ON TAUNGURUNG LAND SHARING HISTORY AND CULTURE Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History Inc. is a part of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, and gratefully acknowledges the support of the School of History and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, The Australian National University. Aboriginal History Inc. is administered by an Editorial Board which is responsible for all unsigned material. Views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily shared by Board members. Contacting Aboriginal History All correspondence should be addressed to the Editors, Aboriginal History Inc., ACIH, School of History, RSSS, 9 Fellows Road (Coombs Building), The Australian National University, Acton, ACT, 2601, or [email protected]. WARNING: Readers are notified that this publication may contain names or images of deceased persons. ON TAUNGURUNG LAND SHARING HISTORY AND CULTURE UNCLE ROY PATTERSON AND JENNIFER JONES Published by ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc. The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760464066 ISBN (online): 9781760464073 WorldCat (print): 1224453432 WorldCat (online): 1224452874 DOI: 10.22459/OTL.2020 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press Cover photograph: Patterson family photograph, circa 1904 This edition © 2020 ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc. Contents Acknowledgements ....................................... vii Note on terminology ......................................ix Preface .................................................xi Introduction: Meeting and working with Uncle Roy ..............1 Part 1: Sharing Taungurung history 1. An overview of Taungurung history since invasion ............11 2. Acheron Aboriginal Station: Land that ‘ever should be theirs’ ....17 3. Mohican Aboriginal Station: ‘Forced miles from the spot they cherished’ .......................................39 4. Breaking up Mohican Aboriginal Station: ‘They got sick of being shunted around’ ...............................61 5. Children of Coranderrk, 1870–86 ........................77 Part 2: Sharing Taungurung culture 6. ‘Knowledge cost ya nothing and is not heavy to carry around’: Taungurung bush tucker, bush medicine and bushcraft .........97 7. ‘Without culture, you’ve got nothing’: Taungurung cultural heritage ...........................133 8. Conclusion .........................................155 Bibliography ...........................................157 Acknowledgements The research and publication of this book was made possible by the following grants and generous collaborations: • La Trobe University Publication Award Scheme, which funded Moorina Bonini’s photography. Thank you Moorina for your wonderful images and company during our bush lessons with Uncle Roy. • The Public Record Office Victoria – Local History Grants Program, GA-F20909-9017. This successful grant application was made possible by the generosity of my collaborators at Murrindindi Shire Council, who administered the grant. Sincere thanks to Libby Kotschet, Murrindindi Library Service and the Alexandra Friends of the Library for their assistance, support and encouragement. • The staff at Camp Jungai provided access to their beautiful Rubicon Valley site and willing support, as it was required. • My thanks to the anonymous referees whose clear and constructive suggestions drove improvements to the manuscript. • Thanks to Chris Marshall from Taungurung Land & Waters Council who generously read and checked the manuscript for errors. Thanks also to Joanne Honeysett for her timely and sensitive cultural advice. • Rani Kerin, Monographs Editor, Aboriginal History Inc., offered ready advice and expert copyediting. Thank you Rani. • Thanks to Rebecca Le Get for sharing your skills and expertise by preparing the map. • Special thanks to Sam and Keith Patterson for providing hospitality, family photographs, advice and assistance after Uncle Roy’s death. This book is dedicated to Taungurung Elders, past, present and emerging. vii Note on terminology There are many variations of spelling for the Aboriginal nation Taungurung. For consistency and to minimise confusion, in this book I adopt the spelling used by the Taungurung Land and Waters Council (Aboriginal Corporation), the Registered Aboriginal Party. Common variations include Taunerong, Daunarung and Daun Wurrung. Uncle Roy preferred ‘Daunarung’, so I use this spelling in his direct speech. ix Preface The unprecedented and devastating bushfires experienced across vast areas of eastern Australia in the long summer of 2019–20 drew world attention to the fragility of Australia’s ancient ecosystems. Many now acknowledge that climate change, drought and the cumulative effect of inappropriate settler land management practices have made Australia’s bush and grasslands increasingly vulnerable to wildfires. In the aftermath of the disaster, some commentators called for the revival of Indigenous cultural burning to reduce the risk of wildfire in south-eastern Australia. In the past decade, collaboration between environmental agencies, government and Traditional Owners has seen the restoration of cultural burning practices in northern Australia.1 Such cultural resurgence holds potential benefits for people and places across the whole continent of Australia, not just in the north. Traditional Owners hold sophisticated ecological knowledge that explains the interrelationships between ‘people, plants, animals, landforms and celestial bodies’.2 This place-based wisdom is both practical and spiritual, and directs proper action or ‘right behaviour’ on that particular land.3 Colonial records reveal the fury and distress of Traditional Owners when settlers contravened traditional laws by using agricultural and forestry methods most appropriate to Europe.4 This included using fire incorrectly for Australian conditions or failing to understand the importance of timely or controlled burning.5 Yet, because settlers commonly believed First Nations people were ‘primitive’ and ignorant, they did not recognise or respect their place-based Indigenous knowledge. A memoir by Marion Popple (1872–1960), a settler woman who lived near Taggerty in the Upper Goulburn Valley of central Victoria, 1 McKemey et al., ‘Cross-Cultural Monitoring’. 2 Grieves, ‘Aboriginal Spirituality’, 365. 3 Broome, ‘There Were Vegetables’. 4 Kenny, ‘Broken Treaty’. 5 Fred Cahir et al., ‘Winda Lingo Parugoneit’. xi ON TAUNGURUNG LAND provides an example. Popple wrote her memoir in 1936, recalling childhood memories and stories told by early settlers. ‘The blackfellows’, she wrote: Always called the [Mount] Cathedral ‘Debils Jawbone’. They were afraid whenever they heard the wind roaring through the caves and gullies, and they used to tell us that ‘one day big fellow fire him all burn up’[;] they would roll their eyes and show the whites, poor blacks really believed it would happen.6 Dire warnings that deadly wildfire would transform the Cathedral Range were trivialised by Europeans, whose cultural superiority led them to dismiss the ancient wisdom of the Traditional Owners, the Taungurung people. These predictions came to fruition when wildfire swept through the district during the Black Friday disaster of 1939, and during the Black Saturday fires of 2009, when the bulk of the Cathedral Range State Park was burnt. These unnamed Taungurung people from ‘the early days’, I suggest, were not afraid of the ‘wind roaring through the caves and gullies’, as Marion Popple implied. Rather, they feared the outcomes of exploitative and extractive land management strategies that seemed to disregard the needs of plants and animals, land and waters. Uncle Roy Patterson was a Taungurung Elder who inherited detailed traditional ecological knowledge from his ancestors. He believed that settler practices were harming the land and shared the worldwide concern of Indigenous people that injustices arise ‘when one culture decides what is significant and worth protecting in the heritage of another’.7 Uncle Roy’s priority was, therefore, to educate as many people as possible about his beautiful country. Before he died on 15 April 2017, he shared his generational knowledge of bush tucker and bush medicine with anyone who would listen: school children, community groups and academics like me. During one of our trips looking for bush tucker, Uncle Roy took me to Mount Monda, 920 metres above sea level in the Yarra Ranges National Park. It was a cool December morning and the mountainside rang with bird calls. Uncle Roy quipped: 6 ‘Some True Stories about the Aborigines of Victoria for Vivienne Hulley and Audrey Bevan, Read by Mrs Marion Popple of Wymarong’, Aborigines of Australia—Miscellaneous Reminiscences, Royal Historical Society of Victoria, MS 22545, Box 118/11. 7 Susemihl, ‘We Are Key Players’. xii PREFACE Isn’t it gorgeous up here; that is Wurundjeri land up there and this is Daunarung over here. You can drive all the way along here and all you got is mountain pepper [trees]. Because the eucalyptus and mountain ash gets clear felled, all this will go, and we will lose the mountain pepper as well. So, it is not just the animals and the reptiles and