Gunditjmara in Australia

Science has finally proved what the Gunditjmara people say they knew all along - that they were not nomads.

Ken Saunders, a Gunditjmara elder living in Victoria, says: "We weren't nomads. We didn't wander all over the bloody place and go walkabout. We had an existence here. We used to trap eels ourselves and use the eel traps. And some of the young fellas today still use the traps. So the eels were part of our diet. I still eat the bloody things today."

Using a combination of archaeology and ethnographic-historical eyewitness evidence, archaeologist Heather Builth has built up a detailed picture of a sophisticated society run by the Gunditjmara.

The people spent much less time acquiring food than nomadic people. Not only could they fish eels whenever they wanted, many other foods were also readily available all year round. By building the artificial ponding system they had also unintentionally created an artificial wetland rich in roots and tubers. These could be harvested during all seasons, as could eggs and the many waterbirds attracted to the wetlands. The Gunditjmara's relatively sedentary life freed up their time, allowing them to develop a more complex society.

The chiefs became very powerful because they controlled the enormous wealth of the wetlands. They arranged the marriages of their people and had up to four wives (commoners were restricted to one). The society was so highly structured that the chief's power filtered down to the lowest levels. Everyone had their role and it was very hard to deviate from it.

The Gunditjmara also had significant influence in the regional economy, which stretched from South Australia to Victoria and probably well into NSW. They traded their eels for important materials they didn't have, such as quartz and flint, to make knives and other stone artefacts. They also imported complete stone axes and exported possum-skin coats, which the women wore when they came of age. Showing just how far Gunditjmara society had moved beyond basic survival needs, they even imported wooden implements that were of no use. Purely for status, the spear-like objects were made from wood that grew only in Victoria's Cape Otway ranges.

The first European settlers arrived illegally in 1834. (Sydney did not know about them.) The Gunditjmara collapsed very soon afterwards, in part because the chiefs had so much power, Builth believes. Once the chiefs had been removed, the highly structured system they controlled just fell apart. By the 1880s local farmers had started draining the eel farms.

Source, pretty surprising for me.

Had the Europeans somehow not arrived (ASB, I know) could they have gone anywhere?
 
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