The Edge of Memory

by Patrick Nunn

  Compared to many other accounts, most Aboriginal stories describing how Port Phillip Bay appeared when it was dry and how it was later inundated are matter of fact and apparently unembellished, suggesting that they may recall exactly such a comparatively recent drying-up event. Alternatively, such stories might recall the time when the rising postglacial sea level did drown the Bay, a memory that was reinforced by a more recent such event.

  Figure 3.4 Port Phillip Bay.

  In 1841, Georgiana McCrae, daughter of the 5th Duke of Gordon, moved from her native Scotland to Port Phillip (as Melbourne was then known), and four years later built a house in the shadow of a granite monolith – Arthur’s Seat – at the southern end of the Mornington Peninsula. By displaying ‘friendly curiosity and an unusual willingness to understand tribal customs’ of the resident Bunurong Aboriginal people, McCrae – an inveterate diarist – was able to record a wealth of information, peppered with verbatim quotes, about their way of life and their stories about Port Phillip Bay.28 She wrote:

  The following is an [Aboriginal] account … of the formation of Port Phillip Bay: ‘Plenty long ago … men could cross, dry-foot, from our side of the bay [in the east] to Geelong [in the west].’ They described a hurricane – trees bending to and fro – then the earth sank, and the sea rushed in through the Heads, till the void places became broad and deep, as they are today. 29

  A decade or so later, on 9 November 1858, in his submission to a Committee of the Legislative Council enquiring into the condition of Aboriginal peoples, one William Hull recalled that various Aboriginal groups ‘say that their progenitors recollected when Hobson’s [Port Phillip] Bay was a kangaroo ground – they say “plenty catch kangaroo and plenty catch opossum there”’, a condition that could have obtained only if the Bay was dry land. Hull went on to add that his Aboriginal informants had told him that ‘the river Yarra once went out [to sea] at the Heads, but that the sea broke in, and that the Bay became what it is [today]’.30

  Another historical recollection was collected in the 1950s and recalled that in pre-European times, the Aboriginal people at Dromana were accustomed to cross dry Port Phillip Bay to hunt at Portsea and Queenscliff; in doing so, they had to ‘walk a little, swim a little’.31 And then there is a mythical story handed down among the Kulin Aboriginal people which explains that

  …Port Phillip was once dry land and the Kulin were in the habit of hunting kangaroos and emus there. One day the men were away hunting and the women had gone off collecting roots and yams, while some young boys, who had been left behind, were playing in the camp. They were hurling toy spears at each other, just like their fathers did. In the camp there were some wooden troughs full of water, and one of the spears upset one of these … this was no ordinary bucket, but a magic one, and it held a tremendous amount of water, which came rolling down engulfing all the land. 32

  In order for Port Phillip Bay to become dry, the sea level outside The Rip would have to be at least 9–12m (30–40ft) lower than it is today.

  East from Port Phillip Bay and Melbourne lies the coast of Gippsland, the closest part of the mainland to Tasmania, today Australia’s largest offshore island. Gippsland is a low-lying region also characterised by alternating rocky headlands and long sandy beaches. It lies along the northern side of Bass Strait, which for much of the time people have lived in Australia was dry land – the Bassian Land Bridge – that allowed people and animals to move freely between the two. The postglacial sea-level rise is known to have progressively drowned this land bridge, the last tenuous connection being severed about 14,000 years ago, thereafter consigning the people of Tasmania (and islands in the Bass Strait) to progressively increasing isolation from their mainland cousins.33

  Along low-lying coasts like that of Gippsland, the effects of the postglacial sea-level rise would have been particularly dramatic, so it is unsurprising that there is an Aboriginal story recalling them. The story belongs to the Kurnai people and recalls that

  …long ago there was land to the south of Gippsland where there is now sea, and that at that time some children of the Kurnai, who inhabited the land, in playing about found a turndun [a musical instrument], which they took home to the camp and showed to the women. ‘Immediately,’ it is said, ‘the earth crumbled away, and it was all water, and the Kurnai were drowned.’ 34

  Unwittingly the Kurnai children had broken an important taboo, for the turndun was only for men’s use; its discovery by children and handling by women invited retribution. Like enduring oral traditions in many cultures, the use of retribution as an explanation of why things happen is common in Aboriginal cultures, probably because adults felt an ethical imperative to pass on morality stories to their young that would not have been applicable to neutral ones.

  Since there is just the one story from Gippsland and since it is so vague about where the coast once stood, we can only speculate about this and the associated level of the sea. If we assume that the story recalls a time when the shoreline lay some 50m (165ft) seaward of its present position, then the sea level might have been around 20m (65ft) lower. If the Gippsland shoreline was 100m (330ft) further out, then the sea level would have been closer to 50m lower than it is today. This information is key to estimating minimum ages for such stories, something that is explained at the end of Chapter 4.

  From Gippsland, we head up the east coast of Australia to Botany Bay, the place where Captain James Cook first landed on 29 April 1770, which is now part of the sprawling city of Sydney. The description of Botany Bay by Joseph Banks, naturalist on Cook’s voyage, was so glowing that 18 years later it was the place where Governor Arthur Phillip was instructed to establish Britain’s first penal colony in Australia. It did not take Phillip long to realise its unsuitability for this purpose – its marshy foreshore, and the lack of fresh water and a secure anchorage – so he swiftly shifted the nascent penal colony to Sydney Cove, one of several bays that eventually became the settlement of Port Jackson. We are left to wonder why initial reports about Botany Bay were so wrong. Consider the experience of Captain Watkin Tench, whose books about the first four years of the Port Jackson settlement are among the most informative from that era. Criticising Banks and the other ‘discoverers of Botany Bay’ for noting that its fringes were ‘some of the finest meadows in the world’, Tench noted that ‘these meadows, instead of grass, are covered with high coarse rushes, growing in a rotten spungy [sic] bog, into which we were plunged knee-deep at every step’.35

  Yet despite such an unpromising description, Botany Bay has a Aboriginal story, owned by the Dharawal people, that talks about how the Bay formed as a result of sea-level rise. It tells of a time long ago when the Bay was mostly dry land, the floodplain of the Kai’eemah (today’s Georges River). So grateful were the Dharawal for having such a fine place to live that one day the decision was made to travel into the hinterland to give thanks to the Creator Spirit for this. The younger members of the community were not happy at the prospect of travelling into such ‘rough land’, so in the end only the ‘knowledge holders’ went, leaving a warrior named Kai’mia behind to look after the others. After several days, huge waves washed into the mouth of the Kai’mia, ‘destroying much of the swampland … used for food gathering’. Fleeing inland, Kai’mia and the youngsters were pursued by giant waves, eventually taking refuge in a cave. Kai’mia tried persuading his charges that they should give thanks to the Creator Spirit for having saved them, but one retorted that they now had nothing to be thankful for – ‘the waves have taken away what we had’. Then the cave collapsed, burying all its occupants except Kai’mia, who crawled away to die, his trail of blood marked by the flowering of the Gymea Lily – a plant with blood-red tips. When the knowledge holders returned, they followed the trail of the Gymea Lily back to the cave, but were too late to rescue those buried inside. Sadly, they ‘returned to their homeland to find that what they had known was no longer. Instead of the swamps, there was a great bay, and where the Kai’eemah had met the sea there
was [sic] high mountains of sand’.36

  Today, Botany Bay has been transformed beyond recognition – Sydney’s airport is located on its shore – so the most reliable guide to its original form is the chart made by Captain Cook in 1770. This shows that the entrance to Botany Bay was then 5–9 fathoms deep, a range of 9–16m (30–50ft), the depth at which the ocean surface would need to be for Botany Bay to be dry land – as the Dharawal recall it once was.

  The bay just south of Botany Bay is Bate Bay, where ‘Mister’, perhaps one of the last of the Gunnamatta Aboriginal people who once occupied the area, passed on his reminiscences in the 1920s. One of his stories was about how ‘in the early days the sea was a lot further out, and his people used to gather ochre there’, at a place he identified as being about 4km (2½ miles) east (seawards) of Jibbon Headland.37 If the ‘4km’ is taken literally, the modern ocean depth here is about 50m (165ft); more likely, the stated measure was unintentionally vague, perhaps much less than 4km, so the depth to which this memory refers is more likely 5–20m (16–65ft) below today’s ocean surface.

  Further north from here, off the mouth of the Brisbane River, lie two elongate islands – Moreton and North Stradbroke in English, Moorgumpin and Minjerribah respectively pre-colonisation. Moreton and North Stradbroke Islands are formed predominantly from sand, typically a ‘bedrock’ of hard indurated dune sand overlain by a veneer of younger unconsolidated sand, all of it deposited along the shores of these islands by waves that had carried it from the south. During the last ice age, when the sea level was lower than it is today, these islands were joined to the Australian mainland. Therefore at the time of the earliest evidence for their human occupation – about 20,000 years ago at Wallen Wallen – no cross-sea journeys were required. Yet by about 7,000 years ago, the sea level had risen so much that both islands were effectively cut off from the mainland, and their inhabitants thereafter developed traits distinct from their mainland counterparts.

  The Aboriginal people who live on Moreton Island are known as the Nughi, those in the northern parts of North Stradbroke as the Noonukul, and both groups are part of the Quandamooka nation. Stories about times in the past, when the geography of these islands was quite different from what it is today, include both mythical and factual varieties. The sole known representative of the former comes from a time when the two islands were one. It involves a Noonukul man named Merripool who had the power to control the winds, something he carried around in a magic bailer shell.38 Envious of such power, the Nughis plotted to steal this shell, but Merripool was informed of their plan and

  … called the four winds to come to him … He called for many days and nights and his voice became louder and louder … [until] the winds blew so hard that they caused the water to cut Moorgumpin [Moreton] away from Minjerribah [North Stradbroke].39

  In a detail that perhaps expresses the ecological consequences of separation, the story continues by saying that when the animals on Moreton Island realised what was about to happen, they all moved to North Stradbroke Island, leaving the Nughi people on Moreton Island solely dependent on the sea for their food.

  Evidence of a factual memory of a time when Moreton and North Stradbroke Islands were apparently not as far apart as they are today comes from the account of Mary Ann, an Aboriginal woman who was interviewed in 1907, when she was ‘very old’, and who remembered that when she was young ‘a small island’ existed between the two on which ‘bopple bopple’ trees grew.40 She also recalled that at the time the Noonukul elders could themselves recall a time when the people of North Stradbroke Island might converse ‘quite easily’ across the gap with the Nughis on Moreton Island.41

  On 17 May 1770, Captain James Cook gave the world the first written account of these islands. He named the bay in which they are found Moreton Bay, noting in his journal that the land forming the islands he ‘could but just see it from the top mast head’. Interestingly, he did not record there being two islands here and it is possible that at this time the islands were joined, forming a continuous strip of land.42

  Sand islands are notoriously changeable in form and many periodically merge or become severed from their neighbours because of changes in the amount of sand being supplied to their shores by waves – rather than any change in the sea level. So while the stories about Moreton and North Stradbroke Islands are certainly intriguing, they do not necessarily require – as do most other stories related in this chapter – the sea level to have been lower than it is today. That said, we know that the islands were connected when the sea level was lower 9,000 years or so ago, so perhaps the possibility that these stories are recollections of that time should not be too hurriedly dismissed.43

  In a similar vein, the next places along the Australian coast for which there is an Aboriginal tradition of a time when islands were not islands are Hinchinbrook and Palm Islands, off the central Queensland coast. Hinchinbrook and Palm Islands are quite different, with the former being much larger than the latter and much closer to the mainland. Palm Island today lies about 25km (16 miles) offshore. The people of this area have a story about a distant ancestor of theirs named Girugar, who travelled across the area giving key places the names by which they are still known and – most critically for our purposes – walking across to Hinchinbrook and Palm Islands (and nearby islands) without getting his feet wet.44 The only way that this could be accomplished would be if the ocean surface were at least 22m (72ft) lower than it is currently.

  In his 1980 opus The Languages of Australia, Robert Dixon, an indefatigable recorder and analyst of Aboriginal languages, noted how ‘many tribes along the south-eastern and eastern coasts [of Australia] have stories recounting how the shore-line was once some miles further out; that it was – on the north-east coast – where the [Great] barrier reef now stands’.45 Inscribed on the World Heritage List, the Great Barrier Reef – the only living thing on Earth that is visible from outer space – lies off the east coast of tropical Australia. Around its southern extremity its outer edge is some 200km (125 miles) offshore, but farther north, in the area around Cairns, this is a mere 40km (25 miles) seawards of the modern coast. As shown in Figure 3.5, the ocean floor between the modern shoreline and the reef edge is comparatively shallow, with patches of reef separated by deeper water passages. Drop the sea level a few tens of metres and these patch reefs become hills and the intervening passages become valleys, a gently undulating landscape that would have terminated during the last ice age 20,000 years ago in sheer cliffs – today’s reef edge – around the base of which the waves would have crashed resoundingly.

  Cairns is built on the traditional lands of the Yidinjdji people, who also claim title over much of the submerged land extending to the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, for many parts of which they have names and about which they know stories. The most widely reported story about coastal drowning in this area was first written down between 1892 and 1909 by the Reverend Ernest Gribble, when he was in charge of the Yarrabah mission station. Gribble wrote of the tradition concerning a man named Goonyah, who by catching a forbidden species of fish angered the ‘Great Spirit’ Balore. In an attempt to drown Goonyah and his family, Balore caused the sea to rise. The humans fled to the mountaintops, where they heated large stones and rolled them down the slopes, something that checked the advance of the rising waters; ‘the sea, however, never returned to its original limits’.46 A later version of this story, collected in the vernacular (Yidin) language by Robert Dixon, also included the detail that the Yidinjdji had tried in vain to stop the unwanted rise of the ocean across the lands on which they had long depended for sustenance.47

  Another story collected from the Djabuganjdji (Tjabogai-tjanji) people in the late 1920s from Double Island, just north of Cairns, recalls a time ‘when the coral reef was all scrubland’ and a blue-tongued lizard, of the kind common in eastern Australia, ‘travelled to the edge of the deep dark waters and caused the sea to bubble up till it covered the reef and arrived at its present position’.48


  Echoes of the time long ago, when the area between the modern coastline around Cairns and the edge of the barrier reef were 40km (25 miles) or so away, are also found in the names of places in the Yidin language.49 Key is that the Yidin word for island is daruway, which also means ‘small hill’. The Aboriginal name for Fitzroy Island is gabar, which means ‘lower arm’, a reference to the time when it was a mainland promontory enclosing a river valley. There was once an island named Mudaga halfway between Fitzroy Island and King Beach, named for the pencil cedar trees (Polyscias murrayi) that grew there when it was emergent. Finally, the Yidinjdji recall a time when Green Island was formerly four times larger than it is today, something that would be expected were the sea level lower.

  Figure 3.5 Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef, today (A) and during the last ice age (B).

  For Green Island to have been four times larger than it is today, the sea level might need to be 5–10m (16–33ft) lower, but Fitzroy Island could not have been the ‘lower arm’ of a mainland promontory unless the sea level was at least 30m (100ft) lower. Yet if we accept the stories about the Great Barrier Reef being dry or even ‘scrubland’, the sea level would need to have been 40–50m (131–165ft) lower. And if indeed the Aboriginal people of the area knew a time when the shoreline was where [the edge of] ‘the barrier reef now stands’, then this would have to have been when the sea level was a staggering 65m (210ft) lower than it is at present.