Wurundjeri a freshwater hunting & gathering People
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Gunnung-willam-balluk
Aquatic Bush Tucker
The Great Gatherings
The following was directly transcribed from a series of interviews with Wurundjeri Elder, Ian Hunter, recorded in 2004-5.
Gunnung-willam-balluk
Most of our people did live along creeks. They were freshwater dwelling people, as Gunnung-willam-balluk explains. [Translated in the Woiwurrung language means the freshwater people.]
In 1835 when first Europeans came to what we call now Victoria, historians have stated that there would've been in excess of 100,000 people, or Aboriginal people. And when you look at the environment that existed, to sustain 100,000 people it could quite easily do it, quite easily.
If there's vegetation there's bird life. If there's bird life, there's animal life. The only reason the birds would be in those areas is that there would be insect life. Not only the small insects that you might see birds eating, but there would be insect life that the Aboriginal people would be eating as well.
Those insects and the under-story would sustain other larger mammals, tree dwelling mammals. And along the creeks you've got freshwater mussels. You had all the aquatic plants. The aquatic plants that grow along creeks - you might even see some of them today.
In the northern parts of Australia [...] they have hot all year round. So therefore they have fruiting plants. Different plants fruit at different parts of the year. So the northern people, a lot of their sustenance might have came off plants out in the open.
Whereas in Melbourne and in Victoria a great deal of their sustenance was relied upon out of their water systems. Because the water systems had not only the meat like the fish and the eels, the tortoises, the freshwater mussels, but all the plants that grew in the watercourses were a source of carbohydrates. Whether it be cumbungi, that's the bullrushes, the root system of that.
Aquatic Bush Tucker
I know a lot of our people have actually spoke about the murnong, the Yam Daisy, which was all over apparently. But [...] the hard hoofed animals trod it into the ground and ate a lot of it. But the aquatic stuff was still there, and it would always have been there - the aquatic plants.
Marsh Club-rush
Or today what we call the bolboschoenus [Marsh Club-rush (Bolboscheonus medianus)], that's another plant. In fact it looks like it's growing in the water. It actually looks like bamboo, but not as tall, it's only a very short plant. But in the root system of that it's almost like [...] water chestnuts and it has a nut on it [...] you don't have to peel the shell off it. And it can probably be anything up to 30 mm diameter.
So they would collect it. And you can pull those out of the water and just eat it straight away. And that same plant you eat the seeding heads on it. And these plants that grow in the water, you can get them all year round.
And then you actually had the one that grows in the mud [Water-ribbon (Triglochin procera)], and you can actually eat the whole plant, without eating the heavy leaves of it. But the root system is like a leek and you can eat that. And in the mud there's little rhizomes, little nuts about the size of a cashew nut and sometimes they get almost the same size as a walnut or an almond, or something of that nature. And they would pick those up, get them out and cook them, or eat them [raw].
Not only could you use the aquatic plants out of the water to get sustenance, but you could also use parts of those plants as fiber, to use for making string. What we call today cumbungi or bullrushes, the rhizomes of those, that actually grow in the mud.
It's just like a dirty old bit of rope when you pull it out of the mud. They can be thrown in the coals and baked. And then the sustenance that comes out of that is sort of the consistency of sweetened condensed milk.
You squash it up and then you suck the sustenance out of it and it has the same taste as creamed mashed potato. When you've actually sucked all the goodness out of it, you've got all stringy fiber that then they could make string out of to make fish trap and eel traps.
Mallun Murray Cod
There were actually cod in the upper reaches of the Yarra River, because mum said she remembered Granny catching cod. She said these cod were [as] big as small kids. She said they were just the same as the cod they used to catch up on the Murray River.
It was just that maybe they weren't as prevalent as they were in the Murray River, because the Murray River was a much bigger river. That's probably why they never survived - all the new people catching all these fish in our rivers, I suppose.
Forgotten Bush Soap
My mum spent her young childhood and early teens with her grandma, so therefore she was the big knowledgeable one [...] She also lost a lot of it. As she said one time, she knew of a plant when her and Granny went fishing.
On the way home from fishing, she said your hands would stink from all the eel and the worms and the dirt. But she said that Granny's coming past, up on Badgers Creek, and granny would just pick up a leaf off there and rub it in her hands and rub it and rub it and rub it and she said you could smell it, getting different smells out of it.
And then she'd just put her hands in the water and it would soap up. And she said it would just make soap [...] But I tried to get mum to identify that, but she was probably fifteen or sixteen when that would've happened. Maybe thirteen or fourteen, so she couldn't remember [...] but she didn't realise what she was loosing.
The Great Gatherings
The gatherings [...] they would work on [...] the star formations and the moon. And when the moon was over a particular point over a hill in the year you might know that was when a particular grub was in season, or the fish or the eels were going up the creek.
They would [...] go to a particular region, because they knew that a particular plant or animal might've been there at that time of year. And they would read the seasons and they would know that, ok, it's starting to get warm now, we know that say along Edgars Creek, or the Merri Creek (what we call the Merri and Edgars Creeks today) they'd know that just about now the water's getting a bit warm so therefore the bolboscheonus, this plant with these great big bulbs underneath it, would be ready for you to go and get them out.
So the people would know to come together. The only way that they could work out their marriage systems - who was going to marry who and what was going on in their country [...] they would all need to come together to pass on any of the things that they'd experienced in maybe the past three to six months, to arrange marriages, to arrange initiations.
That's another thing that always astounds me. We today, we have an event and how much time people need to put together to maybe have an event for a thousand people - toilet facilities and eating facilities and all that.
Whereas the people back in those old times, even five or six hundred Aboriginal people coming together for a camp [...] in those traditional times, how did they feed everybody and the toilet requirements and so forth? [...] There must have been some phenomenal organisation that went into the gathering of all the clans.
So those gatherings were where the outer tribes or outer clans came into our country. That's where the ceremony of Womin Ji-Ka Tanderum would be preformed, meaning opening of the bush for the strangers. And that ceremony we use when we're opening events in our local government or state government areas of our own traditional country. We use it [...] as an opening ceremony for civic events.
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