding of Victoria’s geological past, he suggested that “In
the most of cases – in nearly all – the geological evidence is certainly
against the supposition that the Aborigines could ever have had knowledge of
these points as once active volcanoes.”
Smyth probably had numerous reasons for suggesting that it
was highly unlikely that Victoria’s Aboriginal people had experience of active
volcanoes. Geological studies and methods were in their infancy. The mechanics
of volcanism, though of great interest, were hardly understood at all.
Certainly, tools did not exist with which a geologist might accurately measure
how far into the past a dormant or extinct volcano had last erupted. But the
process by which Woiwurrung words for volcanic hills
and mountains came to incorporate descriptions of fiery eruptions seemed to
give him reason for pause. Smyth wondered how Aboriginal people knew what did
they did about these landscape features, but was clearly unwilling or unable to
fully accept the possibility of a timeline for Indigenous presence in Victoria
that overlapped with so-called geological time: “Whether they have learnt
anything of the nature of these hills from the whites, or whether their
forefathers had, and transmitted to their descendants, any knowledge of a
period when they were active points, is not determinable”, he explained.
Victoria’s volcanic landscape was active much
more recently than we, even now, would generally assume, while its human
inhabitants had been here more a far greater length of time than any Europeans
in the nineteenth century could have guessed.
§
Smyth was not the only European person interested in what
Victoria’s Aboriginal people knew about the region’s volcanic landscape. In a
section of notes that appears to be related to Woiwurrung
speaking people, ethnologist Alfred Howitt – whose Native Tribes of
South-East Australia was published in 1904 – records his informants saying that “[the old
people] told us of a place out near the narin where
the sun goes down like a great fire that never goes out called Kandalau”. While descriptions such as this appear to be
related to mythology, they do, in most cases, refer to actual places. In this
case, we are concerned with a place “out near the narin
where the sun goes down”.
This short sentence provides a good lesson in the
interpretation of ethnological notes. ‘Narin’ has
been recorded in the name of an old pastoral property, ‘Kout
Narin’ or ‘Coortnahring’,
which has been in existence since about 1840 between present-day Balmoral and
Harrow and lends its name to the current Nareen district. But narin or Nareen is simply a corruption of the word for
‘sun’ – in Wathawurrung and Woiwurrung it is nyawiyn and in Djab wurrung it is
nyawi, the latter of which also appears in Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali
words for ‘sunset’, nakono nyawi
and mirmap nyawi. It is
likely Howitt was being told the Woiwurrung name for
a sunset but recorded the conversation incorrectly.
Other material is closer to the mark. In his 1881
ethnological study of western Victorian Indigenous groups, the Scottish
pastoralist James Dawson had collected together, with
the aid of his daughter Isabella, a vast dictionary of Aboriginal words and phrases,
particularly those of Djab wurrung speakers. He
recorded their social life, the ways they managed the land, and their stories
and beliefs. Dawson also wrote of their complex scientific knowledge, which
sometimes recalled astronomical and meteorological events many thousands of
years in the past. Elsewhere, stories of the rising seas tens of thousands of
years ago persisted. In western Victoria, the region’s first people were
witness the geological upheavals that had shaped the landscape.
Dawson noted in his study that some Aboriginal place names
on the western volcanic plains “indicate the existence of heat in the ground at
a former period”. One of these place names was probably Mount Rouse, the naming
which provides a rich example of the ways in which landscape features and
language interacted. Mount Rouse, at the time of European colonisation, was on
the land of the Kolorer gundij,
who were Djab wurrung speakers. This name simply
means ‘belonging to Kolorer’ – Dawson spelt it as Kuulor. Although Dawson recorded that the Djab wurrung word for lava was tintaeaen,
the Dhauwurd wurrung people who lived on the
south-west coast – also known as Gunditjmara – called
lava kuulor, or, more accurately, kulur.
Borrowing from their southern neighbours, Djab wurrung
speakers called an active volcano walpa kulur, or ‘burning hill’, while the Dhauwurd
wurrung name was baawan kulur.
Kolorer, or Mount Rouse, was clearly linked by name
to volcanic activity in western-Victoria.
These names are all apt: Mount Rouse, or Kolorer,
produced the longest lava flows of the Newer Volcanics
Province, travelling through sloping river courses for 60 kilometres until the
lava met the sea on the coast at Port Fairy. Dates for this massive eruption
conflict, ranging from 300,000 years ago to 1.8 million years ago, towards the
start of the most recent period of volcanic activity in the region. If Djab wurrung speakers did not witness the event themselves,
they certainly recognised Kolorer as a volcano.
Dawson himself had gathered no evidence that a “tradition
exists of any of the old craters, so numerous in the Western District, ever
having thrown out smoke or ashes”. The exception, however, was Mount Shadwell
near Mortlake – or Burug “a hill near the town of
Mortlake”, as Dawson wrote, which belonged to Burnung
gundij people, who spoke Girae
wurrung. Mount Shadwell, or Barug, first erupted
around 25,000 years ago, and perhaps as recently as 5000 years ago. Dawson said
that an “intelligent aboriginal distinctly remembers his grandfather speaking
of fire coming out of Bo’ok [Burug]
when he was a young man.”
Another ethnologist, R. H. Mathews recorded a further story,
which seemed to explain how the volcanic Mount Shadwell came to be. In 1904,
Mathews published the story of Murkupang, who was a Girae wurrung man “of great stature”, and who one day ate
his mother-in-law’s grandchildren. “Fearing the retribution of his
mother-in-law's friends,” the story goes, “Murkupang
left his habitation at dawn next morning and journeyed down the Hopkins river
to a place near Wickliffe, where he tried to make a cave in a rock by pulling
loose pieces off with his hands, but he did not succeed. He next went on to
Hexham, and saw in the distance Mount Shadwell, with its rocky sides.” The
account continues:
He approached it and saw a suitable cave in one side near
the top. Being a great conjurer or sorcerer, he commenced “bouncing” or
scolding the mountain, and commanded the portion containing the cave to come
down nearer to the plain on which he was standing. He stamped his feet and made
passes or signs with his hands while he sang a magical song, and presently a
large piece of the mountain containing the cave parted from the rest of the
hill. Murkupang ran away across the plain, and shouted to the fragment of mountain to follow
him. After a while, when he thought he had reached a good camping place, he
turned round, stamping his feet and using other
menaces which caused the mountain fragment to stop. It then settled down and
became what is now known as Flat-top Hill. Murkupang
then selected a place sheltered from the weather by an overhanging rock — a
sort of cave — and made his camp there.
Indeed, the people who told Mathews this story took him to
Mount Shadwell and pointed out the ‘depression’ from which Flat Top Hill was
made. Murkupang’s mother-in-law sent two warriors
after him. They covered the entrance to his cave with stringybark so that Murkupang could not escape: “A fire was then applied to
this inflammable material, which made a great flame and suffocated Murkupang. His spirit flew out of the cave and became a
Mopoke, called by the natives mumguty, a bird which
goes about at night.”
Elsewhere, the Djargurd wurrung-speaking Leeohoorah gundidj people lived around Mount Leura, part of the Leura Maar volcanic complex with Mount Sugarloaf, which erupted between 5000 and 25,000 years ago. Part of their land also included Lakes Bullenmerri and Gnotuk, likewise formed by maar volcanoes. Dawson recorded that “when some of the volcanic bombs found among the scoria at the foot of Mount Leura were shown to an intelligent Colac native, he said they were like stones which the forefathers told them had been thrown out of the hill by the action of fire.”
As with South
Australia and Queensland, the written evidence of volcanic activity taken
down by nineteenth century European colonists hints at a remarkable persistence
of these memories in the stories and languages of western Victoria’s Kulin
people.
§
There are several reasons for exploring volcanism in in the
ecological and biocultural traditions of western Kulin people and their
neighbours. The Newer Volcanics Province that spans
western Victoria and eastern South Australia is a highly distinct geological
region of the Australian continent. Its underlying geology has determined, in
turn, that western Victoria has some of the richest soils in Australasia. These
soils provide the nutrients and ideal conditions for a range of plant
communities, as well as habitats for a variety of faunal species. Besides this,
the landform itself furnishes an array of streams, creeks, rivers, and lakes
that have proved an abundant resource for both water and aquatic species, such
as eels. Without subscribing to theories of environmental determinism, which
tend to strip people of their agency, it is clear enough through the historic
record that the environment of the Victorian volcanic plains was one reason
that its first inhabitants were able to settle in villages, practice the
earliest forms of human aquaculture, and live relatively healthy and affluent
lives. The volcanoes here were important in this regard and were also an
important enough part of the landscape to be remembered and encoded in oral
traditions.
The ethnographic record for western Victorian Indigenous
people is also distinctly rich. The speed, concentration, and timing of
colonisation yielded an abundance of written records of Victorian Aboriginal
communities, and this was in no small part attributable to the establishment of
the Port Philip Aboriginal Protectorate at around the same time the pastoral
invasion began in the late 1830s. Its first leader, George A. Robinson, and his
deputies and successors were notably meticulous men, and wrote down a great
deal of observations from their tours into the Western District, as it became
known, in the late 1830s to the middle of the 1840s. Their records are not
perfect, but they have proven useful in reconstructing Aboriginal life at or
just before colonisation, nonetheless. Western Victoria also produced a number of amateur anthropologists or ethnologists – people
who, in any case, were deeply interested in Aboriginal life and customs, and
who went to great lengths to record and preserve this information in the second
half of the nineteenth century.
Third, and finally, the archaeological, palaeoecological,
and ethnographic evidence from western Victoria has played a significant role
in arguments about how Aboriginal Australian life and society was organised
over the tens of thousands of years the first Australians have occupied this
land. Debates over the intensification of Aboriginal economic and social
activity from around four millennia ago – and what caused it – substantially
relied in the beginning on archaeological findings from western Victorian
sites. This scholarly conflict pitted social and economic explanations against
environmental determinants – such as climate change from the late Pleistocene
to mid-Holocene – for the distinct intensification of human activity in
Australia that had become evident at archaeological sites starting around four
or five thousand years ago. Importantly, this debate moved understandings of
Australia’s so-called ‘prehistory’ beyond views of Indigenous Australians as
bearing a static, unchanging culture that, at best, only ever evolved in response
to environmental change.
Western Victoria’s volcanism and the abrupt and violent
transformation of landscapes that accompanies a volcanic eruption, however,
have played little role in these discussions, despite being an environmental
factor throughout the established period of Indigenous occupation in the
region. Without assigning it an overarching and deterministic role, volcanism
was, nevertheless, part of the lived experience of many Indigenous groups, and
volcanic activity was important enough in their lives that memory and knowledge
of it was held in language and traditions that were eventually passed on, after thousands of years, to Europeans in the nineteenth century.