Lands of Red and Gold #7: True Wealth
“Budetju-yu tjimang agu-yiba garr.” This is an axiom amongst the people of Tjibarr [Swan Hill], spoken after the worst of the Collapse. In their dialect, this phrase means “all true wealth comes from the earth.” This was a simple yet profound truth, amongst a people who had witnessed two centuries of environmental ruin, social upheaval, migration, and warfare. To the people of Tjibarr, who still called themselves the Gunnagal, the earth was the source of all bounty. Some wealth of stone or rare metal was dug from beneath the earth, but most of the wealth was grown from it.
In an era when a centuries-long drought persisted, there were increasing opportunities for anyone who could find ways to make the earth more productive. The pressure on agricultural yields meant that farmers developed new solutions. Early Gunnagal farmers had possessed only limited knowledge of techniques for replenishing the soil. Amidst the struggle of the drought, they found new methods. Their forefathers had long known of the value of burning areas of forest to promote the growth of their chosen crops, and Gunnagal farmers learned to use wood ash as fertiliser, along with dead wattle leaves and other organic matter.
Gunnagal farmers had often used wattles along the edges of yam fields, as a handy source of timber, to mark farm borders, and to act as shelter for small birds who fed on insect pests. Observant farmers noticed that in times of declining yields, yams grown along the edges of fields, next to wattles, would grow larger than yams in the centres of fields [1]. This led to the development of new techniques for companion planting, where rows of wattles were interspersed amongst rows of yams. It also led to methods of crop rotation, where wattles would be planted across exhausted yam-fields. They would be allowed to grow for four years, producing a couple of harvests of seeds, and revitalising the soil while they grew. The wattles would then be cut down as a source of timber, with their leaves mixed into the soil as further fertiliser, and new crops of yams grown on the revitalised soil.
Wattles, the trees whose name became the root of the Gunnagal word for wealth, were also developed in other ways. The Formative Gunnagal had used several wattle species, but usually only one in a particular area. With the population migrations, several species of domesticated wattles were spread across the Murray. This gave farmers access to more kinds of wattles, including those which flower and seed at different times of the year [2]. The Gunnagal farmers developed a system of planting two different kinds of wattles on their farms, in roughly equal numbers. This meant that they could harvest the wattle seeds in different months, spreading the labour required across the year, and allowing a given number of farmers to harvest a larger area. This also meant that they had more protection from pests and diseases, since the same pests and diseases rarely affected both kinds of wattles.
Together, the new farming techniques gave the Gunnagal long-term agricultural stability, allowing them to sustain themselves indefinitely. During the long centuries of the great drought, overall farming yields would still be lower than in former times, but they were more stable [3]. This allowed Gunnagal civilization to rebuild following the Collapse. The population reached its lowest level around 750 BC, and from there, the Gunnagal began a slow recovery. After this time, the Murray basin again became a source of fresh migrants while the Great Migrations transformed the Australian landscape.
The Collapse devastated the peoples of the Murray, but the long-term results were much less catastrophic. The population dispersals of this era led to intermingling of new ideas, new crops, new artwork, and in time new religions. The strains of the era, and the new resources which were made available with the Great Migrations, meant that in time new innovations and new technologies would be developed. For after the Interregnum, a new civilization emerged along the Murray, which would become known to archaeology as the Classical Era. As in its previous incarnation, the Classical Murray civilization saw the great river become a heartland of urbanisation, innovation, and cultural ferment. Unlike its previous incarnation, the Classical Murray civilization did not stand alone. It formed the heartland of an expanding region of agricultural societies. Trade, technology, crops and ideas could now spread over a much wider region. Ideas born along the Murray were no longer confined to its banks, and could disperse elsewhere. Many of the new crops, ideas and trade would now originate from outside the Murray, and spread to it instead.
During the Interregnum, one of the most pressing constraints on the Gunnagal was the lack of reliable sources of metal. Their pre-Collapse predecessors had possessed an abundance of copper and a reasonable supply of arsenical bronze, forged from natural impurities in the copper found in the Lower Murray. With the pressures of the extended drought, mining had collapsed in the Lower Murray, leaving the surviving Gunnagal to search for alternative supplies of metal. Some copper and arsenical bronze was reused and reforged, but access to fresh supplies of metal was quite poor during the Interregnum. Some limited sources of copper existed in the upper reaches of the Murray, which were used throughout the Interregnum, but these lacked the necessary arsenic impurities to form bronze.
Due to the shortage of available metal, knowledge of bronze-working almost collapsed, but not quite. For while arsenical bronze had served the Gunnagal well, most of the world’s civilizations have used bronze made out of tin instead. The upper reaches of the Murray and its tributaries also contained some sources of tin, some as lodes which needed to be mined, but with some secondary deposits in riverbeds which were easily exploited. Late in the Interregnum, the Gunnagal discovered the properties of alluvial tin, and how to forge it with copper to develop a more reliable type of bronze. This discovery revitalised Gunnagal metalworking; they now had a reliable source of metal which could be used to develop much more effective tools. Farming, warfare, stone-working and a host of other industries would be transformed through the availability of bronze tools.
By 450 BC, the Classical Gunnagal had firmly entered the Bronze Age, although their supplies of tin were limited enough that bronze was still a premium metal. This changed over the next couple of centuries, thanks to events elsewhere in Australia. The New England region in north-eastern New South Wales has rich farmland, which in historical Australia supplies a wide variety of crops. Gunnagal migrants settled this region between 400 and 300 BC, and established productive farming communities. In one part of this region, around the highlands of Inverell, the new settlers discovered that they had arrived at an area rich in mineral resources. Here they found gemstones such as sapphires and diamonds which they polished and used as adornments, in the traditional Gunnagal manner. Here, they also found rich sources of tin, including extremely useful native tin which they could exploit immediately.
Tin mining quickly expanded around Inverell, bringing considerable wealth for its inhabitants. Trade routes carried Inverell tin and gems across the settled regions of the continent. Inverell is located on the Gwydir River, which joins several other rivers before becoming part of the Darling, a long river which eventually joins with the Murray. Transport by water meant that large quantities of tin could be exported to the great cities along the Murray, although tin was valuable enough that it was also carried overland to the eastern seaboard and other areas of the continent. Thanks to exploitation of new sources of copper, bronze-working spread across Gunnagalia; the metal was still expensive, but at least it was available.
While valuable, tin was not the only discovery from outside the Murray which would spread back to the old heartlands. The Great Migrations had won the Gunnagalic-speaking peoples access to the resources of half of the continent, sometimes from settlement and sometimes from traders and travellers who ventured beyond the borders of the agricultural regions. The migrants who exploited the new regions found and domesticated new crops which grew there, and in time many of these spread back to the heartland of the Murray.
North of the Murray, the Gunnagal migrants found lands which grew ever drier, even by the standards of their old river lands. In most of these lands, the Gunnagal could grow their old crops, although the yields were lower due to the reduced rainfall. But they found new plants here, ones suited to the arid landscape, and some of these plants could be harvested and then domesticated. They found and domesticated the desert lime, a relative of common citrus trees, and whose flavoursome fruit was occasionally eaten fresh, but which was normally used as a valued flavouring [4].
When desert limes reached the Murray, they were gladly adopted as a fruit, and their juice was used for flavouring food. Still, their most valued use became as an additive to beverages. The Gunnagal had long brewed an alcoholic drink from crushed yams. Adding the pulp of desert limes to the brewing mixture produced a new kind of drink, ganyu, which became the beverage of choice during festivals and other ceremonial occasions. Wealthier Gunnagal drunk varieties of ganyu which were further flavoured by spices traded from the eastern coast [5].
Migrants from the north also found another plant to be worth domesticating, the sweet quandong [6]. This is a tree which also grows in semi-arid areas, and whose fruit is large and sweet, by the usual standards of desert plants. In a land with few large fruits, domesticated quandongs would become a treasured part of the Gunnagal diet, eaten fresh as a seasonal fruit or dried for later use. Domesticated quandong trees give relatively large harvests, and not just from the fruit alone. Quandong fruit contains a relative large nut in the centre (much like peaches), and this seed is itself edible – indeed, highly nutritious [7]. Farmers along the Murray would come to refer to the quandong as the “queen of fruits.”
Still, of all of the plants which the Gunnagal would come to cultivate, none would be more treasured than corkwood (Duboisia hopwoodii). This is a shrub whose leaves and shoots contain high levels of nicotine. In its wild form, corkwood is widespread throughout much of central Australia, but the form which was important grew in a much more geographically restricted area around the Mulligan River in modern Queensland. Here, even during hunter-gatherer days, Aboriginal peoples came to harvest the leaves of these plants, which they collected in such abundance that they are thought to have been managing the land by deliberate farming. Leaves of corkwood were dried, mixed with wood ash (usually from wattles), and rolled into a form of chewing tobacco, called pituri, which was a highly prized drug. Harvests of wild corkwood from this region saw pituri become the basis of a trade network which stretched across large parts of the continent. The preferred form of corkwood grew further north than the limits of Gunnagal agriculture, but they had enough contact with the traders to visit the region and bring back corkwood trees to cultivate [8]. In time, the cultivation of corkwood, and widespread use of pituri, would spread to the Murray.
In the south, in the wetter regions near the coast of Victoria, Gunnagal migrants also discovered a variety of new plants which were suitable for domestication. Here, they found new species of wattle, such as sallow wattle and gossamer wattle, which they started to cultivate alongside their more familiar wattles. They found new fruits such as muntries and apple berries, and new vegetables such as Warrigal greens, which they also cultivated [9]. These new crops were treasured in the areas where they were native, and spread widely along the eastern coast of Australia. In the Gunnagal heartlands along the Murray, though, they were of only limited value. These new crops needed more rainfall than could usually be relied upon, and even during the Classical Era the Gunnagal rarely used irrigation for their crops.
Yet while crops from the south would not become widespread along the Murray, the south would provide other things which changed the nature of farming and society across the continent. In south-western Victoria, the Junditmara chiefdoms had been sedentary societies even before agriculture reached them. Now, they adopted not just new crops, but they also domesticated a new animal. The tiger quoll (Dasyurus maculatus) is the largest marsupial carnivore on the Australian mainland, a predator of small mammals, birds and reptiles. It occupies roughly the same ecological niche as cats do in the Old World, and indeed is similar enough in its habits that early European settlers called it the native pole-cat. The tiger quoll is relatively easy to tame, and even in hunter-gatherer times it was occasionally kept as a pet. With the adoption of farming, stored food often attracted rodent pests. Tamed quolls were very useful in keeping down the numbers of rats and mice. In time, this led to the domestication of the species [10]. Much like cats, quolls were mostly used by farmers to keep down the numbers of rats and mice, although a few were also adopted as household pets by the wealthy [11].
Still, of all the animals which the agricultural peoples of Australia would domesticate, one would be valued above all. The emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) is a flightless bird which is widespread across Australia, and by height is the second largest bird in the world. Aboriginal peoples had long hunted emus as a source of meat and feathers. In time, the Kurnawal, a Gunnagalic-speaking people who had settled around the Gippsland Lakes in south-eastern Victoria, found it more useful to corral emus with ditches and fences until the time came to slaughter them. From here, they sometimes fed and bred them, which in time led to fully domesticated emus [12].
Domesticated emus quickly spread far beyond the lands of the Kurnawal. Quick-growing birds, they became a very useful source of meat, but also provided many other products, such as eggs, feathers, hides for leather and parchment, and emu oil. As the rearing of emus becomes widespread throughout the Murray, one of the main indexes of a farmer’s wealth became how many adult emus he could maintain in his flocks [13].
With the arrival of domesticated emus, and increasing number of ducks farmed in the now-empty rangelands, the Murray peoples had a replacement for their exhausted hunting grounds. Fishing from their wetlands remained a useful supplementary source of meat, but the primary source of meat for the Classical Gunnagal came from domesticated animals. Combined with their development of new farming techniques, this gave them the basis for building a new civilization, with considerable advances in technology and social organisation over their predecessors.
The Interregnum was a time of considerable cultural ferment and increasing technology. New techniques and technologies were developed in artwork, masonry, construction, metallurgy, ceramics, sundials, textiles, weaponry, and many other fields. Yet none of these would be more significant than the development of the first true writing system. By the Late Formative, the Gunnagal were using a variety of symbols to mark ownership and contents of some goods, particularly on ceramics. At first, these were mostly according to personal designs and methods, and varied from a few straight lines cut into the sides of pots to elaborately-painted diagrams to represent container contents. The disruptions and population displacements led to the breakdown of many of the trade routes and the people who used some of these symbols, and the remaining traders found that it became more practical to have a common set of symbols representing ownership, which could be presented to the Council of a city in the case of disputes.
This was the genesis of the Gunnagal writing system; a set of symbols used to assert private ownership which was standardised to assist with government resolution of legal disputes. Yet once the first system of writing developed, it did not take governments long to adopt it much more widely. The power of writing combined with abundant clay to make into tablets led to the rise of a literate bureaucracy who began to keep detailed records of many aspects of life in the Gunnagal cities. The spread of bronze tools and increasing stone working also meant that public inscriptions and proclamations could be conveyed to the people. The first surviving inscription (a fragment of a law code) which later archaeologists can decipher will be dated to 117 BC, but writing on clay had been commonplace for more than a century before that.
The Gunnagal writing system which emerged in early Classical times was shaped both by the preferred writing medium and the variety of personalised designs which preceded it. Early Gunnagal scribes wrote mostly on clay using a stylus with a sharpened point, which meant that all their characters were formed from straight lines; early Gunnagal writing was distinctly angular. The Gunnagal script was fundamentally a syllabary; all of the words in their language (except for a few recently borrowed words) could be represented by about four hundred characters depicting syllables [14].
Thanks to the legacy of symbolic designs, Gunnagal writing also included a number of stylised pictographs which were originally intended to represent trade goods. These pictographs originally represented a single word, usually a name, but were soon expanded used to represent ideas as well, and often acquired multiple meanings which needed to be interpreted based on context. The most common pictograph was a stylised representation of a tree with spreading branches, which was originally intended to depict a wattle tree, but which was soon co-opted for other purposes. Depending on context, the wattle-sign could represent wealth, food, a good harvest, the new year [15], gold as either the colour or the metal, and several other meanings.
In time, the invention of writing allowed the consolidation of government power. The surviving governments of the Interregnum and early Classical era were effectively continuations of the old Wisdom Cities; oligarchic councils which were mostly responsible for the rule of their own city and for a long stretch of the river outside of the city walls. Two of the Wisdom Cities survived the Collapse, Tjibarr and Gundabingee. Displaced migrants within the Murray had founded a third city partway between those two centres, Weenaratta, which started with a similar oligarchic government, and which grew rapidly in population during the later stages of the Interregnum.
During the Classical era, these three cities continued to be called Wisdom Cities, but their governments changed their form. The Councils had been ruled by the elders of the eight kitjigal, and whose roles often combined aspects of noble families, lawmakers, priests, military leaders, and merchant princes. With the chaos of the Collapse and the subsequent rebuilding, many of these functions changed or became more specialised. The kitjigal persisted, but developed into a system of political factions with their own interests in trade and sport, and who also often functioned as an armed militia. Their prominent families emerged as nobles with an interest in trade and in warfare, but they lost any functions as lawgivers or priests. Priestly hierarchies emerged in each city, who took over the main religious duties, and who functioned separately from the kitjigal.
In time, the factions in each city nominated secular leaders, whose function was originally to arbitrate in disputes between the factions, but which in time evolved into monarchies. During the Classical era, the rule of these monarchs was never absolute; the factions had their own interests and if enough of them combined in revolt, they could bring down a monarch. Still, under the monarchs, the Wisdom Cities become the centres of expansive states, who sometimes fought with each other, and who extended their rule far beyond the bounds of the Murray.
The Formative era had seen rule largely confined to a narrow strip of land along the river, but the monarchs extended their power much further. The monarchs at Tjibarr ruled over a kingdom which at its height stretched as far south as the Grampian ranges in Victoria, and as far west as the old lands around Murray Bridge, where they re-opened the copper mines. The monarchs of Gundabingee had a similarly growing realm, expanding their power eastward into the highlands.
Besides the three cities along the Murray, a fourth city was founded by migrants who left the Murray proper and moved along the Murrumbidgee, one of its major tributaries. Here, just upstream of an area of large natural wetlands, they founded a new town which they called Garrkimang [Narrandera, NSW]. Garrkimang never knew the rule of a Council; it had been founded by migrants following a man who claimed to have visions, and his heirs became a line of prophet-kings who ruled according to their claim to be best at interpreting the wisdom of eternity. Under their direction, the natural wetlands downriver were expanded and controlled as a source of food, while the rich lands upriver were turned into productive farmland. In time, Garrkimang would grow to become the wealthiest and most populous of all the Wisdom Cities, first as a monarchy, and then in time as the capital of an empire.
Classical Gunnagal civilization centred on the four great cities, but it fit into a much larger network of trade and transportation which sprawled across much of the continent. Some of this was evident even in the changed methods of construction within the great cities. With bronze tools for quarrying and masonry, the Classical Era saw many buildings constructed out of stone. Most notably, the developing priestly and royal classes saw the construction of large palaces and temples, where the earlier Gunnagal had been much more egalitarian in their dwellings.
From these palaces and temples, the developing bureaucratic classes administered life in the great cities. They did not control everything; the faction-riven society of the Gunnagal did not lend itself to tight government control. Still, the bureaucrats kept records of contracts and censuses. Warehouses under the control of the temples and palaces stored bulk goods, particularly wattle seeds, yams, and other yields of the harvests. The monarchs and their representatives did what they could to ensure impartial government decisions. Especially when it came to anything involving trade.
Trade, more than anything else, ensured the prosperity of the Classical Gunnagal civilization. Much of the trade was local, carried by boats along the rivers. The greatest bulk came from food, including staples such as yams and wattleseeds, and delicacies such as meat and fruit. Other local trade goods included timber, textiles, tools, wattle gum, locally grown spices such as sea celery, river mint and pepperbush, ochres used as mineral dyes, and a variety of vegetable dyes formed from wattle pods, wattle flowers, and the roots of other native plants. Even more valuable were the locally grown drugs; ganyu and other alcoholic beverages were always well-received. While the Gunnagal did not use much irrigation for crops, they did ensure that their cultivated corkwood grew well enough to provide them with pituri to trade far across the continent.
Indeed, the Gunnagal trade networks reached much further than the environs of the Murray. Some goods could be moved by water along the erratic River Darling, and others were so valuable that they were carried overland for long distances. From several coastal areas came a blue-purple dye made from the shell of a sea snail, which preserved its colour long after vegetable dyes had faded [16]. Silver and tin were brought down from Inverell and mined in other smaller deposits. Copper came from both the Upper and Lower Murray. Gold was rarely found, but small alluvial deposits were exploited around Bathurst. Gemstones were highly regarded when they could be found; opals from Broken Hill, sapphires from Inverell, and diamonds from a dozen small deposits in the east. Salt, that valuable preservative, was harvested from inland dry salt lakes or from evaporation ponds in settlements along the Spencer Gulf. The same inland salt lakes supplied treasured alabaster gypsum which was used to make ornamental statues and other stonework. Dried fruits from the southern and eastern coasts were valued delicacies in a civilization with only limited sweet foods of their own. Likewise, a few highly-prized spices grew only on the eastern and southern coasts, where the rainfall was high enough to support them; lemon myrtle, aniseed myrtle, cinnamon myrtle, mintbushes, native ginger, and several other spices were carried by people across the mountains to inland trading posts [17].
While trade flowed from and to each of the four great cities, each had its own areas of specialty. Tjibarr, furthest down the Murray, was the main source of the copper, silver, lead, and tin which came from the Lower Murray or shipped down the Darling. Garrkimang, from its position along the Murrumbidgee, was the major supplier for the pituri trade, and it also had good access to the eastern spices. Gundabingee, in the upper reaches of the Murray, supplied premium-quality timber from the highlands, and with its relatively abundant rainfall grew most of the locally-produced spices. Weenaratta, in the middle of the Murray, had access to the greatest wetlands, exported fish and other meats, and used its central position to take a cut of all trade which went up and downriver.
From their four great cities, the Classical Gunnagal flourished in ways which surpassed even their pre-Collapse ancestors. About 100 BC, the centuries-long drought came to an end. The return to normal long-term rainfall levels allowed them to recolonise most of the Lower Murray areas abandoned in the great drought. More extensive use of bronze tools for farming and land clearing, and for building better boats to transport food by river, combined with the new agricultural techniques and domesticated animals, allowed their population to boom. By 100 AD, the Gunnagal-speaking peoples now matched their pre-Collapse levels. By 350 AD, the population of the four kingdoms had passed two million people, mostly clustered along the Murray and its major tributaries, but with some subject peoples living further away. The peoples of this era would never have thought of themselves as a single group; by this time, the dialects of Gunnagal had diverged beyond the point of mutual intelligibility, even for the peoples along the Murray [18]. Yet they shared a common heritage, and common bonds along the great river which they still called the Water Mother.
And, in time, common problems.
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[1] Being legumes, the roots of wattles contain symbiotic bacteria which replenish nitrates in the soil.
[2] Wattles can be broadly divided into early-flowering wattles, whose seeds are harvested around November-December, and late-flowering wattles, whose seeds are harvested around January-February. The advantage of harvesting two species of wattles is that the labour requirements can be spread over more of the year, while still allowing time to harvest yams and murnongs (in April-May). Some of the other farming work, such as pruning wattles, harvesting gum, and so forth, can be spread over the quieter farming months. This allows for an ever higher yield of food per worker than in the previous form of Gunnagal farming, which in turn supports a greater proportion of the population as city-dwellers.
[3] This also means that when the drought ends, the sustainable population will increase as agricultural yields recover.
[4] The desert lime (Citrus glauca) is related to domesticated citrus species such as oranges and limes. It is native to the more arid areas of Australia, and quite tolerant of harsh conditions such as heat, cold and drought. In modern Australia, it is harvested both from the wild and from commercial plantations, and it is also used to hybridise with other domesticated citrus species. Fruit from wild trees is sweet but quite small; domesticated desert limes in *Australia are somewhat larger, although still not comparable to most other domesticated citrus species.
[5] A similar beverage exists today; in parts of Jamaica, “yam wine” is grown from a mixture of yams, citrus, and spices.
[6] The sweet quandong or desert peach (Santalum acuminatum) is a member of the sandalwood family, and a fairly close relative of Indian sandalwood. After macadamia nuts, it is the most widely-cultivated Australian native plant, with a reasonably large commercial harvest. It is a hemi-parasitic plant whose roots derive parts of its nutrition from the roots of other trees. The Gunnagal will grow domesticated quandongs alongside rows of wattles for this purpose (as is done in commercial harvesting today).
[7] Hunter-gatherer Aboriginal peoples often ate only the nuts of wild quandong, rather than the fruit itself. This is because the nut was much easier to find and gather. They did not collect the nut directly, but relied on emus instead. Those birds ate the fruit, and the nut passed unharmed through their digestive tract. Aboriginal peoples simply gathered quandong nuts from emu droppings. (I am not making this up.)
[8] Corkwood is relatively easy to cultivate, being a plant tolerant of limited rainfall and poor soils. Some species of corkwood are grown commercially today as a source of various alkaloids which are used in making pharmaceuticals.
[9] Sallow wattle/ Sydney golden wattle/ coastal wattle (Acacia longifolia) and gossamer wattle/ white sallow wattle (A. floribunda) differ in some of their details from other domesticated wattles, but their main uses are similar. Muntries (Kunzea pomifera) and apple berry (Billardiera scandens) are both fruits which will be valued along the coastline, and when dried, used as a trade good inland. Warrigal greens/ Australian spinach (Tetragonia tetragonoides) will become a useful leaf vegetable.
[10] As a relatively small animal, the tiger quoll is much easier to domesticate than some larger Australian animals such as wombats or koalas. It has been kept as a pet, and it breeds easily in captivity.
[11] Although unlike cats, domesticated quolls do not get stuck up trees. They climb down on their own.
[12] Monsieur Diamond notwithstanding, emus can be easily kept and bred in captivity, and are increasingly being farmed both in Australia and around the world. They would require more work to tame and feed than the other main Gunnagal domesticated food animal, the wood duck. Wood ducks are primarily grazers, while emus need a more varied diet. Domesticated emus are partly left to feed on grass and other plants, and some insects which they catch for themselves in the fields, but they also need to be partly grain-fed, for which *Aboriginal farmers use wattle seeds. Farmed emus can also be run through wattle fields once the main harvest has taken place. This keeps the emus exercised, and also lets them clean up any stray seeds, discarded seed pods (which emus also eat), and any other insects pests which may be in the fields.
[13] Emu broods are fairly large, often up to 15 chicks for every breeding female, but most of these birds will be slaughtered at around 12-15 months old for their meat and other products. The index of a farmer’s wealth is thus the number of long-term adult birds which they can maintain, not the total size of the flock (which will often include many chicks).
[14] The Gunnagal are fortunate in their syllabary, in that their language is structured in such a way that about four hundred syllables will represent their entire language. (An English syllabary would run into thousands of symbols, since English has lots of consonant clusters and lots of vowels). Most syllables in spoken Gunnagal (at least the Tjibarr dialect) consist of a consonant or consonant cluster followed by a vowel, such as ki, be or tji. Only a relatively few syllables have a consonant-vowel-consonant arrangement, such as the relatively common gal.
[15] The association with the new year is because the Gunnagal date their year from late winter/early spring, around the time of the flowering of the first wattles.
[16] This dye is made from the shell of the large rock shell (Thais orbita), a predatory sea snail which is common around much of the Australian coast. It is a relative of the Mediterranean sea snails which produced dyes of Tyrian purple and royal blue which were such valued commodities in classical times.
[17] Aboriginal peoples used a wide variety of plants to flavour their food. Some of these have been adopted for small-scale commercial cultivation or wild harvesting in modern Australia. In an allohistorical Australia where farming has been widespread, many of these plants are going to be similarly cultivated as spices. Lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) is a tree whose leaves produce a sweet, strong lemony flavour; in modern Australia it is the most widely-cultivated native spice. The related species of aniseed myrtle (Syzygium anisatum) and cinnamon myrtle (Backhousia myrtifolia) have similar properties, and all of these will be cultivated by farmers on the eastern seaboard. Native thyme / roundleaf mintbush (Prostanthera rotundifolia) and the related cut-leaf mintbush (P. incisa) are members of the same plant family as more common culinary herbs such as culinary herbs such as mint, oregano, sage and thyme, and will similarly be used as flavouring. Native ginger (Alpinia caerulea) was used by Aboriginal peoples when roasting food in earth ovens, and gives a strong gingery flavour to cooked food. Lemon-scented teatree (Leptospermum petersonii and L. liversidgei) will also be cultivated for their lemony-scented leaves, which will be used to make an Australian equivalent of tea (as it is sometimes used today). L. petersonii is grown commercially in both Australia and overseas so that its essential oil can be extracted from its leaves. Lemon-scented grass (Cymbopogon ambiguus) is an Australian relative of common lemon grass (C. citratus). Drought-tolerant and easily cultivated as a herb for cooking or for tea, lemon-scented grass is one eastern spice which will spread west across the Great Dividing Range.
[18] By way of comparison, the difference between the Tjibarr [Swan Hill] and Gundabingee languages is about the same as the difference between modern Dutch and Austrian German.
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Thoughts?
