Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  The Indigenous nations had survived ice age, desertification and erratic seasons not just by cooperating with each other but also with the land. Europeans would try to remake the land into their image of European fields and pastures. The mostly male European farmers and planners of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would dimly grasp a simplified form of Indigenous hunting and ‘firestick farming’, the periodic patchwork burning to clear scrubby regrowth and promote green grass that looked so easy to duplicate. But even in these attempts their misunderstanding of the land would have tragic consequences. The far more influential and complex land management techniques practised by Indigenous women would be perilously ignored.

  CHAPTER 4

  The women who made the land

  Summer 2011

  They came for lunch, six Djuuwin women ranging from young to elderly, driving up from further down the river and bringing baskets with them, ordinary baskets with bread and picnic plates as well as baskets of plaited lomandra leaves.1

  We sat at the dining room table, and no one seemed to find anything incongruous in using modern serving spoons at the same time as a traditional stone knife. The small implement looked like any other stone till I took it in my hand and realised it was a perfect fit, that one side cut as well as any tool in my kitchen while the other rounded side could grind. This small tool with no handle may have looked primitive but in fact it was almost perfect, made for the smallness of a woman’s hand.

  They left the stone with me, along with one of the lomandra baskets and other gifts. I have been using it ever since; it doesn’t get blunt like metal knives. Perhaps it will still be in use in one or two hundred years’ time – unless it is thrown out by someone who looks at it and sees just a rock. At school and university I had been taught that ‘hafted’ tools with handles were superior, a sign of humanity’s great technological leap forward. But this small tool was made to be cradled in the hand. It didn’t need the extra leverage a handle would give it.

  The women were from the Indigenous community ‘down river’. One had read something I wrote about this valley many years ago and they wondered if I knew more than I had put into print. These women had never been here before, but they knew my land, could tell me where the fig trees and kurrajongs were, and why. They told me to watch for the clematis in spring, to see how it would form a highway to show the young girls where to go to gather the young inner stringybark that makes waterproof fishing line and string and many other woven products.

  Five hundred or five thousand years ago, or even more, trees that gave food, medicine or other useful materials like sticky saps for bird traps or seeds for making torches were planted where they were needed, near places where ceremonies would be held, by camping sites, or as a signpost at the base of the ridge that this was the easiest way to get from the valley up to the tableland above. Everywhere we went that day, those women knew what we’d see before we came to it because their ancestors had planted the ancestors of those trees. I have walked this land and studied it for forty years, taken notes, written about the ecological successions, identified the plants and tracked wombats, pythons and brown snakes, but in many, even most ways, they knew it far better than I, from lore handed down in a continuous tradition for thousands of years.

  The lower parts of the end of the Araluen Valley and the lower part of our property were profoundly changed by intermittent gold mining from the early 1850s until World War 2, when the dredges finally stopped churning up the river, although they never came up as far as where our house has been built. The creek flats have been turned over possibly many times looking for specks of gold. As you wander through what looks like untouched bush you’ll find Chinese stone water races, mullock heaps, even the remnants of fireplaces or the vague outline of huts from long ago. The red gums that used to line the creek have been replaced by lines of casuarinas that once grew in only a few spots up a couple of gullies but spread as the creek was disturbed by humans and by floods, churning up the damaged land, sweeping away tents and grog shops, heaving soil and boulders and washing them down to the sea.

  And yet, about 150 years later, these women knew what they would find here. Trees chopped down to feed the wood-fired dredges or for farmers’ fence posts left seed behind in the soil. Those trees, bushes and climbers had been planted in the right place and so their offspring grew again, out of a devastated land, to take their place.

  The land had shaped Australia’s Indigenous nations, as it would shape the new settlers’ lives and cultures too. But it was also shaped in its turn by hundreds of generations of women. Indigenous women made parts of Australia a linked series of farms that were so unlike traditional European farms that white settlers, and even anthropologists, few of whom were botanists or had lived a hunter–gatherer life themselves, either failed to recognise them or, until recently, underestimated their significance.

  If you don’t know what to look for in this valley, you might assume that the gotu kola that can help ease arthritis grows near the waterholes fortuitously – or the headache plants or best medicinal sap trees2 – and never realise that the roots of the murrnong, or yam daisy (Microseris lanceolata), are fat because the best ones were selected to regrow by women. You won’t know that the blady grass that cuts your fingers to the bone if grasped will give a rich harvest of oily seeds that can be ground into a paste and make delicious pancakes when fried on hot rocks by the fire. The tablelands above us are too cold and dry for a hundred kilometres for bunya nut or sandpaper and Port Jackson fig trees to grow, unless they were sheltered when young and watered. The bunyas and figs that grow in the gullies near areas of special significance to Indigenous women must have been deliberately planted, the seeds gathered at some gathering or festival and carried here – the nearest natural bunya nut plantings are too far away for birds to have carried the seed.

  The women men don’t see

  Probably more than half, even nine-tenths, of the food in Indigenous diets was hunted, collected, caught or planted and then harvested by women. But looking at colonial paintings in art galleries, the classic Indigenous food-gathering theme is ‘bloke with dead kangaroo and spear’.

  Women turned areas near good water sources into living larders, with a range of foods that would be available not just at the various seasons of the year but also in years of extremes3: wattles that only give edible seeds in droughts, orchids that only flower and produce fat tubers for baking after wet years of flood. Some food sources like ant larvae were left for really bad drought years when there was little else available. Even in regions where there were permanent houses, large gatherings would rotate to different places so that food sources weren’t overused. In other areas food would be harvested only in certain seasons or even every three, six or more years, so they wouldn’t be exhausted.

  Most cultures have their own traditional starch foods, from rice in Southeast Asia to south American maize and potatoes, north American wild rice, Africa’s pearl and finger millet and fonio, Hawaiian taro … it would take a book in itself to list them all, from cassava, tapioca, millet and yams to the chestnut and hazelnut flours used in rocky areas of the Mediterranean where grains don’t grow well.

  Starchy food also played a major part in the Indigenous Australian diet, and varied across the country. In the outback grasslands, Australian millet (Panicum decompositum) was harvested from vast fields of five-hundred hectares or more, using much the same techniques that were used in Europe: slashing down the stems while the plants were still green, leaving them piled up to dry, then beating out the seed, leaving the straw behind and winnowing to get rid of the seed husks by throwing the husk-covered seeds in the air on a windy day, so the lighter husks were blown away, leaving a growing pile of seeds. These were then ground into flour using smaller grinder stones on larger flat ones, and then baked on hot rocks. In central Australia, spores of nardoo were collected, ground and baked as cakes. Portulaca was also spread out in heaps to dry, then shaken, leaving piles of t
iny, oil-rich seeds behind.

  In tropical areas, wild rice (Oryza species) were grown and harvested. In the coastal forested areas tubers were eaten more than breads or cakes from seeds, but tree seeds from various acacias, quandongs, kurrajongs, Moreton Bay chestnut, velvet bean (Mucuna gigantea) and many, many others were planted, harvested, treated to counter their toxicity by leaching them for days or weeks in water and other techniques, then made into breads or cakes.4

  But even in forested areas there were many grass seeds that were planted, harvested and cooked, and well as seeds from ground covers like pigweed, the oily seeds of which can be made into a quick and delicious ‘paper bread’ by wiping the paste onto a hot rock by the fire. A paper-like bread was also made from many sources of starch harvested from ferns, palm, burrawangs, cycads, and rock orchid stems, although once again you need to know how to do this safely.

  Tubers and roots were also a major source of food, with the murrnong possibly the most important one in much of New South Wales and Victoria. Bracken root was baked in Tasmania. Only young and tender roots were harvested then placed on grass laid on hot stones by the fire, with another covering of grass so they steamed as they baked. In our valley, in the rare areas that have not been devastated by introduced animals, various crops of edible orchids carpet the ground from late winter to early summer. You need to know which are edible (and I am carefully not mentioning their names, as many are now endangered). But twenty minutes’ digging could easily feed a dozen people. The tubers are starchy, often sweet, each with its own flavour. In areas where edible lilies and edible orchids were cultivated, they would be so thick that you could gather handfuls once you’d scraped back the soil.

  Women also tended the water sources. The first job each day was to sweep away the accumulated animal droppings from the night before, keeping the water clean and drinkable. Use of water was women’s lore, passed on to the children: yes, you can swim in this pool (only if you know where the crocodile is sleeping), but don’t swim or wash in this hole as it is for drinking only. Clean this pool with coals from last night’s fire: when the charcoal has settled at the bottom, it’s safe to drink.

  Why has the vital role women played in Indigenous agriculture and food gathering been relatively ignored, especially in comparison to the acknowledgement of firestick farming? Partly it is because any bloke with a box of matches can tell himself he understands firestick farming (he probably doesn’t), but it’s also because those who wrote history, colonial records or published diaries in the first hundred years of European colonisation here were mostly men, from a culture that undervalued women’s contribution in their own homelands. It’s telling that during the food shortages of the early Sydney Cove colony, only one officer, Lieutenant William Dawes, appears to have asked an Indigenous woman about local foods.

  But the sheer complexity of knowing what to harvest, when and how – when getting it wrong could have deadly consequences – also meant much of the knowledge was lost relatively quickly.5 Once local communities of women were forcibly taken from their own lands, they might not know how to recognise, harvest or prepare the new plants around them. The knowledge of a displaced people, where knowledge isn’t written down but taught by example, is soon lost. Comparing our local bush foods with those of Arrente women in the 1990s, they told me that they were still trying to remember what their grandmothers had told them when they were children. Oral tradition had kept a vast and complex knowledge for tens of thousands of years, but it only needed two generations of women to stop passing it on, and much lore could be gone.

  The potential deadliness of some foods when ill-prepared, such as Moreton Bay chestnuts, also meant that even when the knowledge of how to prepare them was passed on to colonial women, they were hesitant to use it. There was also a stigma of poverty attached to using ‘bush’ foods, an admission that you couldn’t afford ‘proper’ food. We kids feasted on bunya nuts in southeast Queensland in the 1950s and 1960s, throwing the giant nut clusters into the fire and burning our fingers as we ate the roasted nut. But despite their abundance, I don’t remember any adult even tasting one, although as they allowed us to eat them, they must have known they were safe to eat.

  It’s also difficult to appreciate the sheer depth of racism. The schools of my childhood actively discouraged or wouldn’t admit Indigenous kids, because they were ‘dirty’ or ‘spread diseases’, or ‘too stupid to learn and bad for discipline’. One of the girls I sat next to in class admitted once, in a whisper, that her mother wasn’t Indian, as we had been told, but Indigenous. She moved seats soon after, and I think regretted telling me a secret that might have got her expelled if I’d spread the story. My grandmother, in particular, was paranoid that the slightly darker than northern European skin I’d inherited from her might make me appear Indigenous, especially in my childhood when my skin was suntanned.

  At school and in church we were informed that the Indigenous races were, quite literally, subhuman. My year 7 class, in a school I will not name, as today it is a strong force against racism, even had an Indigenous skull on display, brought in by one of my fellow students. Our science teacher showed us how (in her words) ‘the brain cavity was smaller than in other “intelligent” races’. My neurosurgeon grandfather informed me that skull size and shape had no bearing on intelligence. But even though I argued with my teachers about some aspects of history, this misapprehension was so deep and value-laden that I left it alone.

  The lost lore of women

  Indigenous women did pass on a lot of their lore to European women; several elderly white women passed some of that on to me, and others. In the nineteenth century, when more Indigenous cultures were intact and the people still allowed to live on the land they knew, white women too were rarely regarded as reliable authorities. And if Indigenous people generally were regarded as subhuman, an Indigenous woman was regarded as an even lower being. Women’s knowledge, and interests, whatever the colour of their skin, was regarded as inherently trivial. Even in my youth it was almost impossible for a woman to become a university lecturer rather than a tutor or research assistant, or a scientist rather than a laboratory assistant. In the 1960s many Australians quite seriously believed that a women was incapable of learning to drive well, and that even if a female could pass the exams, their hysterical temperament made them unfit to be managers, doctors, politicians or barristers. White male anthropologists talked to Indigenous men, not Indigenous women. Even if they had, Indigenous women may not have talked about women’s business to men.

  The land with no ovens or cooking pots

  Indigenous women’s land management, food storage and cooking also left few easily recognised remnants. A fridge is still a fridge, decaying in a dump forty years after it chilled its last leftover pizza, but dried bogong moth cakes, underground caches of semi-dried bunya nuts or baskets of dried fish or eel last at most a few years. Grinding stones or the small women’s knife/grinder that I use now don’t look like tools unless you have been shown how they can be used.

  Indigenous Australians used ovens. But unlike the easily recognised European bake houses, these were in-ground ovens, in use from Cape York to South Australia. A hole was dug, lined with rock, and then a fire was lit on the rocks. Once the rocks were red hot the ashes and coals were removed, a layer of leaves, seaweed or damp grass was added, and then the food: from meats to eggs, green vegetables, tubers, or cakes made from ground seeds or nuts, sometimes with added fat or fruits. At this stage water might be poured into the oven, to clear off the ashes and help steam the food. The food was wrapped in clay, or leaves, or barks, or seaweed to add flavour, or sometimes left in skin and feathers to protect the meat inside. It was then covered with more greenery and/or soil, to bake for hours or overnight.

  Ground ovens have several advantages over above-ground ovens. They are faster to make and don’t need to be waterproof. The meat and other food in a ground oven is safe from flies and can be left for days, if necessary, without rotting, and may
still even be warm. It is almost impossible to overcook food in a ground oven (not totally impossible: I’ve managed to burn a chicken and tubers), nor do you need to tend it while it cooks. The food stays juicy; the herb and wrappings add flavour; tubers soften, which is especially important if they are slightly fibrous, like young kurrajong root. A ground oven can be used for years, decades or centuries. But unless you know what it is, it just looks like a hole in the ground.

  Large shells were used to roast or boil food, or food might be placed in rock pools and hot rocks added till the food was cooked. These techniques were fast and effective, but left no easily recognised traces, unless you know what to look for: small rock pools surrounded by an unusual richness of food plants, nearby grinding stones, or the slivers of rock nibbled by women’s teeth into a fast cutting tool. Like the ‘pots’, these didn’t have to be carried from place to place but could be made on the spot, as you needed them. These ‘disposable’ knives are one of the most common, but rarely recognised, remnants of the cooks of two hundred years ago.

  Food was also steamed by placing it on woven mats of green vegetation on top of fire, or by wrapping meats and tubers in big balls of leaves, cress or moist seaweed, or in balls of clay, and baked by the fire. Once again these techniques used what was to hand but left no archaeological remnants. Nor did the baskets made of bulrush fibre that were used to cook tubers in central Victoria, left by the fire overnight to roast slowly, then eaten hot or cold.

  Ancient Greek and Roman pottery amphoras are still being dug up from thousands of years ago. Indigenous drinks were made in containers of wood, shell, paperbark or leather: light to carry, quickly made, but decomposing quickly – excellent from the point of view of leaving no pollution behind, but of little use to an archaeologist a few hundred years later.