Lands of Red and Gold #5: Life As It Once Was
Future archaeologists excavated much of what was left of what they called the Murray Valley civilization, but even the most detailed excavations can only reveal a small fraction of the lives of vanished times. To find out what life was like for the Gunnagal in what will be called the Late Formative period, archaeology alone will not suffice. Another way is needed to look back in time, to imagine what happened in this world that never was. If the pages of history can be turned back for a time, then you might picture the Murray Valley as it existed one thousand years before the birth of the man whom some would call the Christ.
In that time, if you looked from above the Murray, you would see a thin ribbon of blue winding its way from east to west across an otherwise dry landscape. Near the river, fields of yams spread their spread their foliage across the landscape, dark green leaves and stems winding up the forked branches planted for them, or spreading across the soil. If watched over time, the yams die back to the ground in late autumn, regrow in late winter and early spring, display small purple flowers in late spring, then grow vigorously for most of the summer, before the tubers are harvested in late autumn, and the cycle begins again. Wattles grow along the edges of the yam-fields, or are planted in rows on sloping or hilly ground. The trees grow quickly if they are planted, regrow vigorously if damaged by fire, and in season are covered in sweet-smelling golden flowers, which are then replaced by abundant seed pods which start green but ripen to brown before they are harvested.
In between the yam fields, or closer to the river, lie the marks of the other main achievement of the Gunnagal civilization. They have shaped the land to be a home for water, with channels running amongst yam fields to connect to ponds, small lakes, swamps and other wetlands. Maintained by a system of weirs, dams and other stonework, the wetlands usually thrive even through the irregular droughts which can last for several years. Rushes, reeds and other water plants grow vigorously throughout these wetlands, and the Gunnagal sometimes harvest them for food. Mostly, though, here is where traps are laid to catch Murray cod, golden perch and many other fish, and sometimes to catch the swans, ducks, and other water birds which visit.
From the fields and the rivers, the Gunnagal draw almost their complete diet. The core of the Gunnagal diet is yams, murnong, and wattleseeds; everyday labourers often eat little else. Yams are usually peeled and then roasted alone or with murnong. Sometimes yams and murnong are boiled in water and then pounded into a paste-like porridge called benong which can be eaten alone or with soup [1]. Wattleseeds are ground into flour, which can be baked into flatbreads and served alone or alongside roasted yams. Ground wattleseed can also be used to flavour benong, along with some other seed crops such as purslane and flax seeds. Leaf vegetables such as purslane and nettle leaves are baked and served as part of the same meal. This is what the Gunnagal call the ‘farmer’s diet’; adequate from a nutritional point of view, sufficient to avoid starvation, but low-status food which the upper classes will try to avoid.
Meat is the preferred delicacy amongst the Gunnagal, eaten by elders and other high-status people whenever they can, and usually available to common citizens only on feast-days and other festivals. Fish is their most common meat, harvested in traps from their wetlands. The traps are only permitted to be large enough to catch fish of specified size, and even then the harvests are controlled by order of the Council of each city. Ducks and dingos are also farmed for their meat, although less common than fish. Wild-harvested meat from waterbirds in the wetlands is an occasional delicacy, also subject to control from the Councils. The rarest meats are wild-hunted animals such as kangaroo and emu, which can be gathered from the rangelands designated by city Councils. The rangelands are in theory subject to Council hunting controls, but in practice kangaroos and emus are being increasingly harvested ‘against law and custom.’ The Councils appoint rangers to police the rangelands, but the expanses of the rangelands make effective control difficult, and in many cases the rangers themselves are the illegal harvesters. All of this makes kangaroo and emu meat increasingly rare and expensive. Amongst city-dwellers, usually only elders can afford it.
While meat is the most common Gunnagal delicacy, they also have other valued high-status foods. For those who cannot afford meat, the most common substitute is ‘beefsteak fungus,’ an edible fungus which in appearance is remarkably like a piece of raw meat. In the wild it grows on living or dead wood, and with their abundant sources of timber from wattles, the Gunnagal grow this fungus as a delicacy [2]. A variety of wild-gathered plants are available from the wetlands and cherished for their exotic flavours; the most common of these are cumbungi and water-lily roots. Duck eggs are much enjoyed but rarely eaten, at least in the cities; one of the ironies is that city-dwellers view eggs as a luxury food which is above a ‘farmer’s diet,’ but actual Gunnagal farmers eat eggs regularly. The Gunnagal have also domesticated a few native fruit species, such as native raspberries, which are treasured seasonal delicacies, and sometimes dried for later use. The Gunnagal also cultivate a variety of plants which are used as flavourings or spices, such as river mint, mountain peppers, and sea celery [2]. Consumption of spicy food is another mark of the elite; duck in river mint sauce is particularly popular, as is pepper kangaroo steak, for those who can afford both the kangaroo and the pepper leaves. For those who lack the wherewithal to procure spices, wattle gum is a common sweetener for both food and drink.
Of all the delicacies treasured amongst the peoples who live along the Mighty Murray, the rarest and most expensive is wattleseed oil. Wattleseeds themselves are abundant and a staple food, particularly in famine times; silos of wattleseeds are found in every Gunnagal city as a vital protection against famine. Wattleseed oil, however, requires extensive processing to extract. Wattle seeds contain most of their vegetable fat in a small aril attached to the main seed. The Gunnagal have learned to separate this aril from the seeds before they are ground into flour, using a particularly fine knife of copper or obsidian. This is a laborious process, usually done by children who have smaller fingers and keen eyesight to cut the arils from tens of thousands of seeds. The fat-rich arils are then turned into a form of vegetable oil, which is mostly used for flavouring, and even then available only to the elite. The most ostentatious use of wattleseed oil is for frying. One of the favoured methods is to cut yams into small wedges and then fry them in wattleseed oil on a hot metal pan for a few moments, until crispy brown. Only a few among the Gunnagal are wealthy enough to use wattleseed oil in such a profligate, but tasty, manner.
While the fields and lakes supply their food, the Gunnagal are bound to the river. It supplies them with a rich lifestyle; six cities and more than two dozen smaller towns and settlements are dotted along its length. The Murray is a source of life-giving water for drinking and for their wetlands, and it is their primary means of transportation. All their main cities are on the Murray, and no town and few farms are more than a day’s march away from the river or one of its tributaries. Without beasts of burden and few decent roads, the Gunnagal rely on the river to move their goods. The Murray is crowded with boats large and small, some with sails, some with oars, and some towed by men on the banks. Only riverine transport can supply the city-dwellers’ insatiable demands for food, wood, and clay; only boats can support such a volume of long-range trade in metal, textiles, pottery, dyes, spices, and other trade and manufactured goods.
The Gunnagal have become a numerous people beyond the imaginings of their forebears who lived alongside one swan-inhabited lagoon, and of those people, about one in four live in towns or cities. The easternmost outpost of the Gunnagal civilization is a small town at Tintaldra [3], where workers often harvest timber which is easily floated downstream, and where miners have started to explore some of the copper deposits in the region. Tintaldra and some other smaller nearby towns are under the aegis of the largest of the Gunnagal cities. Gundabingee, located a little east of what would someday become the town of Corowa, is a flourishing city at the heart of some of the best agricultural land in Australia, and it has a permanent population of around thirty thousand inhabitants.
Gundabingee is one of the Wisdom Cities, and while it is the largest, there are five more, each of which has a population of ten thousand or more. Tocumwal, with some of the most extensive wetlands along the entire Murray, has some eighteen thousand inhabitants. Echuca has about fifteen thousand people, while the ancient centre of Swan Hill has around twenty-two thousand dwellers. Downstream of Swan Hill, as the river moves ever westward, the surrounding countryside becomes drier and the wetlands harder to sustain.
Robinvale, the fifth of the Wisdom Cities, has about ten thousand inhabitants, but it draws from a much larger agricultural hinterland than the cities further upstream. Robinvale controls a series of smaller towns, with its westernmost outpost around Mildura, beyond which there is a large region of only thinly-inhabited land. This area is the driest part of the Murray Valley, where the rainfall is poor enough that even the drought-tolerant farming of the Gunnagal is marginal. They do not irrigate crops in any meaningful way, with their waterworks more focused on supplying fish, and so there is only a small population in this area. Yet this is not the last of the Wisdom Cities. The last great Gunnagal city is Murray Bridge, separated by a considerable distance from the other main Gunnagal centres, but which has grown rich from the flourishing trade in copper, lead and silver.
The Gunnagal have many towns and settlements, but the Wisdom Cities have an exalted status which goes far beyond merely large size. Each of the Wisdom Cities has a recognised body of religious government, a Council of Elders, which is honoured even in their rival cities. The elders are those whose houses will be recognised by much later archaeologists as indicating signs of social stratification, with the accumulation of high-value goods and individual shrines, but no excavation can reveal the full function of the councils. Elders win that distinction not because of advancing years, but because of recognised wisdom, and age is not considered an automatic guarantee of wisdom. Many elders are indeed advanced in years by the standards of early agricultural peoples, but there are those who are young and considered wise, while many city-dwellers are old but are not considered wise.
Government by Council has some variations between the Wisdom Cities, but at least in outward tradition it is similar. The office of elder is not formally hereditary, and a new elder must be recognised by the combined consensus of the existing elders. In many cases, the rank is nonetheless inherited, for elders are not just the nobles and priests of this era, they are also the merchants of the times. They trade in goods moved along the Water Mother, and sometimes in the rarer goods like alabaster, ochre and opals which are moved over land. With inherited wealth comes power, and it is a rare occasion when a council will spurn the son of a current elder, although there are always exceptions. Politics within the councils are complex, fractious, and full of factions and rivalries; the intrigues often defy the comprehension of ordinary citizens within their own cities, let alone those who try to understand them from a distance of three millennia. While formally the decisions of any council need a consensus, there are many ways of achieving agreement. Some are dominated by a smaller group of oligarchs who hold the true power; in the case of Tocumwal, there is a single family which rules the Council in all but name, and whose leading member would be considered the monarch if the Gunnagal had such a concept. In the case of Swan Hill, oldest of the Wisdom Cities, the institution of the Council has stayed closest to its roots, and it remains governed by the principle of equality of mistrust. The elders are heads of rival merchant and religious families who sometimes find it necessary to cooperate and strike compromises, but who will always act to bring down any individual elder who is thought to be accumulating too much power.
As priests and merchants, the Councils are responsible for following the established law and customs of their predecessors. They oversee marriages, resolve disputes between individuals and families, and in theory are the guardians of traditional lore. Many of these duties are delegated to a smaller caste within the elders, whose rank translates as ‘stick-men.’ Named for the ancient means of communication between distinct peoples [5], the stick-men have made an art of memorisation, using chants, mnemonics and other practices to allow them to recall the accumulated oral law of their city. Once a year, in the Goldentime of spring which marks the passage of the new year, each of the Wisdom Cities holds a great festival which lasts for three days. Most of this time is taken up with feasting, social gatherings, dances, song and the like, but at the dawn of each day, the stick-men take turns to recite passages from the oral law code of their city, in such a way that over the three days, the entirety of the law code is retold for all listeners to hear [6].
In keeping with their wealth, elders have a much greater variety of clothes to choose from than the average citizen, but on formal or religious occasions (which are often synonymous) they wear possum-skin cloaks as a mark of their rank. Ordinary citizens usually wear an all-purpose linen kilt around the waist, knee-length for men and ankle-length for women, dyed into a personalised pattern. During colder weather they wear a linen cloak with a similar pattern. This not all the decoration that people wear, for the Gunnagal decorate everything: skin, jewellery, household walls, tools, everything. Every citizen will have some form of personal decoration which is the symbol of one or more of their totems, but they have decoration almost everywhere else, too. Painted clay figurines are common, murals are on most walls, and everyone uses the most elaborate jewellery which they can afford. Even their copper and arsenical bronze axes and knives have patterns of fine lines etched into them when they are forged, not enough to weaken their primary purpose, but to give them a more aesthetically pleasing appearance. Indeed, even city walls are decorated; ochre is mixed into the upper layers of rammed earth in each wall to give a decorative pinkish-red tint to the tops of city walls.
The Gunnagal systems of decorations are complex, often adopted merely for the aesthetic appearance, but they also serve important social functions. The Gunnagal have an intricate set of social relationships, kinship patterns, and customs of respect and mutual avoidance. The core of this system is the division of all Gunnagal people into a set of eight kinship classes called kitjigal (literally, skin groups). Every Gunnagal is born into a particular kitjigal, which changes over the generations, based on their father or mother’s kitjigal. All members of the same kitjigal are considered to be relatives; members of the same kitjigal who are born into the same generation will refer to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister,’ and there is an intricate vocabulary of social terms to refer to members of the same kitjigal who are of different generations. Since all members of the same kitjigal are considered relatives, they will support each other even if their own cities are at war; warriors of the same kitjigal will refuse to fight each other, for instance. Marriage between members of the same kitjigal is always considered to be incest, and there is a complex set of relationships which allows marriage only between certain kitjigal and forbids others.
Each of the kitjigal is named for a colour – gray, white, black, gold, blue, azure, green, and red – and each has its own set of totems [7]. Every adult Gunnagal, and most children, will wear the representation of one or more of their totems at all times, and their personalised decorations for their clothing will usually include their kitjigal’s colour as part of the pattern. The social patterns of the kitjigal will dictate both individual and political relationships throughout the lives of every Gunnagal. Marriages and inheritance are the most obvious example of these, with children of one kitjigal changing to another in every generation as part of a complex pattern [8]. Yet the relationships are broader; in politics it is considered important for each kitjigal to be represented equally amongst each city’s elders, and rivalries are often shaped by kinship cycles. Marriages amongst the Gunnagal are often arranged from birth as part of these social arrangements; even when marriages are individual love-matches, the marriage ceremony requires the approval and then the participation of an elder from the kitjigal of both bride and groom.
Even during informal social and recreational events, the codes of the kitjigal predominate. The most common sport amongst the Gunnagal is well-represented in their artistic traditions, and archaeologists will christen it, with inspiring mundanity, as the ‘ball-game.’ Depictions of descendant games will be recognised amongst many successor cultures to the Gunnagal, and it will usually be inferred to have had some religious significance. In fact, the ball-games – there are many variations – are used purely for recreational purposes, and are played at most social gatherings. In their basic form, the ball-games are played used a ball (usually of possum skin), which is kicked between a large number of players. The aim of the game is usually not to let the ball touch the ground, and the last player to catch the ball drop-kicks it again. Sometimes the game is played for points, other times just for entertainment, but in all cases, people of the same kitjigal will automatically be on the same team whenever the game is played. The same principles apply to other Gunnagal sports such as wrestling, where even in championships wrestlers of the same kitjigal will not compete against each other.
The social system of the kitjigal links the polities of the Gunnagal. Since all people of the same kitjigal are considered relatives, even from rival cities, this allows for channels of communication and hospitality to remain open even during troubled times. Such occasions are relatively rare; while the Gunnagal cities are often rivals, they have customary limits on the practices of warfare. Each of the six Wisdom Cities has recognised borders marked by boundary stones, and the Council of each city is supreme within those borders. Warfare, when it does come, is usually border warfare, for rangelands or other territory. Even then, warfare is usually ritualised. Gunnagal elders themselves do not take up arms, but many of their younger sons join a dedicated warrior caste, who are recognised and trained from childhood. During peacetime social gatherings between polities, warriors will fight honour duels with each other to first blood, or occasionally to the death. Formal warfare follows similar rules, with battles often being decided by a set number of duels between the two sides, although these duels are usually to the death.
Military tactics are not particularly advanced; even when rival cities cannot agree on terms for a contest of duels, the two armies will usually meet on a chosen field. Battle tactics generally consist of both armies forming a rough line of battle, flinging taunts and boasts at one another, until one warrior decides to charge, and his comrades will follow him into a battle which rapidly degenerates into individual contests. Even during the middle of a battle, it is considered extremely poor form to interrupt two individual soldiers who are fighting, or to strike quickly without recognising one’s opponent, in case it turns out that the two warriors were of the same kitjigal. For the same reason, ranged weapons are frowned upon during warfare; throwing spears and other missile weapons are considered tools for hunters, not warriors.
Underlying the traditions of the kitjigal, of warfare, and indeed all of Gunnagal society, are their religious beliefs. The beliefs of the Gunnagal are complex and not always coherent; in a culture with no writing system and no overall religious hierarchy, there is nothing to enforce total conformity. In its essence, though, the Gunnagal religious world-view is shaped by their concept of time and of fate. To them, time is non-linear; they do not see the world in terms of past, present and future. They see the immediate world as being the present time, but which is touched by what they call the Evertime. The Evertime is both what was and what will come to be. A person’s current actions are reflected in the Evertime, but not in a linear way; the Gunnagal see no functional difference between a person’s actions affecting the past as much as the future. Dreams are considered to be extremely important, as they are the most direct link between the present time and the Evertime. One of the most important roles of elders is to interpret dreams, which are variously seen as omens, as warnings, as visions of the past or future, or as answers to questions which the dreamer has been pondering.
The Gunnagal see the Evertime as populated by a variety of beings, some powerful, some mischievous, and some insignificant. The most powerful of these are a set of beings regarded as being responsible for the shaping of the world. To the Gunnagal, the world itself is eternal, but the creator beings have made the world into its form. In keeping with their non-linear view of time, the Gunnagal see creation as a continuous, ongoing process. For instance, they view the River Murray as the Water Mother, who has shaped the river’s course, but they speak of the Water Mother as if she were still creating the Murray every day. Some days, the Water Mother makes the course of the river anew, which is why the Murray sometimes shifts its course slightly. Lightning Man is another important creation being, who shapes the storms and brings down lightning and thunder, but to the Gunnagal, all storms past, present and future are part of the same act of creation. The Gunnagal see all the creator beings – the Fire Brothers, the Rainbow Serpent, the Green Lady, Eagle, Bark Man, She Who Must Not Be Named, and several others – in the same way.
Aside from the great creator beings, the Gunnagal also believe that their extended family (both ancestors and descendants) live in the Evertime. Until they are resurrected, at least; the Gunnagal believe in reincarnation of the spirit, in human, animal or plant form. The Evertime is also inhabited by a variety of lesser beings, which are thought of as mischievous and which sometimes cross over to the present time and interfere with human affairs. Elders are responsible for knowing the traditional lore needed to placate, bargain with, or drive away such beings. Elders are also seen as responsible for communicating with the greater creator beings, although these beings are seen as more distant and often implacable. The Water Mother is seen as the most important of the creator beings; the Gunnagal do not like to wander far from the Mother’s embrace. They are reluctant to settle anywhere far from the Murray or one of its tributaries; traders and travellers who leave the Murray swear an oath to return as soon as they practically can, and ask that their body be carried back even if they die elsewhere [9].
In their religion, then, as in so much else, the Gunnagal appear to be flourishing in the Late Formative. They have several large cities, and their agriculture supports a total population of nearly one million. They know how to work in copper, silver, lead, and are starting to work with arsenical bronze. They have a dynamic tradition of artwork in paintings, figurines, dyes, and other mediums. They do not have a system of writing, but they have a developing tradition of proto-writing. The archaeological record will not show all of the details, but it will confirm their apparent success.
Which makes what happens next all the more puzzling for archaeologists to explain.
* * *
[1] This is similar to how yams are used in parts of Africa, where they are formed into a staple food called fufu.
[2] Beefsteak fungus (Fistulina hepatica) exists in the wild both in Australia and on several other continents. Historically, it has often been cultivated as a meat substitute, and indeed is still sometimes grown for this purpose in a few European countries. Aboriginal people harvested the wild fungus, and it seems likely that they would cultivate it (as has happened elsewhere in the world) if they have also adopted farming.
[3] The Australian native raspberry (Rubus parvifolius) is a close relative of domesticated raspberries (R. idaeus and R. strigosus), produces similar-tasting fruit and has similar growing requirements, although it is much more drought-tolerant. Australia also has a variety of plants which are suitable as spices. Aboriginal peoples harvested many species as flavourings, and several of them have been cultivated or used by more recent immigrants as well. River mint (Mentha australis) is a widely-distributed plant in south-eastern Australia whose leaves have a distinctive spearmint flavour. Mountain peppers (Tasmannia lanceolata) have been cultivated both in Australia and overseas as a spice. Sea celery (Apium prostratum) is an Australian relative of common celery (A. graveolens), which grows along much of the coast of Australia. Sea celery is used as a vegetable and flavouring by the Gunnagal, in much the same way as common celery is used in other parts of the world. (Sea celery was harvested by early European colonial settlers as a celery substitute).
[4] For clarity and ease of reference, all of the towns listed here (apart from Gundabingee) are listed by their contemporary Australian names, not the native name.
[5] Message-sticks were a form of communication used by Aboriginal peoples to transmit information between different groups, particularly those who spoke different languages. They consisted of solid sticks of wood with patterns of dots and lines to convey information, and which could be carried by messengers for hundreds of kilometres. They could be used for a number of purposes, but one of the most common was to announce a gathering of many peoples for religious or social events. This sense of using message sticks to announce gatherings has carried over into the Gunnagal, where the stick-men open the yearly festivals which announce the laws and customs which all of the peoples follow.
[6] This accumulated law is a series of guiding principles and a few historical cases, rather than a strict law code.
[7] The eight kitjigal are given names which are usually translated as colours, and they also have a number of totems. These totems often match the colour-names, but not always; the colour-name represents an underlying concept and has a number of connotations. The totems fit with these connotations, not necessarily the colour itself. For instance, the Gunnagal associate (medium and dark) blue with water and rainfall, which for them for them is an occasion welcomed with joy and laughter. So one of the totems for blue is the laughing kookaburra, a bird which sounds like it is laughing, but which is not blue. (This is comparable to common connotations of colours in English, where green is associated with envy, for instance).
The colours and their associated totems are as follows.
Gray has three totems, the eastern grey kangaroo (Macropus giganteus), sandstone (regardless of colour), and what the Gunnagal call rain clouds, which in modern terms would be nimbostratus.
White has four totems, the long-billed corella (Cacatua tenuirostris), the little egret (Egretta garzetta), granite, and lightning.
Black has four totems, the snake-necked turtle (Chelodina longicollis), the Australian raven (Corvus coronoides), the perentie (Varanus giganteus), and the new moon.
Gold has four totems, the golden perch (Macquaria ambigua), wattle flowers, obsidian, and shooting stars.
Blue, to the Gunnagal, is a colour which includes shades which English-speakers would classify as medium and dark blue, but not light blue. Blue has four totems, the laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), sand goanna (Varanus gouldii), the morning star (Venus ascendant), and raindrops.
Azure (or light blue) is a colour which the Gunnagal consider to be separate from blue in the same way that English-speakers distinguish between red and light red (pink). Azure has four totems, the wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax), the short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), orchid flowers, and strong wind.
Green has four totems, the common wombat (Vombatus ursinus), quartz, eucalyptus flowers, and the crescent moon.
Red has four totems, the dingo (Canis lupus dingo), the common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula), the evening star (Venus descendant), and northerly winds. Northerly winds are associated with red since these hot winds, blowing from Australia’s arid interior, fan the worst summer bushfires.
[8] There are many intricacies about which kitjigal can marry which, and the terms which are used when addressing others vary along similar lines. (All members of the same kitjigal as a person’s father will be politely referred to as ‘father’, for instance.) For descent, a child’s kitjigal shifts according their parent of the same gender. In the male line, the kitjigal are divided into two groups of four, with the pattern repeating every four generations. Blue fathers have red sons, red fathers have black sons, black fathers have gold sons, and gold fathers have blue sons. The other group sees azure fathers have white sons, white fathers have green sons, green fathers have gray sons, and gray fathers have azure sons. For women, the corresponding groups are blue to black to white to gray (then back to blue), and red to gold to azure to green (then back to red).
[9] This is one reason why early agriculture spreads only slowly from its heartland in the Murray; the religious attachments mean that very few Gunnagal want to abandon the vicinity of the Murray. The Gunnagal possess a dryland agricultural package which is not limited to areas of irrigation or high rainfall; their crops are drought-tolerant, and their main domesticated animal, the Australian wood duck, does not need significant contact with water. Indeed, the Gunnagal themselves do not usually irrigate their crops even when living along the Murray; their efforts at waterworks are more focused on aquaculture. This means that knowledge of Australian domesticated crops does not spread readily beyond the Murray Valley until the Gunnagal themselves find a reason to leave their homelands.
* * *
Thoughts?
P.S. There is a map in the works which will give a more visual impression of the layout of the main Gunnagal cities and territory. It will be posted once it’s been completed.
