Dark Emu refers to several kinds of traditional fish trap (pages 53–71). Those given the most prominence, generally, are the ones that constitute exceptional creations. The Lake Condah eel trapping system, the Brewarrina River fish traps and the Glyde River fish trap are prominent in the ‘Aquaculture’ chapter but there is little to compare them with anywhere else, perhaps except for the Brewarrina traps. There were hugely numerous but different and more basic coastal fish traps that used tides to capture wild fish. Weirs, not highlighted by Pascoe and not included in Young Dark Emu, were widespread. The curriculum guide Dark Emu in the Classroom illustrates only one kind of fish trap: the exceptional case of Brewarrina.1
Is it accurate to refer to these successful devices as ‘aquaculture’, as Pascoe does (page 53), rather than as ‘trapping wild fish’?
Most people’s understanding of ‘aquaculture’ would define it as the protective breeding, rearing and harvesting of aquatic animals. Raising fingerlings in captivity, where they are protected from predators, is usually integral to aquaculture enterprises. That is, there is domestication of the reproductive beginnings of the relevant fish population. While the Old People did this through ritual and through communicating with aquatic spirits, there is no evidence they did so using physical technology. In the case of the eels of Western Victoria (see Chapter 13), they spawn far from human beings, swimming ‘anything up to three or four thousand kilometres to a spawning ground in deep water somewhere in the Coral Sea off New Caledonia’.2
That is, there is abundant evidence that Aboriginal people in different regions of Australia harvested wild fish by spearing, angling, netting, grabbing them by the gills, and creating weirs and stone traps, but no evidence that they physically bred, fed, protected and reared them as captive fingerlings and then introduced them into the environment.
This is from the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment website:
Aquaculture is defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as the farming of aquatic organisms including fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants with some sort of intervention in the rearing process to enhance production, such as regular stocking, feeding and protection from predators.3
Complicating the issue is the fact that the World Heritage listing of the Budj Bim Landscape in western Victoria describes the fish trapping system as ‘aquaculture’: ‘The three serial components of the property contain one of the world’s most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems.’4 Perhaps two distinct meanings of ‘aquaculture’ are now established in Australian English usage: a technical sense covering breeding of spawn in captivity, and a broader sense covering trapping of wild fish by modification of water flows.
Pascoe raises the Glyde River (Northern Territory) fish trap in the context of the phrase ‘for example’, and indeed it is an example of invention using bush materials. However, it is completely unrepresentative of Aboriginal fish trap technology. It is unique in the Australian record, and even unique in Arnhem Land, and in fact unique to only two local clans of Yolngu people on a single river in Arnhem Land. It was named gorl by Donald Thomson’s teachers:
The gorl technique is not in general use throughout Arnhem Land but is confined to a small area on the north coast lying between the Glyde River in the west, and Buckingham Bay in the east … the right to use the gorl is regarded as the exclusive property of two of these groups—Ngalladar Tjumbar’poingo and Kalbanuk group of Liagallauwumirr—and its use is restricted to these.5
Pascoe reproduces a photo of this particular fish trap, and says, ‘When I show this to students of Aboriginal Studies they turn to me in astonishment, as if I’m pulling their leg’ (page 65). This may be true, but photographs of this same trap have been published multiple times over decades. It is ironic then that Thomson’s 1938 paper was originally called ‘A new type of fish trap …’6 It was new, then, to anthropological publication in 1938. Photos of this Glyde River fish trap have since been repeatedly published, in two publications by Thomson7 and in works by Wiseman,8 Keen9 and Memmott.10 The trap has also been described in print in Thomson,11 Blainey12 and Memmott and Fantin.13 This unique creation is the only fish trap illustrated in Young Dark Emu.14 No ordinary traps are represented. The normal is excluded.
Pascoe’s use of the striking Thomson photo is marred by multiple errors of fact, which can be detected if you compare his description with Thomson’s 1938 original. Thomson’s 1937 photograph was of two men sitting, not standing as Pascoe says. Pascoe also says the tubs were made of paperbark; Thomson says they were made of Darwin stringybark. Pascoe’s caption for the photo describes the image as ‘Queensland fishing system’ (page 65). The Glyde River is in Arnhem Land: the nearest part of Queensland is over 500 kilometres away to the south-east.
Moving offshore, Pascoe here asserts that ‘large, organised fishing expeditions by watercraft were observed all around the coast’ (page 66). If ‘the coast’ here is the Australian coast, then the statement is false. Large parts of the coast had people with no seagoing craft at all, only inland still-water bark canoes. Some had no boats but used floating logs, for example to cross rivers.
Watercraft were absent from the greater part of the south-western coasts. There were also no watercraft in most of the interior. These distributional contrasts have been on the published record for many decades,15 and the National Maritime Museum has published an authoritative map of watercraft distributions (see below). Pascoe seems to have ignored this evidence in a now familiar pattern: towards uniformity, largeness, and a social evolutionist expectation of ‘advancement’.
Aboriginal watercraft distribution at conquest.
The Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia contains a mainly compatible map (see page 3 of the picture section). This atlas was aimed at the educational market of young people and people new to the subject of Aboriginal studies. It has sold well and gone through two editions, and there is a downloadable teacher’s guide.