1 Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Magabala Books, 2014); and Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, 2nd edn (Magabala Books, 2018). Note that in this book we rely principally on sources of information that were available before Dark Emu appeared in 2014. Some highly relevant works have appeared since. For example, on traditional south-eastern Australian economy and domestic technology and clothing, see Fred Cahir, Ian D Clark & Philip A Clarke, Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-Eastern Australia: Perspectives of Early Colonists (CSIRO Publishing, 2018).
2 Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2011).
3 Rupert Gerritsen, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (British Archaeological Reports, 2008).
4 Although the absence of agriculture in Australia was used as an excuse for dispossession by colonists, the presence of agriculture on other continents was no barrier to conquest and appropriation of land by the British: ‘The fact that the Aborigines were to a very large extent hunter-gatherers probably provided a convenient pretext for their dispossession by the Westerners. But, as far as is known, the existence of agriculture never stopped any colonisation in the world, on any continent whatsoever. To take just one example, North America was, at the time of contact, populated, depending on the area, by hunter-gatherer or farming societies, the latter sometimes being very dense. As for Africa, it was almost entirely agricultural, and moreover organized in States. In what way did this protect the populations from the greed of the conquerors?’—Christophe Darmangeat, ‘Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture (Bruce Pascoe)’, La Hutte des Classes, 4 January 2020, https://cdarmangeat.blogspot.com/2020/01/dark-emu-bruce-pascoe.html (accessed 17 July 2020).
5 Gerritsen’s book lacks an index so it is very hard to use as a reference work.
6 Paul Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia (University of Queensland Press, 2007).
7 R Lauriston Sharp, The Social Anthropology of a Totemic System in North Queensland, Australia, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1937, pp. 27–8. In the typed copy of this dissertation, Sharp did not mention the exceptional nonda plum. He later inserted it thus in a handwritten addition on the copy I have used: ‘Only the nonda’ (p. 28).
8 Philip A Clarke, Aboriginal People and Their Plants (Rosenberg, 2007), pp. 76–7.
9 Peter Sutton & Dermot Smyth, ‘Ethnobotanical data from Aurukun Shire, Queensland’ (mainframe computer printout, 1980).
10 Peter Sutton, ‘Material culture traditions of the Wik people, Cape York Peninsula’, Records of the South Australian Museum 27, 1994, p. 45. Similarly, for Central Australia, Latz and Griffin wrote: ‘Foraging parties gathered sufficient food for their immediate requirements and only rarely stored food for later use’ —Peter Latz & GF Griffin, ‘Changes in Aboriginal land management in relation to fire and to food plants in Central Australia’. In BS Hetzel & HJ Frith (eds), The Nutrition of Aborigines in Relation to the Ecosystem of Central Australia (CSIRO, 1978), p. 79.
11 Bruce Pascoe, ‘A real history of Aboriginal Australians, the first agriculturalists’ [video], TEDxSydney, TEDx Talks, YouTube, 24 July 2018, https://youtu.be/fqgrSSz7Htw (accessed 11 January 2020).
12 The fishing-hunting-gathering-gardening people of Torres Strait were different (see Chapter 6).
13 Yangzi and Yellow rivers about 9000 years ago (BP), New Guinea 9000–6000 BP, Sub-Saharan Africa 5000–4000 BP, Central Mexico and north-west South America 5000–4000 BP, and eastern USA 4000–3000 BP: see Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Blackwell, 2005), p. 7. (BP means ‘before present’ and is used in archaeology to specify when events occurred before the advent of radiocarbon dating; the standard start date is 1 January 1950.)
14 Bellwood, p. 7.
15 Thomas Barfield (ed.), The Dictionary of Anthropology (Blackwell, 1997).
16 Barfield, p. 202.
17 Barfield, p. 244. This refers to an animal-drawn plough, not a hand-plough, we surmise.
18 Jeremy Beckett, Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 28–9, 114; ‘Torres Strait Islanders: Economy’, Countries and Their Cultures, n.d., https://www.everyculture.com/Oceania/Torres-Strait-Islanders-Economy.html (accessed 19 February 2020).
19 Barfield, p. 9.
20 Susie Beattie (ed.), Collins German Dictionary and Grammar (HarperCollins, 2014); DR Harris & GC Hillman (eds), Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation (Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 19.
21 Bellwood, p. 13.
22 For further details, see chapters 4, 9, and 10 of this book.
23 Harry Lourandos, ‘Review of Australia and the Origins of Agriculture by Rupert Gerritsen’. Australian Archaeological Association, 1 June 2010, https://australianarchaeologicalassociation.com.au/journal/review-of-australia-and-the-origins-of-agriculture/ (accessed 27 February 2020).
24 Bellwood, p. 12.
25 AMT Moore, ‘The transition from foraging to farming in Southwest Asia: Present problems and future directions’. In Harris & Hillman (eds), p. 628.
26 Ofer Bar-Yosef & Mordechai E Kislev, ‘Early farming communities in the Jordan Valley’. In Harris & Hillman (eds), p. 632.
27 See Peter White, ‘New Guinea and Australian prehistory: The “Neolithic” problem’. In DJ Mulvaney & J Golson (eds), Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia (ANU Press, 1971), p. 187.
28 Clarke, 2007, pp. 127–32.
29 Harriet V Hunt, Hannah M Moots & Peter J Matthews, ‘Genetic data confirms field evidence for natural breeding in a wild taro population (Colocasia esculenta) in northern Queensland, Australia’, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 60, 2013, pp. 1695–707.
30 Ray Wood pers. comm., 13 July 2020. For other evidence of ancient east Papuan contact with the wider Cooktown area, see Ray Wood, ‘Wangga: The linguistic and typological evidence for the sources of the outrigger canoes of Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula’, Oceania 88, 2018, pp. 202–31.
31 Rhys Jones & Betty Meehan, ‘Plant foods of the Gidjingali: Ethnographic and archaeological perspectives from northern Australia on tuber and seed exploitation’, in Harris & Hillman (eds), p. 132; Tim Denham, Mark Donohue & Sara Booth, ‘Horticultural experimentation on northern Australia reconsidered’, Antiquity 83, 2009, pp. 643–5.
32 Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (Allen & Unwin, 1935).
33 In a refereed paper, scholars in Western Australia have provided detailed evidence from the Kimberley of plants represented in ancient rock art. They concluded in part that there ‘[W]e have a society in which people actively chose not to pursue orthodox agriculture while according plants a central place in their lives’ (Peter Veth et al., ‘Plants before farming: The deep history of plant-use and representation in the rock art of Australia’s Kimberley region’, Quaternary International 30, 2016, p. 1).
34 Gammage, p. 301.
35 Gammage, p. 300.
36 Gammage, p. 301.
37 Fiona Jane Walsh, ‘Review of R Gerritsen, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (2008)’, GeoJournal 74, 2009, p. 500.
38 Gammage’s book has a large index but the following items are not among its entries: agriculture, cultivation, horticulture, sowing, planting; there are entries for farming, and for land management. Another method Gammage and Pascoe share is the preferencing of early explorer and settler accounts over the studies of anthropologists and archaeologists, and the reconstruction of vegetation history. This point was made by Professor of Archaeology Peter Hiscock in his review of Gammage (see Peter Hiscock, ‘Creators or destroyers? The burning questions of human impact in ancient Aboriginal Australia’, Humanities Australia 5, 2014, p. 45).
39 Clearly a journalist’s error, given the limited range of palm trees. The commonest materials were bark, boughs, posts and grass.
40 Barbara McMahon, ‘Scientist debunks nomadic Aborigine “myth”’, The Guardian, 9 October 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/09/australia.barbaramcmahon (accessed 20 December 2019).
41 Helen Clemens, ‘The Aborigines: Hunter-gatherers: Why not agriculturists?’ In Christine Haigh & Wendy Goldstein (eds), The Aborigines of New South Wales (NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service, 1980), pp. 52–3. Archaeologists John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga expressed a similar view in their Prehistory of Australia (Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 87.
42 Philip Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape (Allen & Unwin, 2003).
43 Other texts for the general reader that cover most if not all of the same topics have been the bestseller by Geoffrey Blainey, Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia (Macmillan, 1983; 1st edn 1975), and Josephine Flood’s Archaeology of the Dreamtime: The Story of Prehistoric Australia and Its People (JB Publishing, 2006).
44 Thomas Worsnop, The Prehistoric Arts, Manufactures, Works, Weapons, etc., of the Aborigines of Australia (CE Bristow, Government Printer, 1897), p. 102.
45 George Horne and George Aiston in Savage Life in Central Australia (Macmillan, 1924) describe a wall of stakes being used to divert fish into nets (p. 64). Altman in Hunter-Gatherers Today: An Aboriginal Economy in North Australia (AIAS, 1987) provides photos of the making of a conical fish trap and the related creek-trapping fence inland from Maningrida in the period 1979–81 (pp. 124–5).
46 The rest of the fence can be seen in another photo in Roslyn Poignant & Axel Poignant, Encounter at Nagalarramba (National Library of Australia, 1996), on p. 63.
47 A similar limitation applies to Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2nd edn, Quadrant Books, 2020), a pugnacious polemical assessment of Dark Emu. While O’Brien relies on Mitchell, Sturt, Grey, Davis, McKinlay, Giles, King and other explorers, and on colonial lay observers such as Tench, Hunter, Beveridge, Robinson and Kirby, extremely few anthropologists or archaeologists other than self-taught ethnographers Howitt, Dawson and Basedow manage to make an appearance.
48 Ian Keen, Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation (Oxford University Press, 2004).
49 See Bruce Pascoe, Young Dark Emu: A Truer History (Magabala Books, 2019) and Simone Barlow & Ashlee Horyniak, Dark Emu in the Classroom: Teacher Resources for High School Geography (Magabala Books, 2019).
50 Sometimes a work is mentioned in the text but is missing from the references, such as Rhys Jones’s paper ‘Fire-stick farming’ (in Australian Natural History 16(7), 1969, pp. 224–8), a seminal contribution to Pascoe’s core subject: the pre-colonial Aboriginal management of country and its resources.
1 Kenneth Maddock, The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of Their Society (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press, 1972), p. 25.
2 Athol Chase, ‘Belonging to country: Territory, identity and environment in Cape York Peninsula, northern Australia’. In LR Hiatt (ed.), Aboriginal Landowners (Oceania, 1984), p. 114.
3 Elizabeth Povinelli, Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (Chicago University Press, 1993)—for example, p. 153.
4 R Lauriston Sharp, ‘Ritual life and economics of the Yir-Yoront tribe of Cape York Peninsula’, Oceania 5, 1934b, pp. 30–1.
5 R Lauriston Sharp, ‘The social organization of the Yir-Yoront tribe, Cape York Peninsula’, Oceania 4, 1934a, p. 409.
6 Ursula H McConnel, Myths of the Muŋkan (Melbourne University Press, 1957), pp. 2–11.
7 McConnel, 1957, p. 2.
8 Ursula H McConnel, ‘The Wik-Munkan tribe, Part 2: Totemism’, Oceania 1, 1930b, p. 187.
9 In the Cape York Peninsula language Umpithamu, the word for ‘to activate’ an increase site is uympan, otherwise used for ‘to wake someone up’ or ‘to herd fish into a drag net by frightening them’ (J-C Verstraete pers. comm., 31 May 2020).
10 Peter Sutton et al., Aak: Aboriginal Estates and Clans between the Embley and Edward Rivers, Cape York Peninsula (unpublished report; South Australian Museum, 1990); Peter Sutton, David Martin & John von Sturmer, ‘Supplementary site report’, Appendix 3 of The Wik Peoples Native Title Determination Application QC94/3 (unpublished report; Cape York Land Council, 1997).
11 On demand-sharing among the living, see Nicolas Peterson, ‘Demand sharing: Reciprocity and the pressure for generosity among foragers’, American Anthropologist 95, 1993, pp. 860–74.
12 Sutton et al., 1990, pp. 283–4.
13 Sutton et al., 1990, pp. 562–3 and photo facing p. 562.
14 David Martin’s record is in Sutton et al., 1990, p. 418 and photo of ritual facing p. 416.
15 Sutton et al., 1990, p. 555.
16 Peter Sutton, Wik-Ngathan Dictionary (Caitlin Press, 1995), p. 19.
17 Ursula McConnel, ‘Native arts and industries on the Archer, Kendall and Holroyd rivers, Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland’, Records of the South Australian Museum 11, 1953, pp. 1–42, plates I–XVII.
18 Peter Sutton, ‘Material culture traditions of the Wik people, Cape York Peninsula’, Records of the South Australian Museum 27, 1994, pp. 31–52.
19 Caroline Tennant Kelly, ‘Tribes on Cherburg [sic] settlement, Queensland’, Oceania 5, 1935, pp. 461–73.
20 Lindsey Page Winterbotham, ‘The Gaiarbau story: Some native customs and beliefs of the Jinibara tribe as well as those of some of their neighbours in south-east Queensland’. In G Langevad (ed.), Queensland Ethnohistorical Transcripts 1(1), 1982, p. 129.
21 Winterbotham, p. 82.
22 AR Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Notes on totemism in eastern Australia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 59, 1929, pp. 401, 406.
23 Radcliffe-Brown, 1929, pp. 401–7.
24 Peter Sutton, ‘Aboriginal ceremonial sites of New South Wales’, unpublished report for National Parks and Wildlife Service of New South Wales, 1985.
25 AW Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-east Australia (Macmillan, 1904), p. 399.
26 Ian Keen, Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 219–20, 225, 227–8 and 232 respectively.
27 Ronald M Berndt, Australian Aboriginal Religion (EJ Brill, 1974), Fascicle 1, p. 26.
28 Robert Tonkinson, The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1991), p. 37.
29 Lorraine Mortimer, Roger Sandall’s Films and Contemporary Anthropology: Explorations in the Aesthetic, the Existential, and the Possible (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), p. 70.
30 Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt, The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional Life, Past and Present, 4th rev. edn with additions (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), pp. 269–73.
31 AP Elkin, ‘Cult-totemism and mythology in northern South Australia’, Oceania 5, 1934, p. 177.
32 Elkin, 1934, p. 186.
33 Elkin, 1934, p. 189.
34 G Horne & G Aiston, Savage Life in Central Australia (Macmillan, 1924), pp. 133–4.
35 Horne & Aiston, p. 134.
36 Mervyn Meggitt, Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia (Angus & Robertson, 1962), p. 220.
37 Meggitt, p. 221.
38 David Nash pers. comm., 14 January 2020.
39 Brian Geytenbeek & Helen Geytenbeek, Gidabal Grammar and Dictionary (AIAS, 1971), p. 53. Their spelling is biřbanj.
40 Peter Latz, Bushfires & Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia (IAD Press, 1995), p. 69. About 200 plants are discussed in the book.
41 Norman B Tindale, ‘The Pitjandjara’. In MG Bicchieri (ed.), Hunters and Gatherers Today: A Socioeconomic Study of Eleven Such Cultures in the Twentieth Century (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972), p. 234.
42 Baldwin Spencer & FJ Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (Macmillan, 1899), pp. 167–211. See also John Morton, ‘The effectiveness of totemism: “Increase ritual” and resource control in Central Australia’, Man (New Series) 22, 1987, pp. 453–74.
43 Morton, p. 456.
44 Petronella Vaarzon-Morel pers. comm., 15 January 2020.
45 The writing on one of the eggs in the photo on p. 36 says: 20 M Nth WEST OF / YALKAWARDALINA / WATER HOLE SA / SIMPSON DESERT—66.
46 Tom McCourt, Aboriginal Artefacts (Rigby, 1975), p. 125.
47 TGH Strehlow, ‘Culture, social structure, and environment in Aboriginal Central Australia’. In RM Berndt & CH Berndt (eds), Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor AP Elkin (Angus & Robertson, 1965), p. 144.
48 Strehlow, p. 144.
49 Isobel White in Daisy M Bates (ed. Isobel White), The Native Tribes of Western Australia (National Library of Australia, 1985), p. 89.
50 Bates, pp. 199–200.
51 Bates, p. 202.
52 Bates, p. 212.
53 Bates, p. 203.
54 Phyllis Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman, Sacred and Profane (George Routledge & Sons, 1939), pp. 203–7.
55 Kaberry, p. 203.
56 Kaberry, p. 177.
57 Kim Akerman, From the Bukarikara: The Lore of the Southwest Kimberley through the Art of Butcher Joe Nangan (UWA Publishing, 2020), p. 11.
58 Radcliffe-Brown, 1929, p. 399.
59 Ralph Piddington, ‘Totemic system of the Karadjeri tribe’, Oceania 4, 1932, pp. 376–93; AP Elkin, ‘Totemism in north-western Australia (the Kimberley division)’, Oceania 3, 1933, pp. 284–96.
60 A common name originating in the Pilbara, not a Karajarri name. In Karajarri it is yarrinyarri (KR McKelson, Studies in Karajarri, unpublished ms, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 1989, p. 10). Yarrinyarri is Cyperus bulbosis, known also as nutgrass and onion-grass or yelka; Philip A Clarke, Aboriginal People and Their Plants (Rosenberg, 2007), pp. 24, 39, 41, 74.
61 Pebbles (‘magic stones’) were also scattered by people in the Lake Eyre region in order to make the yelka grow (Horne & Aiston, p. 53).
62 Piddington, p. 391.
63 Clarke, p. 74.
64 AR Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Three tribes of Western Australia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 43, 1913, p. 160.
65 Radcliffe-Brown, 1913, p. 167.
66 WEH Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monograph No. 11, 1963), p. 31 also said ‘increase’ sites ‘were not developed to any extent in the region’, referring to the region just to the west of Daly River in the area of Port Keats.
67 Photographs and description in Peter Sutton & Arthur Palmer, Daly River (Malak Malak) Land Claim (Northern Land Council, 1980), pp. 70–2.
68 Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt, Man, Land and Myth in North Australia: The Gunwinggu People (Ure Smith, 1970), pp. 147, 216.
69 Francesca Merlan, Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics, and Aborigines in a North Australian Town (University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), pp. 95–6.
70 Jon C Altman, Hunter-Gatherers Today: An Aboriginal Economy in North Australia (AIAS, 1987), p. 219.
71 Geoffrey Bagshaw pers. comm., 20 January 2020. Lily Gurambara gave this information to Bagshaw, an anthropologist with long and deep experience of the Maningrida region, who translated it for me from Burarra.
72 Jeffrey Heath, Nunggubuyu Dictionary (AIAS, 1982), p. 43.
73 Jeffrey Heath, Nunggubuyu Myths and Ethnographic Texts (AIAS, 1980), p. 283.
74 Translated by Heath, a professional linguist who made a detailed study of the language. Other texts by a senior man called Ma:di on increase ceremonies are at Heath, 1980, pp. 279–83. Biographical notes on Yurumura and Ma:di are at Heath, 1980, pp. 8–9.
75 Heath, 1980, pp. 278–9.
76 Heath, 1980, pp. 284–90.
77 W Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (Harper & Brothers, 1937), pp. 39–51.
78 Warner, p. 410.
79 But see Warner, p. 311.
80 Ian Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 267.
81 Berndt, 1974, Fascicle 4, p. 9.
82 Berndt, 1974, Fascicle 4, p. 26. Readers are warned that this publication contains religious material restricted to adult men only.
83 John Bradley, ‘The social, economic and historical construction of cycad palms among the Yanyuwa’. In B David, B Barker & IJ McNiven (eds), The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), p. 177. ‘Too many’ in Aboriginal Kriol does not mean an excess, but merely plenty or many.
84 Bradley, pp. 163–4.
85 Bradley, p. 168.
86 Geoffrey Bagshaw pers. comm., 15 January 2020.
87 Sutton, 1995, p. 48.
88 From my own fieldwork in the area 1999–2000.
89 Cf. L Head, D D’Costa & P Edney, ‘Pleistocene dates for volcanic activity in Western Victoria and implications for Aboriginal occupation’. In MAJ Williams, P de Deckker & AP Kershaw (eds), The Cainozoic in Australia: A Reappraisal of the Evidence (Geological Society of Australia, 1991), pp. 302–8.
90 Paul Memmott & Robyn Horsman, A Changing Culture: The Lardil Aborigines of Mornington Island (Social Science Press, 1991), p. 163.
91 Paul Memmott et al., ‘Fission, fusion and syncretism: Linguistic and environmental changes amongst the Tangkic people of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia’. In J-C Verstraete & D Hafner (eds), Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country (John Benjamins, 2016), p. 128.
92 Nicolas Peterson pers. comm., 13 January 2020.
1 Peter Austin, ‘Diyari language postcards and Diyari literacy’, Aboriginal History 10(2), 1986, p. 176; Peter Austin, A Grammar of Diyari, South Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
2 David R Moore, ‘Cape York Aborigines and Islanders of western Torres Strait’, in D Walker (ed.), Bridge and Barrier: The Natural and Cultural History of Torres Strait (Australian National University, 1972), pp. 327–43; David R Moore, Islanders and Aborigines at Cape York (AIAS, 1979), pp. 268–85; David R Harris, ‘Subsistence strategies across Torres Strait’, in J Allen, J Golson & R Jones (eds), Sunda and Sahul: Prehistoric Studies in Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Australia (Academic Press, 1977), pp. 441–8; Jeremy Beckett, Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 28–9, 114; Athol Chase, ‘Domestication and domiculture in northern Australia: A social perspective’, in DR Harris & GC Hillman (eds), Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation (Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 45.
3 Nicholas Thieberger & William McGregor, Macquarie Aboriginal Words: A Dictionary of Words from Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages (The Macquarie Library, 1994), p. 613.
4 Thieberger & McGregor, pp. 344, 630.
5 RMW Dixon, Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. xxx–xxxi.
6 Dixon, p. xxx.
7 In volume 2 of his classic work on the horticultural Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea, a volume called The Language of Magic and Gardening, Malinowski laid great stress on language as a pathway into the culture, including presenting a detailed vocabulary of plant cultivation that included terms for ‘garden under cultivation’, ‘garden plot’ and ‘land intended for cultivation’—see Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (Allen & Unwin, 1935), vol. 2, pp. 86–7.
8 Page numbers in tables 1 and 2 refer to Sidney H Ray, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. Vol. III: Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 1907). In line 1, ‘M’ indicates the Muralag dialect; in line 2, ‘K’ indicates Kiwai, a New Guinea language.
9 Nick Piper pers. comm., 29 January 2020 adds memeg barki, ‘fallow land, empty of food’.
10 Piper pers. comm., 29 January 2020: kar-iruk.
11 Piper pers. comm., 29 January 2020 says verb for ‘to clear land’ is igeb.
12 Piper pers. comm., 29 January 2020 says ‘not so much an object as keeping quiet about your planting time’.
13 Piper pers. comm., 29 January 2020: probably the word wez, ‘croton plant, to mark your garden and ownership’.
14 Donald F Thomson, ‘The hero cult, initiation and totemism on Cape York’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 63, 1933, pp. 453–537.
15 Ray Wood, ‘Wangga: The linguistic and typological evidence for the sources of the outrigger canoes of Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula’, Oceania 88, 2018, pp. 202–31.
16 Barry J Blake, Ian Clark & Sharnthi H Krishna-Pillay, ‘Wathawurrung: The language of the Geelong-Ballarat area’. In BJ Blake (ed.), Wathawurrung and the Colac Language of Southern Victoria (Pacific Linguistics, 1998), p. 110. Blake (pers. comm., 28 January 2020) does not know the etymology for this expression.
17 The languages are Adnyamathanha, Alawa, Alyawarr, Anmatyerr, Arabana, Arrernte (East and Central), Awabakal, Bandjalang, Bardi, Barngarla, Bunganditj, Burarra, Flinders Island language, Gathang, Githabal, Guugu-Yimidhirr, Jingulu, Kayardild, Kaytetye, Martu Wangka, Morrobolam, Mudburra, Muruwari, Ngaanyatjarra/Ngaatjatjarra, Ngarinyman, Ngarrindjeri, Noongar (Nyungar), Nunggubuyu (Wubuy), Nyulnyul, Pintupi/Luritja, Tiwi, Umpithamu, Warrnambool language, Wathawurrung, Western Desert (Balgo), Western Desert (Warburton), Western Kulin, Wik-Mungkan, Wik-Ngathan, Wiradjuri, Yawuru, Yaygir, Yidiny, Yintyingka, Yir-Yoront.
18 Rose Whitehurst, Noongar Dictionary: Noongar to English and English to Noongar (Noongar Language and Culture Centre, 1992), p. 22.
19 Kathleen Glasgow, Burarra–Gun-nartpa Dictionary with English Finder List (Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1994), p. 447.
20 Lily Gurambara via Geoffrey Bagshaw pers. comm., 15 January 2020. CC Macknight, The Voyage to Marege’: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1976), pp. 59, 157 (endnote 54).
21 Jenny Green, Central & Eastern Anmatyerr to English Dictionary (IAD Press, 2010), p. 50.
22 Rob Pensalfini, Jingulu Texts and Dictionary (Pacific Linguistics, 2011), p. 129.
23 Pensalfini, p. 120.
24 Myfany Turpin & Alison Ross, Kaytetye to English Dictionary (IAD Press, 2012), pp. 300–1.
25 Jennifer R Lee, Ngawurranungurumagi Nginingawila Ngapangiraga: Tiwi–English Dictionary (Nguiu Nginingawila Literature Production Centre, 1993), pp. 292, 346; Stan Grant (Snr) & John Rudder, A New Wiradjuri Dictionary (Restoration House, 2010), p. 152.
26 Grant & Rudder, p. 307.
27 Grant & Rudder, p. 286.
28 Grant & Rudder, p. 387.
29 Grant & Rudder, p. 219.
30 Grant & Rudder, p. 234.
31 Robert Amery pers. comm., 27 January 2020.
1 Rhys Jones, ‘Fire-stick farming’, Australian Natural History 16(7), 1969, pp. 226, 228.
2 Norman B Tindale, ‘Ecology of primitive aboriginal man in Australia’. In A Keast, RL Crocker & CS Christian (eds), Biogeography and Ecology in Australia (Junk, 1959), pp. 42–3.
3 Frederick D McCarthy, ‘Ecology, equipment, economy and trade’. In Helen Sheils (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Studies: A Symposium of Papers Presented at the 1961 Research Conference (Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 171–91.
4 Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt, The World of the First Australians: An Introduction to the Traditional Life of the Australian Aborigines, 1st edn (Ure Smith, 1964), p. 95.
5 Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt, The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional Life, Past and Present, 4th rev. edn with additions (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), p. 110.
6 Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2011), p. 284.
7 Gammage, p. 3.
8 Tindale, 1959, p. 43.
9 Rhys Jones, ‘The Neolithic, Palaeolithic and the hunting gardeners: Man and land in the antipodes’. In RP Suggate & MM Creswell (eds), Quaternary Studies (Royal Society of New Zealand, 1975), p. 25.
10 Jones, 1969, p. 226.
11 Jones, 1969, p. 227.
12 Jones, 1975, p. 28.
13 Rhys Jones, ‘Mindjongork: Legacy of the firestick’. In DB Rose (ed.), Country in Flames: Proceedings of the 1994 Symposium on Biodiversity and Fire in North Australia (Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories / North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1995), p. 14.
14 Jones, 1995, p. 15. As Marcia Langton observed, ‘The disputes over garden plot boundaries played a significant role both in their status under colonial and post-Federation Australia and in their land tenure traditions which were recognised partially under the Torres Strait Islander Land Act 1993, and at common law with respect to Mer or Murray Island following the Mabo No 2 case decided by the High Court. It was this extensive court record of land disputes that provided a wealth of evidence supporting their claim to native title heard first by the Queensland Supreme Court.’ See Marcia Langton, An Aboriginal Ontology of Being and Place: The Performance of Aboriginal Property Relations in the Princess Charlotte Bay Area of Eastern Cape York Peninsula, Australia, PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2005, p. 147.
15 Silas Wolmby on the left, Morrison Wolmby on the right, children possibly Perry and Ursula Yunkaporta. The raised clod of clay was where Noel Peemuggina had checked for the presence of red ochre.
16 Petronella Vaarzon-Morel & Kasia Gabrys, ‘Fire on the horizon: Contemporary Aboriginal burning issues in the Tanami Desert, Central Australia’, GeoJournal 74, 2009, pp. 469–70.
17 Peter Latz & GF Griffin, ‘Changes in Aboriginal land management in relation to fire and to food plants in Central Australia’. In BS Hetzel & HJ Frith (eds), The Nutrition of Aborigines in Relation to the Ecosystem of Central Australia (CSIRO, 1978), p. 78.
18 Dean Yibarbuk, ‘Introductory essay: Notes on traditional use of fire on upper Cadell River’. In Marcia Langton, Burning Questions: Emerging Environmental Issues for Indigenous Peoples in Northern Australia (Northern Territory University, 1998), pp. 1–6.
19 Vaarzon-Morel & Gabrys.
20 Philip A Clarke, Aboriginal People and Their Plants (Rosenberg, 2007), pp. 60–71.
21 Nancy M Williams & Eugene S Hunn, Resource Managers: North American and Australian Hunter-Gatherers (Westview Press, 1982), p. 1.
22 Langton, 1998, p. 39.
23 Marcia Langton, ‘Earth, wind, fire, water: The social and spiritual construction of water in Aboriginal societies’. In B David, B Barker & IJ McNiven (eds), The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), p. 140.
24 Marcia Langton, ‘Botanists, Aborigines and native plants on the Queensland frontier’. In J-C Verstraete & D Hafner (eds), Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country (John Benjamins, 2016), p. 221.
25 Langton, 2005.
26 Norman B Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names (University of California Press, 1974), pp. 94, 95.
27 Phyllis Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman, Sacred and Profane (George Routledge & Sons, 1939), pp. 20, 24.
28 Quoted in Stephanie Anderson, Pelletier: The Forgotten Castaway of Cape York (Melbourne Books, 2009), p. 163.
29 Anderson, p. 317.
30 Anderson, p. 312.
31 Anderson, p. 272. On p. 273 Anderson provides a note by Athol Chase, citing Chase and Peter Sutton (‘Hunter-gatherers in a rich environment: Aboriginal coastal exploitation in Cape York Peninsula’, in A Keast (ed.), Ecological Biogeography of Australia, W Junk, 1981, pp. 1817–52), who describe a different management practice in relation to yams, namely removing the tuber but leaving the stem and vine in place to encourage a continuing supply.
32 Tindale, 1974, pp. 94–109, 126, 145.
33 Tindale, 1974, p. 104.
34 Cf. Frederick GG Rose, The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines (Angus & Robertson, 1987), p. 58.
35 Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Blackwell, 2005), pp. 16–17.
36 Robert Layton, Robert Foley & Elizabeth Williams, ‘The transition between hunting and gathering and specialized husbandry of resources’, Current Anthropology 32, 1991, p. 262.
37 Layton, Foley & Williams, p. 261.
38 Layton, Foley & Williams, p. 261.
39 Transhumance is the seasonal movement of livestock between lowlands and adjacent mountains.
40 Ian Keen, Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 97.
41 Ian Keen pers. comm., 6 July 2020. He details his reasons in Keen, ‘Foragers or farmers: Dark Emu and the debate over Aboriginal agriculture’, Anthropological Forum, 2021, DOI: 10.1080/00664677.2020.1861538.
42 See especially Keen, 2004, pp. 30–44.
43 WEH Stanner, After the Dreaming: The 1968 Boyer Lectures (ABC, 1969), p. 36.
44 Peter Sutton, ‘Australian anthropologists and political action 1925–1960’, Oceania 79, 2009, pp. 202–17.
45 Athol Chase, ‘Domestication and domiculture in northern Australia: A social perspective’. In DR Harris & GC Hillman (eds), Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation (Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 52.
46 Rev. Amos Brazier, ‘Report on Lake Condah Mission’, quoted in Aldo Massola, Aboriginal Mission Stations in Victoria (Hawthorn Press, 1970), p. 100.
47 Francis Xavier Gsell, ‘“The Bishop with 150 Wives”: Fifty Years as a Missionary (Angus & Robertson, 1955), p. 54.
48 Wilbur S Chaseling, Yulengor: Nomads of Arnhem Land (Epworth Press, 1957), p. 17.
49 IG (Ella) Shepherdson, Half a Century in Arnhem Land (One Tree Hill, SA: Ella & Harold Shepherdson, 1981), p. 91.
50 Berndt & Berndt, 1988, p. 108.
51 Berndt & Berndt, 1988, pp. 108–9.
52 Berndt & Berndt, 1988, p. 109.
53 Christopher Anderson pers. comm., 8 February 2020.
54 Ann E Wells, Milingimbi: Ten Years in the Crocodile Islands of Arnhem Land (Angus & Robertson, 1963), p. 41.
55 Lazarus Lamilami, Lamilami Speaks: The Cry Went Up: A Story of the People of Goulburn Islands, North Australia (Ure Smith, 1974), p. 93. There are in my memory also cases where people took up private farming after learning it on missions, in the cases of Coranderrk, Poonindie and Point McLeay, but I have been unable to locate written evidence in time for this book.
1 Tom Griffiths, ‘Reading Bruce Pascoe’, Inside Story, 26 November 2019, https://insidestory.org.au/reading-bruce-pascoe/ (accessed 20 January 2020).
2 Apart from pubic tassels, various adornments and belts, perhaps the most common body covering was fat, animal grease retrieved from game— often mixed with pigments as decoration. This functioned as protection against chill conditions and biting insects, and was also an enhancement of one’s appearance.
3 W Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (Harper & Brothers, 1937), p. 475.
4 Warner, p. 477.
5 Rupert Gerritsen, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (British Archaeological Reports, 2008), p. 71.
6 Ken Maddock notably wrote a chapter called ‘The defensibility of Aboriginal society’ in his The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of Their Society (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press, 1972, pp. 177–94), in which he compared the freedoms of the old society with the lack of it in modern states. The argument might have been extended to economics.
7 Layton, Foley and Williams wrote of ‘the usefulness of treating hunting and gathering, herding, and [plant] cultivation as alternative strategies which are, singly or in combination, appropriate to social or natural environments’ (Robert Layton, Robert Foley & Elizabeth Williams, ‘The transition between hunting and gathering and specialized husbandry of resources’, Current Anthropology 32, 1991, p. 255).
8 Heather Builth, Ancient Aboriginal Aquaculture Rediscovered (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014), p. 514.
9 Griffiths.
10 ‘Brewarrina Aboriginal fish traps: Creation story’ (n.d.), in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewarrina_Aboriginal_Fish_Traps#Creation_story (accessed 14 February 2020).
11 Roger Cribb et al., ‘Landscape as cultural artefact: Shell mounds and plants in Aurukun, Cape York Peninsula’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2, 1988, pp. 60–73.
12 R Lauriston Sharp, ‘Steel axes for stone-age Australians’. In TG Harding & BJ Wallace (eds), Cultures of the Pacific: Selected Readings (The Free Press, 1970), pp. 394–5.
13 Harry Allen, ‘The Bagundji of the Darling Basin: Cereal gatherers in an uncertain environment’, World Archaeology 5, 1974, p. 317.
14 Donald F Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Macmillan, 1949), p. 7.
15 Mike Smith, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 202, 210–11, 287.
16 Luise Hercus & Peter Clarke, ‘Nine Simpson Desert wells’, Archaeology in Oceania 21, 1986, p. 58.
17 Eric Rolls, Epic Rolls (unpublished manuscript, 2009), Chapter 7, p. 7. [Further details unknown. Citation after Pascoe, 2014, p. 169.]
18 Smith, p. 85.
19 Bruce Pascoe, Young Dark Emu: A Truer History (Magabala Books, 2019a), p. 16.
20 Pascoe, 2019a, p. 16.
21 Federation of Bakers, Factsheet no. 9: The History of Bread, Federation of Bakers Ltd, London, 2011, https://www.fob.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/FS-9-History-of-Bread.pdf (accessed 6 August 2020); Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Blackwell, 2005), p. 101.
22 Matthew Connellan, ‘“Clearly wrong”: Bruce Pascoe on what people get wrong about Australian Indigenous history’, NITV Radio, 5 July 2019, https://www.sbs.com.au/language/english/clearly-wrong-bruce-pascoe-on-whatpeople-get-wrong-about-australian-indigenous-history (accessed 7 July 2020).
1 Ian Keen, Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 97; Ian Keen, ‘Foragers or farmers: Dark Emu and the debate over Aboriginal agriculture’, Anthropological Forum, 2021, DOI: 10.1080/00664677.2020.1861538.
2 For example, Elizabeth Williams, Complex Hunter-Gatherers: A Late Holocene Example from Temperate Australia (British Archaeological Reports, 1988).
3 Eleanor Leacock & Richard Lee, Politics and History in Band Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
4 Lesley Head, Second Nature: The History and Implications of Australia as Aboriginal Landscape (Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 40.
5 Rhys Jones, ‘The Neolithic, Palaeolithic and the hunting gardeners: Man and land in the antipodes’. In RP Suggate & MM Creswell (eds), Quaternary Studies (Royal Society of New Zealand, 1975), p. 24.
6 Norman B Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names (University of California Press, 1974), p. 99.
7 DS Davidson & FD McCarthy, ‘The distribution of stone implements in Western Australia’, Anthropos 52, 1957, p. 440. Tindale’s 1974 grasslands map and the Davidson and McCarthy millstones map were combined to form a composite map in Mike Smith, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 190, Figure 6.9c; see the map on p. 77.
8 Harry Allen, ‘The Bagundji of the Darling Basin: Cereal gatherers in an uncertain environment’, World Archaeology 5, 1974, pp. 312–14.
9 Allen, pp. 316–18.
10 Roger Lawrence, Aboriginal Habitat and Economy (Department of Geography, ANU, 1968).
11 Norman B Tindale & HA Lindsay, Aboriginal Australians (Jacaranda Press, 1963), p. 121.
12 Jones, p. 23.
13 Ursula McConnel, ‘Native arts and industries on the Archer, Kendall and Holroyd rivers, Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland’, Records of the South Australian Museum 11, 1953, p. 7.
14 McConnel, p. 1.
15 See Peter Sutton, ‘Ursula McConnel’s tin trunk: A remarkable recovery’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia 134, 2010c, pp. 101–14.
16 Peter Sutton & Dermot Smyth, ‘Ethnobotanical data from Aurukun Shire, Queensland’ (mainframe computer printout, 1980); Peter Sutton, ‘Linguistic aspects of ethnobotanical research’, in B Rigsby & P Sutton (eds), Contributions to Australian Linguistics (Pacific Linguistics, 1980), pp. 303–14; Peter Sutton, Wik-Ngathan Dictionary (Caitlin Press, 1995); Athol Chase & Peter Sutton, ‘Hunter-gatherers in a rich environment: Aboriginal coastal exploitation in Cape York Peninsula’, in A Keast (ed.), Ecological Biogeography of Australia (The Hague: W Junk, 1981), pp. 1817–52.
17 Dioscorea transversa and D. bulbifera. Plant ecologist Dr Len Webb relayed Aurukun missionary William MacKenzie’s information on the subject to Alastair Campbell. MacKenzie wrote: ‘I made careful enquiries from the old folk but was told that only those two roots were replanted’; see Alastair H Campbell, ‘Elementary food production by the Australian Aborigines’, Mankind 6, 1965, p. 208.
18 Edward Palmer, ‘On plants used by the natives of north Queensland, Flinders and Mitchell Rivers, for food, medicine, &c., &c.’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 17, 1883, p. 93.
19 JH Maiden, The Useful Plants of Australia (including Tasmania) (Turner & Henderson, 1889).
20 Leonard J Webb, Guide to the Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Queensland (Commonwealth of Australia: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Bulletin No. 232. Melbourne: JJ Gourley, Government Printer, 1948).
21 Dulcie Levitt, Plants and People: Aboriginal Uses of Plants on Groote Eylandt (AIAS, 1981); Julie Waddy, Classification of Plants & Animals from a Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Point of View (ANU North Australia Research Unit, 1988).
22 Levitt, p. 137.
23 The Australia-wide record of Aboriginal people translocating or dispersing plants is reviewed in JL Silcock, ‘Aboriginal translocations: The intentional propagation and dispersal of plants in Aboriginal Australia’, Journal of Ethnobiology 38(3), 2018, pp. 390–405. Silcock found the ethnographic evidence useful but ‘sparse’ (p. 390). The ‘isolated historic reports of deliberate planting are difficult to verify and were ranked as having low reliability, as they are made within generalized works and no sources are provided’ (p. 395).
24 Mary Gilmore, Old Days, Old Ways: A Book of Recollections (Angus & Robertson, 1986), p. 138.
25 Lazarus Lamilami, Lamilami Speaks: The Cry Went Up: A Story of the People of Goulburn Islands, North Australia (Ure Smith, 1974), pp. 9–10.
26 Lamilami also recorded the myth of Naganmara, an ancestral being who named and created trees and grass (Lamilami, pp. 15–19).
27 WEH Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monograph No. 11, 1963), p. 88.
28 Jeff Hardwick, Wadeye Kardu Murntak Warra: Old People Before: Plant Food Collecting and Processing. Book 3 of Traditional Knowledge, Language and Skills of the Aboriginal People from the Wadeye Region, NT, Australia (The author, 2019).
29 WEH Stanner, ‘Caliban discovered’. In WEH Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973 (ANU Press, 1979 (1962)), p. 163.
30 David R Harris, ‘Subsistence strategies across Torres Strait’. In J Allen, J Golson & R Jones (eds), Sunda and Sahul: Prehistoric Studies in Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Australia (Academic Press, 1977), p. 437.
31 Harris, p. 434.
32 In Adnyamathanha iga, scientific name Capparis mitchellii.
33 Bob Ellis, ‘Iga: The tree that walked’, South Australian Geographical Journal 112, 2013, p. 11.
34 Ross Hynes & Athol Chase, ‘Plants, sites and domiculture: Aboriginal influence upon plant communities in Cape York Peninsula’, Archaeology in Oceania 17, 1982, pp. 38–50.
35 Sic: Syzygium, wild cherry.
36 Rhys Jones, ‘Ordering the landscape’. In I Donaldson & T Donaldson (eds), Seeing the First Australians (George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 204. In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kriol, olisem or olsem (from English ‘all the same’) usually means ‘resembling’, not ‘the same as’—for example, see Anna Shnukal, Broken: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Torres Strait (Pacific Linguistics, 1988), p. 174. ‘Gardeni’ or katini is the English word ‘garden’ pronounced in an Aboriginal sound system.
37 Rex Walmbeng, ‘Mythological affinities of shell mounds’. Appendix B in Roger Cribb et al., ‘Landscape as cultural artefact: Shell mounds and plants in Aurukun, Cape York Peninsula’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2, 1988, pp. 60–73 (72–3).
38 Hynes & Chase; Athol Chase, ‘Domestication and domiculture in northern Australia: A social perspective’, in DR Harris & GC Hillman (eds), Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation (Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 42–78.
39 Cliff Goddard & Arpad Kalotas (comps & eds), Punu: Yankunytjatjara Plant Use: Traditional Methods of Preparing Foods, Medicines, Utensils and Weapons from Native Plants (Angus & Robertson, 1985).
40 Peter Latz, Bushfires & Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia (IAD Press, 1995), p. 63.
41 FR Irvine, ‘Evidence of change in the vegetable diet of Australian Aborigines’. In AR Pilling & RA Waterman (eds), Diprotodon to Detribalization: Studies of Change among Australian Aborigines (Michigan State University Press, 1970), p. 279.
42 Rupert Gerritsen, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (British Archaeological Reports, 2008), pp. 39–41, 62.
43 Gerritsen, p. 41.
44 Campbell, p. 209.
45 Campbell, p. 209; see also Gilmore, pp. 186–8.
46 Gilmore, p. 134.
47 RG Kimber, ‘Resource use and management in Central Australia’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2, 1984, p. 16.
48 Kimber, p. 16.
49 Kimber, p. 17.
50 Gerritsen, p. 59.
51 Gerritsen, p. 63.
52 Warwick Dix & Mance E Lofgren, ‘Kurumi: Possible Aboriginal incipient agriculture associated with a stone arrangement’, Records of the Western Australian Museum 3, 1974, pp. 73–7.
53 Dix & Lofgren, p. 77.
54 Dix & Lofgren, pp. 74, 77.
55 Tindale does not identify the ‘two situations’ but they are likely to be the sole examples of damming provided in Campbell (pp. 206–7): Roper River and the Grampians.
56 In this paper (Norman B Tindale, ‘Adaptive significance of the Panara or grass seed culture of Australia’, in RVS Wright (ed.), Stone Tools as Cultural Markers, AIAS, 1977, pp. 345–7), Tindale referred to the dependence of the grain-zone peoples on ‘natural grain crops’ (p. 347; emphasis added).
57 Tindale, 1977, p. 345.
58 Alice Monckton Duncan-Kemp, Our Sandhill Country: Nature and Man in South-western Queensland (Angus & Robertson, 1934), p. 30.
59 Duncan-Kemp, pp. 146–7.
60 Duncan-Kemp, pp. 188–9.
61 DE Yen, ‘The domestication of environment’. In Harris & Hillman (eds), p. 59.
62 Yen, p. 62.
63 Campbell, p. 208.
64 Campbell, p. 207.
65 Campbell, p. 208.
66 Barry Alpher pers. comm., 15 January 2020.
1 William Arthur & Frances Morphy (eds), Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia: Culture and Society through Space and Time (Macquarie Library, 2005), p. 62. The footwear distribution may be added to from my own work with Wik people: sandals were used in very hot seasonal conditions in the area on the coast between the Archer and Edward rivers on western CYP. They were called tha’-morrok (Wik-Ngathan) and tha’-murruk (Wik-Mungkan).
2 Edmund Gregory, Sketch of the Residence of James Morrill among the Aboriginals of Northern Queensland for Seventeen Years (‘Courier’ General Printing Office, 1866), http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/114510 (accessed 22 December 2019).
3 Thomas L Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales (T & W Boone, 1839), vol. 1, p. 249.
4 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia (George Robertson, 1881), p. 8.
5 John Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley: Thirty-two Years a Wanderer Amongst the Aborigines of the then Unexplored Country around Port Phillip, now the Province of Victoria (William Heinemann, 1967), pp. 34, 37.
6 Buckley said of the Victorian people among whom he lived: ‘In the winter months they are often very much distressed for fire, and suffer greatly from hunger and cold; their only covering being skin rugs sown [sic] together with sinews …’ (Morgan, p. 68). See also Morgan, pp. 55–6.
7 Stephanie Anderson, Pelletier: The Forgotten Castaway of Cape York (Melbourne Books, 2009), p. 151.
8 Anderson, p. 219.
9 DS Davidson, ‘Footwear of the Australian Aborigines: Environmental vs cultural determination’, Southwest Journal of Anthropology 3, 1947, pp. 114–23. Davidson’s map of footwear (p. 115) indicates a larger area of use than that implied in the map presented here on p. 3 of the picture section.
10 Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt, The World of the First Australians: An Introduction to the Traditional Life of the Australian Aborigines, 1st edn (Ure Smith, 1964), pp. 103–4.
11 Anthropologist Jane Goodale, who worked intensively with Tiwi people, wrote: ‘Tiwi males wore no clothing, while females usually held a sheet of paperbark covering themselves in front from waist to knees but leaving their backside bare’ (Jane C Goodale, Tiwi Wives: A Study of the Women of Melville Island, North Australia, University of Washington Press, 1971, p. 233). Spencer, who photographed the image on p. 96, has a description that is closer to Goodale’s than to what he photographed. He referred to Tiwi women wearing ‘curious bark aprons’ (Baldwin Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia, Macmillan, 1914, p. 401). If they had to be held up by hand, they could not have been apparel used while working with the hands.
12 John Morton (pers. comm., 18 January 20) points out that skin is itself a kind of clothing. It is often decorated with scarification in Aboriginal traditions, modifications designed to be seen and valued.
13 RMW Dixon, ‘Preface’. In JRB Love, The Grammatical Structure of the Worora Language of North-western Australia (Lincom Europa, 2000), p. 1.
14 JRB Love, 2000, p. 5.
15 JRB Love (comp. & ed. by David M Welch), Kimberley People: Stone Age Bushmen of Today (David M Welch, 2009), p. 67; and see photos on pp. 155–7, 220, 228, 236 and 244.
16 For example, Howitt’s photo of a Victorian man wearing a possum skin rug (AW Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-east Australia, Macmillan, 1904, p. 40); Berndt and Berndt’s cloaked man (Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt with John Stanton, A World that Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, Melbourne University Press at The Miegunyah Press, 1993, p. 62; actually a drawing); Norman B Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names (University of California Press, 1974): black-and-white photo plates 5–32, taken 1935); Herbert Basedow (comp. & ed. David M Welch), Notes on Some Native Tribes of Central Australia (David M Welch, 2008): plates 3–11, 13–15, 18, 43, 45–7, taken 1903).
17 David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (T Cadell Jun. & W Davies, 1798), p. 551.
18 Collins, p. 562.
19 Ursula McConnel, ‘Native arts and industries on the Archer, Kendall and Holroyd rivers, Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland’, Records of the South Australian Museum 11, 1953, p. 15.
20 McConnel, p. 29, Plate XIq.
21 McConnel, pp. 15–18.
1 Simone Barlow & Ashlee Horyniak, Dark Emu in the Classroom: Teacher Resources for High School Geography (Magabala Books, 2019), p. 16.
2 ‘Short-finned eel: Life history’ (n.d.), in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-finned_eel#Life_history (accessed 20 July 2020).
3 Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, Aquaculture, DAWE website, n.d., https://www.agriculture.gov.au/fisheries/aquaculture (accessed 12 January 2021).
4 UNESCO, Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, UNESCO website, n.d., https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577/ (accessed 5 March 2020).
5 Donald F Thomson, ‘A new type of fish trap from Arnhem Land, Northern Territory of Australia’, Man 38, 1938, p. 195.
6 Thomson, 1938, p. 193.
7 Thomson, 1938, p. 194; Donald F Thomson (comp. Nicolas Peterson), Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land (Currey O’Neil, 1983), p. 94.
8 Judith Wiseman, Thomson Time: Arnhem Land in the 1930s: A Photographic Essay (Museum of Victoria, 1996), p. 43.
9 Ian Keen, Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 101.
10 Paul Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia (University of Queensland Press, 2007), p. 179.
11 Donald F Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Macmillan, 1949), p. 62.
12 Geoffrey Blainey, Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia (Macmillan, 1983), pp. 140–1.
13 Paul Memmott & Shaneen Fantin, ‘The study of indigenous ethno-architecture in Australia’. In Bruce Rigsby & Nicolas Peterson (eds), Donald Thomson, the Man and Scholar (Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2005), p. 206.
14 Bruce Pascoe, Young Dark Emu: A Truer History (Magabala Books, 2019a), p. 43.
15 For example, see the maps in DS Davidson, ‘The chronology of Australian watercraft’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 44, 1935, pp. 21, 28, 136; Donald F Thomson, ‘The fishermen and dugong hunters of Princess Charlotte Bay’, Walkabout 22(11), 1956, p. 83; William Arthur & Frances Morphy (eds), Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia: Culture and Society through Space and Time (Macquarie Library, 2005), p. 55 (here the map on p. 3 of the picture section); and Rupert Gerritsen, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (British Archaeological Reports, 2008), p. 10.
1 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia (George Robertson, 1881), pp. 10–11.
2 The biggest encampment Thomas described was of 150 huts. If the whole or most of a ‘tribe’ was present, the encampment was subdivided into ‘small hamlets’ of about six huts each—see William Thomas, ‘Brief account of the Aborigines of Australia Felix’, in TF Bride (ed.), Letters from Victorian Pioneers: Being a Series of Papers on the Early Occupation of the Colony, the Aborigines, etc. (Trustees of the Public Library, 1898), p. 93.
3 Thomas, pp. 65, 66.
4 Thomas, p. 66.
5 Pardoe and Hutton refer to middle Murray encampments as ‘villages’, even though they were only occupied for an estimated five months a year. See Colin Pardoe & Dan Hutton, ‘Aboriginal heritage as ecological proxy in south-eastern Australia: A Barapa wetland case study’, preprint, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 2020, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338688722_Aboriginal_heritage_as_ecological_proxy_in_southeastern_Australia_A_Barapa_wetland_case_study (accessed 8 July 2020).
6 Peter Beveridge, The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina (ML Hutchinson, 1889), p. 102. ‘Rudest’ here means ‘simplest’.
7 Paul Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia (University of Queensland Press, 2007), pp. 199–200.
8 Sue O’Connor, ‘The stone house structures of High Cliffy Island, north-west Kimberley, WA’, Australian Archaeology 25, 1987, p. 34.
9 O’Connor, 1987, p. 33.
10 Sue O’Connor, ‘30,000 years of Aboriginal occupation: Kimberley, north-west Australia’, Terra Australis 14 (ANH Publications and Centre for Archaeological Research, Australian National University, 1999), p. 113.
11 O’Connor, 1987, p. 37.
12 O’Connor, 1999, pp. 95–6.
13 Norman B Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names (University of California Press, 1974), pp. 147, 242.
14 Language group intermarriage varied widely, but as a rule of thumb, the smaller the group, the greater the degree to which its members married members of neighbouring linguistic country groups. For example, see Peter Sutton, ‘Comment on Denham’s Beyond Fictions of Closure in Australian Aboriginal Kinship’, Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory 5(5), 2013a, pp. 1–5, http://mathematicalanthropology.org/Pdf/Sutton_MACT0513.pdf; Peter Sutton, ‘Cross-comment on Denham’s Beyond Fictions of Closure in Australian Aboriginal Kinship’, Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory 5(6), 2013b, pp. 1–6, http://mathematicalanthropology.org/Pdf/Sutton2_MACT0513.pdf (Sutton 2013a and 2013b accessed on 20 January 2021); Peter Sutton, ‘Small language survival and large language expansion on a hunter-gatherer continent’, in Tom Güldemann, Patrick McConvell & Richard A Rhodes (eds), The Language of Hunter-Gatherers (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 356–91.
15 R Lauriston Sharp, The Social Anthropology of a Totemic System in North Queensland, Australia, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1937, pp. 13–27.
16 From my own fieldwork with Wangkangurru claimants in two Simpson Desert land claims in the 1980s–1990s.
17 Rhys Jones, ‘Tasmanian tribes’. Appendix in Tindale, p. 333.
18 John Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley: Thirty-two Years a Wanderer Amongst the Aborigines of the then Unexplored Country around Port Phillip, now the Province of Victoria (William Heinemann, 1967).
19 Morgan, p. 35. Yawangcontes means ‘native hut lake’.
20 Page references are from Morgan.
21 Peter Manifold in A Kenyon, ‘Stone structures of the Australian Aboriginal’, Victorian Naturalist 47(5), 1930, p. 71.
22 Dawson, p. 11.
23 Kenyon, p. 71.
24 Kenyon, p. 72.
25 Thomas Worsnop, The Prehistoric Arts, Manufactures, Works, Weapons, etc., of the Aborigines of Australia (CE Bristow, Government Printer, 1897), p. 77. Worsnop was town clerk of Adelaide from 1886 to 1898.
26 Worsnop, p. 77.
27 Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, vol. 2 (G & W Nicol, 1814), pp. 172–3. These were stonelines built by Macassan trepangers to support the cauldrons used to boil sea slugs—see CC Macknight, The Voyage to Marege’: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1976), pp. 51–2.
28 Memmott, pp. 182–207.
29 Memmott, p. 185.
30 R Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, with Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of Other Parts of Australia and Tasmania (John Ferres, Government Printer, 1878), pp. 136–7. This or perhaps another version from the same source, Assistant Protector of Aborigines in Victoria William Thomas, appears to be the source of Pascoe’s unsourced passages on the ‘important philosopher’ ‘Kuller Kullup’ on pp. 91, 129–30; cf. Thomas, p. 98.
31 The term is used in local tourist signage and literature on the Budj Bim (Mount Eccles) area, for example, Gib Wettenhall with the Gunditjmara People, The People of Budj Bim: Engineers of Aquaculture, Builders of Stone House Settlements and Warriors Defending Country (em Press Publishing, 2010).
32 A sign near this reconstruction refers to ‘stone houses’ and has a drawing of a house with stone walls from floor to roof. It bears no resemblance to the reconstruction and is an imagined structure only.
33 Memmott, p. 185.
34 Memmott, p. 185.
35 Worsnop, p. 73.
36 Phillip Parker King, Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia Performed between the Years 1818 and 1822, vol. 1 (John Murray, 1827), pp. 431–2.
37 Paul Memmott pers. comm., 26 May 2020.
38 Page references in this list refer to Memmott, 2007.
39 Specialists in the archaeology of the Sydney area (Val Attenbrow, pers. comm., 16 June 2020; Paul Irish, pers. comm., 16 July 2020) have not found any evidence of an ongoing presence of Aboriginal people in the northern beaches in the form of the Warringah sandstone house foundations described in Memmott (p. 186). No evidence relating to pre-conquest stone house foundations in the Sydney region appears in Val Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past: Investigating the Archaeological and Historical Records, 2nd edn (UNSW Press, 2010); Paul Irish, ‘Changing perspectives in Australian archaeology, Part III: Hidden in plain view: The Sydney Aboriginal Historical Places Project’, Technical Reports of the Australian Museum, Online 23(3), 2011, pp. 31–44; Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney (NewSouth Publishing, 2017); or Melinda Hinkson, Aboriginal Sydney: A Guide to Important Places of the Past and Present (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2001).
40 Paul Memmott pers. comm., 26 May 2020.
41 Worsnop, p. 80.
42 Worsnop, p. 107.
43 For example, Fred Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), maps 3a to 3h ‘Maantja’s travels’; Robert Layton, Uluru: An Aboriginal History of Ayers Rock (AIAS, 1986), pp. 32–3.
44 Athol Chase & Peter Sutton, ‘Hunter-gatherers in a rich environment: Aboriginal coastal exploitation in Cape York Peninsula’, in A Keast (ed.), Ecological Biogeography of Australia (W Junk, 1981), pp. 1817–52.
45 In the case of north-east Arnhem Land, the seasons were referred to in Donald F Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Macmillan, 1949), p. 16 as the ‘six or more phases or seasons which they name from the winds, the weather conditions, or from the food supplies which characterise them’. They were laid out in detail for the Daly River area in WEH Stanner, ‘The Daly River tribes: A report on field work in north Australia’, Part 1, Oceania 3, 1933, p. 385; for Groote Eylandt in Julie Waddy, Classification of Plants & Animals from a Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Point of View (ANU North Australia Research Unit, 1988), vol. 1, p. 53; for various regions of Cape York Peninsula in Donald F Thomson, ‘The seasonal factor in human culture illustrated from the life of a contemporary nomadic group’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 5, 1939, pp. 214–15, and in Chase & Sutton, pp. 1831, 1835, 1838; for Wik-Mungkan in Cape York by Philip Clarke in Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape (Allen & Unwin, 2003), p. 172; for south-east Cape York in Christopher Anderson, ‘Regional variation’, in Susan Bambrick (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 66; for the Borroloola region (NT) in Richard Baker, ‘Traditional Aboriginal land use in the Borroloola region’, in Nancy M Williams & Graham Barnes (eds), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Wisdom for Sustainable Development (Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, 1993), p. 129; for north-east Arnhem Land in Stephen Davis, Man of All Seasons (Angus & Robertson, 1989); for western Arnhem Land in Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt, Man, Land and Myth in North Australia: The Gunwinggu People (Ure Smith, 1970), p. 31, and in Bill Neidjie, Stephen Davis & Allan Fox, Kakadu Man … Bill Neidjie (Mybrood, 1985), pp. 18–23, and in Diane Lucas & Ken Searle, Walking with the Seasons in Kakadu (Allen & Unwin, 2005); and for different parts of the Kimberley region in Phyllis Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman, Sacred and Profane (George Routledge & Sons, 1939), p. 11, and in Hermann Nekes & Ernest A Worms, Australian Languages (Micro-Bibliotheca Anthropos, 10, Anthropos Institut, 1953/2006), pp. 78–81.
46 Bureau of Meteorology, Australian Government, Indigenous Weather Knowledge: Yawuru Calendar, 2016, BOM website, http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/yawuru.shtml (accessed 20 December 2019).
47 Memmott, pp. 156–81.
48 W Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (Harper & Brothers, 1937), pp. 471–5.
49 Pascoe, 2014, pp. 88–9.
50 ‘Eastern Trans-Fly languages’ (n.d.), in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Trans-Fly_languages (accessed 20 December 2019); Jeremy Beckett, Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 114.
51 Memmott, p. 19.
52 Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, 2nd edn (Magabala Books, 2018), p. 22.
53 Bruce Pascoe, Young Dark Emu: A Truer History (Magabala Books, 2019a), pp. 45–6.
54 WEH Stanner, ‘Caliban discovered’. In WEH Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973 (ANU Press, 1979 (1962)), p. 162.
55 Walter E Roth, ‘North Queensland Ethnography Bulletin no. 16: Huts and shelters’, Records of the Australian Museum 8(1), 1910, Plate XII, Figure 2.
56 Roth, p. 59.
57 James Davis, ‘James Davis 1861: Evidence of Davis to the Select Committee into the Native Police and the Condition of the Aborigines generally’, Queensland Ethnohistorical Transcripts 1(1), 1982, p. 12.
58 RM Williams, Song in the Desert (Angus & Robertson, 1998).
59 From Nicolas Peterson with Jeremy Long, Australian Territorial Organization: A Band Perspective (Oceania Monographs, 1986), p. 40.
60 Peterson & Long, pp. 74–141.
61 Peterson & Long, p. 135.
62 Page numbers in Table 7 refer to Morgan, 1967.
63 For example, Peterson & Long, p. 30. Frederick Rose, in his book on the ‘traditional mode of production’ of the Old People (Frederick GG Rose, The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines, Angus & Robertson, 1987, pp. 169ff), used the term ‘foraging group’ for what we generally refer to here as ‘camps’ or ‘bands’.
64 Harry Lourandos, ‘Aboriginal spatial organization and population: South western Victoria reconsidered’, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 12, 1977, pp. 202–25.
65 Peter Sutton, Native Title in Australia: An Ethnographic Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 70.
66 Lourandos, p. 211.
67 Rhys Jones, ‘The demography of hunters and farmers in Tasmania’. In DJ Mulvaney & J Golson (eds), Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia (ANU Press, 1971), pp. 277–8.
68 Pascoe, 2019a, p. 51.
69 Pascoe, 2019a, p. 49.
70 For a similar house photographed at Mer in 1928 by Charles Yonge, see ‘Old type of house, Meer Island, Queensland, ca. 1928’, National Library of Australia Catalogue, https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/4189451 (accessed 13 July 2020).
71 Simone Barlow & Ashlee Horyniak, Dark Emu in the Classroom: Teacher Resources for High School Geography (Magabala Books, 2019), p. 27.
72 Barlow & Horyniak, p. 15.
1 John Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley: Thirty-two Years a Wanderer Amongst the Aborigines of the then Unexplored Country around Port Phillip, now the Province of Victoria (William Heinemann, 1967).
2 Page numbers here refer to Norman B Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names (University of California Press, 1974).
3 Tindale’s ‘horde’ was usually a confusion of a land-owning descent group with a camp, but here he probably means the estate or country of a descent-based land-owning group, not a camp of mixed relatives.
4 Edmund Gregory, Sketch of the Residence of James Morrill among the Aboriginals of Northern Queensland for Seventeen Years (‘Courier’ General Printing Office, 1866), http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/114510, p. 18.
5 Paul Memmott & Robyn Horsman, A Changing Culture: The Lardil Aborigines of Mornington Island (Social Science Press, 1991), p. 68.
6 Memmott & Horsman, p. 121.
7 Petronella Vaarzon-Morel (ed.), Warlpiri Women’s Voices (Warlpiri Karnta Karntakurlangu Yimi): Our Lives, Our History (IAD Press, 1995).
8 RMW Dixon (comp. & ed.), Words of Our Country: Stories, Place Names and Vocabulary in Yidiny, the Aboriginal Language of the Cairns-Yarrabah Region (University of Queensland Press, 1991), pp. 56–8.
9 Sylvia Hallam, Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in South-western Australia (AIAS, 1979), p. 147; cf. Pascoe, 2014, pp. 21–2.
10 Baldwin Spencer, ‘Aborigines’. In AW Jose & HJ Carter (eds), The Australian Encyclopaedia, Vol. 1: A to LYS (Angus & Robertson, 1927), p. 16.
11 Charles Barrett, Blackfellows of Australia (Lawrence Kay for Pictorial News-papers, a Sun book, c1936), p. 16.
12 JW Bleakley, The Aborigines of Australia: Their History, Their Habits, Their Assimilation (Jacaranda Press, 1961), p. 12.
13 Charles P Mountford, The Aborigines and Their Country (Rigby, 1969), p. 71.
14 Earlier he was a blacksmith’s striker and tram conductor (Max Lamshed, ‘Monty’: The Biography of CP Mountford, Rigby, 1972, pp. 17–21, 41). Norman Tindale was also a self-taught ethnographer, albeit one with a Bachelor of Science degree, but he was far better at it and his interests were vastly wider than Mountford’s. Unlike Mountford, Tindale took a special interest in Aboriginal social organisation, languages, territories, economy and food technology, including seed grinding, as I explore later in this chapter.
15 Mountford, p. 7.
16 Charles Chewings, Back in the Stone Age: The Natives of Central Australia (Angus & Robertson, 1936), p. viii.
17 AW Reed, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Life (AH & AW Reed, 1969), p. 5.
18 Reed, p. 6.
19 ‘Alexander Wyclif Reed’, (n.d.), in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Wyclif_Reed (accessed 1 January 2020).
20 Reed, p. 70.
21 Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt, The World of the First Australians: An Introduction to the Traditional Life of the Australian Aborigines, 1st edn (Ure Smith, 1964), and The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional Life, Past and Present, 4th rev. edn with additions (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988).
22 Berndt & Berndt, 1964, p. 9.
23 Berndt & Berndt, 1964, p. 24.
24 Berndt & Berndt, 1964, p. 92.
25 Berndt & Berndt, 1964, p. 93.
26 Berndt & Berndt, 1964, p. 93.
27 Berndt & Berndt, 1964, p. 95.
28 Norman B Tindale, ‘Ecology of primitive aboriginal man in Australia’. In A Keast, RL Crocker & CS Christian (eds), Biogeography and Ecology in Australia (Junk, 1959), pp. 37–51.
29 Berndt & Berndt, 1964, p. 99.
30 Catherine H Berndt & Ronald M Berndt, Aborigines in Australian Society (Pitman, 1985), pp. 14–15.
31 Berndt & Berndt, 1985, p. 29.
32 There is no fixed and precise meaning for ‘semi-nomadic’ or ‘semi-sedentary’, and the two would be hard to distinguish from each other. Basically the intent is to label a pattern whereby staying in one place for weeks or months alternates with greater mobility and shorter overnight stays at different locations.
33 AP Elkin, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them (Angus & Robertson, 1938), p. 15.
34 For example, AP Elkin, The Australian Aborigines (Angus & Robertson, 1981).
35 Phyllis Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman, Sacred and Profane (George Routledge & Sons, 1939), p. 10.
36 Ursula H McConnel, ‘The Wik-Munkan tribe of Cape York Peninsula, Part 1’, Oceania 1, 1930a, pp. 100–4.
37 WEH Stanner, ‘Caliban discovered’. In WEH Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973 (ANU Press, 1979 (1962)), p. 161.
38 David Nash pers. comm., 14 January 2020; The Australian Encyclopaedia in Ten Volumes: Volume 1: Abbott to Birch (Grolier Society, 1962).
39 Peter Sutton (ed.), Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia (Asia Society Galleries & George Braziller; Viking/Penguin, 1988).
40 See J Korff, Alcheringa, Creative Spirits website, https://www.creativespirits.info/resources/movies/alcheringa (accessed 22 January 2020).
41 Norman B Tindale & HA Lindsay, Aboriginal Australians (Jacaranda Press, 1963), p. 5.
42 Tindale & Lindsay, pp. 58–9.
43 Donald F Thomson, ‘The Aborigines of Australia’. In Australian Junior Encyclopaedia, Vol. 1 (2nd edn, Australian Education Foundation, 1956a), pp. 70–97.
44 Thomson, 1956a, p. 94.
45 Donald F Thomson, ‘The fishermen and dugong hunters of Princess Charlotte Bay’, Walkabout 22(11), 1956b, p. 33.
46 R Lauriston Sharp, ‘People without politics’. In Verne F Ray (ed.), Systems of Political Control and Bureaucracy in Human Societies (University of Washington Press, 1959), p. 3.
47 R Lauriston Sharp, The Social Anthropology of a Totemic System in North Queensland, Australia, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1937, pp. 318–19.
48 Sharp, 1937, pp. 320–1.
49 The later revised and expanded edition is John Mulvaney & Johan Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia (Allen & Unwin, 1999).
50 As described in Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt with John Stanton, A World that Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia (Melbourne University Press at The Miegunyah Press, 1993), p. 17.
51 DJ Mulvaney, The Prehistory of Australia (Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 67. Much of this passage remained intact in the revised edition thirty years later (Mulvaney & Kamminga, p. 275). Pardoe and Hutton estimate that people returned annually to the Pollack Swamp area, middle Murray River, for ‘perhaps five months each year’ (Colin Pardoe & Dan Hutton, ‘Aboriginal heritage as ecological proxy in south-eastern Australia: A Barapa wetland case study’, preprint, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 2020, p. 12; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338688722_Aboriginal_heritage_as_ecological_proxy_in_south-eastern_Australia_A_Barapa_wetland_case_study, accessed 8 July 2020).
52 Aldo Massola, Aboriginal Mission Stations in Victoria (Hawthorn Press, 1970), p. 94.
53 Peter Latz & GF Griffin, ‘Changes in Aboriginal land management in relation to fire and to food plants in Central Australia’, in BS Hetzel & HJ Frith (eds), The Nutrition of Aborigines in Relation to the Ecosystem of Central Australia (CSIRO, 1978), p. 77.
54 Robert Tonkinson, The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1991), p. 40.
55 WH Edwards, An Introduction to Aboriginal Societies (Social Science Press, 1988), p. 43.
56 Catherine H Berndt & Ronald M Berndt, Pioneers and Settlers: The Aboriginal Australians (Pitman, 1978), p. 14.
57 Colin Bourke, Eleanor Bourke & Bill Edwards (eds), Aboriginal Australia: An Introductory Reader in Aboriginal Studies (University of Queensland Press, 1994), pp. 179–80. This book also had sections on Lake Condah, the Brewarrina fish traps, firestick farming and land degradation by stock, four topics revisited by Pascoe; see Olga Gostin & Alwin Chong, ‘Living wisdom: Aborigines and the environment’, pp. 134–6; Colin Bourke, ‘Economics: Independence or welfare’, pp. 180–1.
58 Donald F Thomson, ‘The seasonal factor in human culture illustrated from the life of a contemporary nomadic group’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 5, 1939, p. 209.
59 Donald F Thomson, Kinship and Behaviour in North Queensland: A Preliminary Account of Kinship and Social Organisation on Cape York Peninsula (AIAS, 1972), p. 1.
60 Judith Wiseman, Thomson Time: Arnhem Land in the 1930s: A Photographic Essay (Museum of Victoria, 1996), p. x.
61 Donald F Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Macmillan, 1949), p. 8.
62 Thomson, 1949, p. 16.
63 Marcia Langton, ‘Prologue’. In Rachel Perkins & Marcia Langton (eds), First Australians: An Illustrated History (Melbourne University Press at The Miegunyah Press, 2008), p. xxiv.
64 Langton, p. xxiv.
65 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Robert Manne, the apology, and genocide’, The Monthly 94, 2008, p. 31.
66 Marji Hill & Alex Barlow, Black Australia: An Annotated Bibliography and Teacher’s Guide to Resources on Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (AIAS, 1978).
67 David Horton (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society and Culture, 2 vols (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994). That work and Sylvia Kleinert & Margo Neale (eds), The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000), which is very comprehensive and contains over 400 images, have long been major standard reference volumes.
68 Horton (ed.), p. xxi.
69 Horton (ed.), pp. 374–86.
70 Cribb in Horton (ed.), pp. 382–3.
71 Ian Bryson provides a history of the unit in his Bringing to Light: A History of Ethnographic Filmmaking at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2002).
72 Scott Cane, First Footprints: The Epic Story of the First Australians (Allen & Unwin, 2013).
73 Ronald M Berndt, ‘The Walmadjeri and Gugadja’. In MG Bicchieri (ed.), Hunters and Gatherers Today: A Socioeconomic Study of Eleven Such Cultures in the Twentieth Century (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972), p. 183.
74 Fred Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), p. 77.
75 Lamshed (in Max Lamshed, ‘Native’s odyssey: Remarkable record of year’s travel: 400 places named’, The Advertiser (Adelaide), 26 August 1932, p. 19) gives the figure of ‘400 places named’ but it seems to have actually been 332 (Paul Monaghan, Laying Down the Country: Norman B Tindale and the Linguistic Construction of the North-west of South Australia, PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 2003, p. 58). Identification of youth from South Australian Museum Anthropology Archives AA346 Mount Liebig data.
76 Lamshed.
77 Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2011), p. 300.
78 Diane E Barwick, ‘Changes in the Aboriginal population of Victoria, 1863– 1966’. In DJ Mulvaney & J Golson (eds), Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia (ANU Press, 1971), p. 288.
79 Harry Lourandos, ‘Aboriginal spatial organization and population: South western Victoria reconsidered’, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 12, 1977, pp. 218–19; see also Chapter 13 of this book.
80 Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime: The Story of Prehistoric Australia and Its People (JB Publishing, 2006), p. 198.
81 William Arthur & Frances Morphy (eds), Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia: Culture and Society through Space and Time (Macquarie Library, 2005), p. 69.
82 Flood, p. 299. Not all scholars are averse to using the term ‘village’ for large encampments. Peterson and Long used the term once or twice (Nicolas Peterson with Jeremy Long, Australian Territorial Organization: A Band Perspective, Oceania Monographs, 1986, p. 31). See also Pardoe & Hutton.
83 Old-fashioned now, in earlier English ‘fancy’ meant ‘preference’ (as well as imagination), as in Aboriginal English ‘fancy-man’ (bandjiman, often shortened to bandji), meaning ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’ or cross-cousin. So Buckley here is probably not referring to a fantasy but a choice.
84 Buckley in Morgan, p. 58.
1 Frederick GG Rose, The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines (Angus & Robertson, 1987).
2 Thomas L Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales (T & W Boone, 1839), vol. 1, pp. 237–8.
3 Mitchell, 1839, vol. 2, p. 194.
4 Mitchell, 1839, vol. 2, p. 194.
5 Alan EJ Andrews (ed.), Stapylton: With Major Mitchell’s Australia Felix Expedition, 1836, Largely from the Journal of Granville William Chetwynd Stapylton (Blubber Head Press, 1986), p. 146.
6 George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-west and Western Australia During the Years 1837, 38 and 39 (T & W Boone, 1841), vol, 2, pp. 2, 11, 12, 19.
7 Rupert Gerritsen, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (British Archaeological Reports, 2008), p. 33.
8 Grey, vol. 2, p. 19.
9 Common name yam daisy, although it is not a yam but a tuber: Microseris lanceolata.
10 For example, Lesley Head, Second Nature: The History and Implications of Australia as Aboriginal Landscape (Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp. 41, 59; Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, 2nd edn (Magabala Books, 2018), pp. 18–23; Tim Denham, ‘Traditional forms of plant exploitation in Australia and New Guinea: The search for common ground’, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17, 2008, p. 246; Gerritsen, pp. 33–5, 112; Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2011), pp. 289–90; Peter White, ‘Revisiting the “Neolithic problem” in Australia’, Records of the Western Australian Museum 79, 2011, p. 88. The yam daisy example is also used in Simone Barlow & Ashlee Horyniak, Dark Emu in the Classroom: Teacher Resources for High School Geography (Magabala Books, 2019), pp. 33–4, minus Grey on the warran.
11 Denham, p. 246; see also Harriet V Hunt, Hannah M Moots & Peter J Matthews, ‘Genetic data confirms field evidence for natural breeding in a wild taro population (Colocasia esculenta) in northern Queensland, Australia’, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 60, 2013.
12 John Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island (John Stockdale, 1793), p. 150.
13 Batey’s birth date from National Library of Australia, ‘Isaac Batey: Reminiscences of settlement of Melbourne and the Sunbury district (1840–70)’, Trove, https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/227765754?q&versionId=249938056 (accessed 9 January 2020).
14 Thomas L Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1848), p. 274.
15 Mitchell, 1848, p. 65. This is a reference to the banishment of Eve and Adam from the Garden of Eden after they fell from grace and committed original sin. Among their punishments were that Adam was condemned to henceforth engage in agriculture (presumably Adam and Eve were initially hunter-gatherers): ‘Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken’ (Genesis 3:23). Peter Hiscock, in ‘Creators or destroyers? The burning questions of human impact in ancient Aboriginal Australia’, Humanities Australia 5, 2014, links this fall-from-grace mythology to the work of Gammage.
16 There is a large literature on Aboriginal sharing: a good starting point is Nicolas Peterson, ‘Demand sharing: Reciprocity and the pressure for generosity among foragers’, American Anthropologist 95, 1993, pp. 860–74. On ‘the sustaining ideals of Aboriginal societies’ see TGH Strehlow, The Sustaining Ideals of Aboriginal Societies (Aborigines Advancement League Inc. of South Australia, 1956). Strehlow summarised his defence of Aboriginal society in this way: ‘… we may say that among the strongest ideals which sustained the aboriginal Australian societies were the principles of co-operation, not subordination; of differentiation without inequality; of tolerance for the customs of other peoples in their own country; and of respect for the hunting grounds of other tribes’ (p. 11). The technological ‘progress’ that had created the threat of nuclear annihilation was part of the shadow of concern that lay over Strehlow at that time.
17 Geoffrey Bagshaw pers. comm., 19 January 2020.
18 Peter Sutton, Wik: Aboriginal Society, Territory and Language at Cape Keerweer, Cape York Peninsula, Australia, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1978, pp. 70–2.
19 Mitchell, 1839, vol. 2, p. 65.
20 John McKinlay, McKinlay’s Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia (Burke Relief Expedition) (FF Bailliere, 1861), p. 50.
21 McKinlay’s location provided by Tom Gara pers. comm., 20 February 2020.
22 Robert Etheridge (Jnr), ‘On an Aboriginal implement, believed to be undescribed, and supposed to be a hoe’, Journal of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 9, 1894, pp. 109–12.
23 Etheridge (Jnr), pp. 111–12.
24 Etheridge (Jnr), p. 110.
25 Augustus Charles Gregory, ‘Appendix II: Memoranda on the Aborigines of Australia’. In H Ling Roth, ‘On the origin of agriculture’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 16, 1887, p. 131.
26 Gregory, p. 131. Pascoe refers to Augustus Gregory twice but does not use this source. Gammage (p. 298) does cite this source, but only to put it into the category of ‘wrong’ statements. He thus claims to know more than Gregory about what people were doing on the west coast of Western Australia prior to 1882, the date when Gregory was interviewed for the 1887 paper by Ling Roth.
27 Charles Sturt, Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia (T & W Boone, 1849), vol. 1, p. 387.
28 See Leonn D Satterthwait, ‘Aboriginal Australian net hunting’, Mankind 16, 1986, pp. 31–48.
29 Peter Beveridge, The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina (ML Hutchinson, 1889), p. 10.
1 Robert Etheridge (Jnr), ‘On an Aboriginal implement believed to be undescribed, and supposed to be a hoe’, Journal of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 9, 1894, pp. 109–12.
2 Walter Harper, ‘A description of certain objects of unknown significance, formerly used by some New South Wales tribes’, Proceedings of the Linnean Society 23, 1898, pp. 420–36; Robert Etheridge (Jnr), ‘The cylindro-conical and cornute stone implements of Western New South Wales and their significance’, Memoirs of the Geological Survey of New South Wales, Ethnological Series 2, 1916, pp. 1–42; WW Thorpe, ‘Ethnological notes, no. 1’, Records of the Australian Museum 16(5), 1928, pp. 241–53 and ‘Ethnological notes, no. 4’, Records of the Australian Museum 18(6), 1932, pp. 302–11; Lindsay Black, Cylcons: The Mystery Stones of the Darling River Valley (The author, 1942); George Horne, ‘Aboriginal stone implements of south-eastern Victoria’, paper, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 1921; Frederick D McCarthy, ‘The grooved-conical stones of New South Wales’, Memoirs of the Australian Museum (Mankind) II, 1939, pp. 161–9; Frederick D McCarthy, ‘Some unusual cylindro-conical stones from New South Wales and Java’, Records of the Australian Museum 21(5), 1944, pp. 257–60; Frederick D McCarthy, Australian Aboriginal Stone Implements, 2nd edn (Australian Museum Trust, 1976); Frederick D McCarthy, Elsie Bramwell & HVV Noone, ‘The stone implements of Australia’, Australian Museum Memoir 9, 1946, pp. 1–94.
3 Harper; Etheridge (Jnr), 1916; Black.
4 Thorpe, 1928; McCarthy, 1939 and 1976; McCarthy, Bramwell & Noone.
5 Nici Cumpston & Jonathon Jones, Riverland: Yvonne Koolmatrie: A Retrospective of Ngarrindjeri Weaver Yvonne Koolmatrie (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2015).
6 Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, 2nd edn (Magabala Books, 2018). The image is poorly produced and simply labelled ‘stone picks’. It is attributed to J Jones.
7 Harper, p. 436.
8 McCarthy, 1944.
9 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916.
10 Harper; Etheridge (Jnr), 1916; Black.
11 Harper, p. 435.
12 Harper, p. 425.
13 Harper, p. 425.
14 Harper, p. 426.
15 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916, p. 4.
16 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916, p. 40.
17 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916, p. 41.
18 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916, p. 15.
19 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916, p. 17.
20 Mathews cited in Etheridge (Jnr), 1916, p. 40.
21 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916, p. 19.
22 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916, p. 40.
23 Black, p. 24.
24 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916; Black; McCarthy, 1944.
25 McCarthy, 1944.
26 Nici Cumpston, Jonathon Jones & Lorena Allam, Bunha-Bunhanga: Aboriginal Agriculture in the South-East (Board of the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium, 2019), paragraph 5, lines 26–9.
27 Cumpston, Jones & Allam, paragraph 11, lines 1–3.
28 Horne; McCarthy, 1976.
29 See NMA Object Summary with Images, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5cf30ff26df8f90001ae648d/t/5d397c8aa48d2b0001f3f8bb/1564048526233/atsip_objectlistmultiplenewlogo.pdf (accessed 12 July 2020).
30 Harper; Etheridge (Jnr), 1916; McCarthy, 1944.
31 Etheridge (Jnr), 1916; Thorpe, 1928; McCarthy, 1939 and 1944.
32 McCarthy, Bramwell & Noone; later published as Frederick D McCarthy, 1967, (1st edn) and McCarthy, Australian Aboriginal Stone Implements (Australian Museum) 1976, (2nd edn, revised).
33 McCarthy, 1944.
34 McCarthy, Bramwell & Noone, p. 2.
35 Tom McCourt, Aboriginal Artefacts (Rigby, 1975); Simon Holdaway & Nicola Stern, A Record in Stone: The Study of Australia’s Flaked Stone Artefacts (Melbourne & Canberra: Museum Victoria & AIATSIS, 2004).
36 McCarthy, Bramwell & Noone, p. 9.
37 McCarthy, Bramwell & Noone; McCarthy, 1976.
38 McCarthy, Bramwell & Noone, p. 259.
39 McCarthy, 1939, pp. 166–7.
40 Thorpe, 1928; McCarthy, 1939.
41 Holdaway & Stern, p. 236.
42 Horne, p. 12.
43 Stan Grant (Snr) & John Rudder, A New Wiradjuri Dictionary (Restoration House, 2010) p. 318.
44 Lorena Allam in Cumpston, Jones & Allam, paragraph 9, lines 1, 3.
45 Thomas L Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales (T & W Boone, 1839), vol. 1, p. 336.
46 Mitchell, vol. 1, p. 336.
47 McCarthy, 1976, p. 36.
48 McCarthy, 1976, p. 36; James Knight, ‘A broken juin knife from Yandan Creek: Some implications’, Archaeology in Oceania 25(2), 1990, pp. 68–74; Holdaway & Stern, p. 264.
49 Knight.
50 Holdaway & Stern, p. 264.
51 Norman B Tindale, ‘Culture succession in south eastern Australia from late Pleistocene to the present’, Records of the South Australian Museum 13(1), 1957, p. 29.
52 Knight, pp. 70–1.
53 Knight, p. 72.
54 DA Casey, IM Crawford & RVS Wright, ‘The recognition, description, classification and nomenclature of Australian stone implements: The report of the Stone Implement Committee, 1967’, Australian National University, 1967, http://rubens.anu.edu.au/raid1/student_projects/tools/casey.html (accessed 8 February 2020).
55 Suzanne Nugent, Sticks and Stones: A Functional Analysis of Aboriginal Spears from Northern Australia, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2015.
56 Augustus Charles Gregory, ‘Appendix II: Memoranda on the Aborigines of Australia’. In H Ling Roth, ‘On the origin of agriculture’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 16, 1887, p. 132.
57 Rupert Gerritsen, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (British Archaeological Reports, 2008), p. 78.
58 Johan Kamminga, ‘Over the edge: Functional analysis of Australian stone tools’, Occasional Papers in Anthropology (Anthropology Museum, University of Queensland), 12, 1982; Peter Hiscock & Tim Maloney, ‘Australian lithic technology: Evolution, dispersion and connectivity’, in T Hodos (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization (Routledge, 2017), pp. 301–80.
59 R Tobler et al., ‘Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia’, Nature 544, 2017, pp. 180–4; James F O’Connor et al., ‘When did Homo sapiens first reach Southeast Asia and Sahul?’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(34), 2018, pp. 8482–90; R Wood et al., ‘Towards an accurate and precise chronology for the colonization of Australia: The example of Riwi, Kimberley, Western Australia’, PLOS One 11(9), 2016.
60 Aboriginal Victoria, Victorian Government, Fact Sheet: Aboriginal Coastal Shell Middens, 2019, Aboriginal Victoria website, https://www.aboriginalvictoria.vic.gov.au/fact-sheet-aboriginal-coastal-shell-middens (accessed 15 February 2020).
61 BD Koppel, Disentangling Shell Middens: Exploring the Complexities of Deposit Formation and Transformation Using Amino Acid Racemisation, PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 2017, pp. 2–5.
62 Koppel, p. 24.
63 JR Prescott & JE Sherwood, ‘Thermoluminescence ages for an unusual shell deposit at Point Ritchie, Warrnambool, Australia’. In JR Prescott (ed.), Archaeometry: Australasian Studies (Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics, University of Adelaide, 1988), pp. 61–9.
64 Ian J McNiven et al., ‘The Moyjil site, south-west Victoria, Australia: Excavation of a last interglacial charcoal and burnt stone feature: Is it a hearth?’ Royal Society of Victoria 130, 2018, pp. 94–116.
65 JE Sherwood, ‘The Moyjil site, south-west Victoria, Australia: Prologue: Of people, birds, shell and fire’, Royal Society of Victoria 130, 2018, p. 11.
66 Jim M Bowler at al., ‘The Moyjil site, south-west Victoria, Australia: Fire and environment in a 120,000-year coastal midden: Nature or people?’ Royal Society of Victoria 130, 2018, pp. 71–93.
67 McNiven et al., p. 111.
68 Stephen P Carey et al., ‘The Moyjil site, south-west Victoria, Australia: Stratigraphic and geomorphic context’, Royal Society of Victoria 130, 2018, p. 16.
69 Wood et al.
70 Tobler et al.; James F O’Connell et al., ‘When did Homo sapiens first reach Southeast Asia and Sahul?’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(34), 2018, pp. 8482–90; A Cooper, A Williams & N Spooner, ‘When did Aboriginal people first arrive in Australia?’ The Conversation, 7 August 2018. By using the human fossil record and genetic signals, these researchers cannot find strong evidence for an exodus from Africa earlier than 50,000–55,000 years ago. They suggest that processes operating on some archaeological deposits have left deposits younger than 50,000 years old, with older age outcomes. See also Appendix 1 of this book.
71 Sue O’Connor, ‘30,000 years of Aboriginal occupation: Kimberley, north-west Australia’, Terra Australis 14 (ANH Publications and Centre for Archaeological Research, Australian National University, 1999).
72 Carey et al.; Bowler et al.; McNiven et al.; Sherwood, 2018; JE Sherwood et al., ‘The Moyjil site, south-west Victoria, Australia: Chronology’, Royal Society of Victoria 130, 2018, pp. 32–49; JE Sherwood, IJ McNiven & Laurie Laurenson, ‘The Moyjil site, south-west Victoria, Australia: Shells as evidence of the deposit’s origin’, Royal Society of Victoria 130, 2018, pp. 50–70.
73 Bruce Pascoe, Salt: Selected Essays and Stories (Black Inc., 2019b), p. 102.
74 CE Dortch & PA Hesp, ‘Rottnest Island artifacts and palaeosols in the context of Greater Swan Region prehistory’, Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia 77, 1994, pp. 23–2; P Hesp, CV Murray-Wallace & CE Dortch, ‘Aboriginal occupation on Rottnest Island, Western Australia, provisionally dated by aspartic acid racemisation assay of land snails to greater than 50 ka’, Australian Archaeology 49, 1999, pp. 7–12.
75 Dortch & Hesp.
76 Hesp, Murray-Wallace & Dortch, p. 11. The Pleistocene is a geological epoch commencing, in Australia, around 1.5 million years ago and ending about 11,000 years ago. On other continents, the Pleistocene era commences around 2.6 million years ago.
77 AN Williams et al., ‘Sea-level change and demography during the last glacial termination and early Holocene across the Australian continent’, Quaternary Science Reviews 182, 2018, pp. 144–54.
78 Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Wakefield Press, 2000); Keryn Walshe, ‘Investigator Isles Expedition 2006: Two stone implements from Flinders Island, South Australia’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia 132(2), 2008, pp. 45–50; Keryn Walshe, ‘Archaeological evidence for a sealer’s and wallaby hunter’s skinning site on Kangaroo Island, South Australia’, Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 9(1), 2014, pp. 130–43.
79 Taylor; Walshe, 2008; Walshe, 2014; Keryn Walshe, ‘Echidna to wolf’s head: A nineteenth-century sealer’s ornament from Kangaroo Island, South Australia’, The Artefact 39, 2018, pp. 5–8.
80 Walshe, 2014.
81 David Horton, The Pure State of Nature: Sacred Cows, Destructive Myths and the Environment (Allen & Unwin, 2000), p. 67.
82 Horton, p. 61.
83 Horton, p. 67.
84 Horton, p. 65.
85 Horton, p. 69.
1 See Francis Dahlberg (ed.), Woman the Gatherer (Yale University Press, 1981).
2 Richard B Lee & Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter (Aldine, 1968); Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Aldine, Atherton Inc., 1972).
3 Bryony Orme, ‘The advantages of agriculture’. In JVS Megaw (ed.), Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers beyond Europe: An Archaeological Survey (Leicester University Press, 1977), p. 41.
4 Aldo Massola, ‘A history of Lake Condah Reserve: An address to the Society on Tuesday evening, 19th June, 1962’, Victorian Historical Magazine 34(1), 1963, p. 29.
5 Sian Johnson, ‘Volcanoes in Victoria reveal fresh evidence of eruptions 37,000 years ago’, ABC News, 26 February 2020.
6 L Head, D D’Costa & P Edney, ‘Pleistocene dates for volcanic activity in western Victoria and implications for Aboriginal occupation’. In MAJ Williams, P de Deckker & AP Kershaw (eds), The Cainozoic in Australia: A Reappraisal of the Evidence (Geological Society of Australia, 1991), pp. 302–8.
7 See Neville Rosengren, ‘Lake Condah area: Lava surface features’, in Anne Clarke, Lake Condah Project Aboriginal Archaeology (Occasional Report No. 36, Victoria Archaeological Survey, 1991), pp. 90–103; Heather Builth, ‘Mt Eccles lava flow and the Gunditjmara connection: A landform for all seasons’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 116(1), 2004, pp. 165–84; J Tibby et al., ‘Environmental change and variability in southwestern Victoria: Changing constraints and opportunities for occupation and land use’, in Bruno David, Bryce Barker & Ian J McNiven (eds), The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), pp. 254–69; Heather Builth et al., ‘Environmental and cultural change on the Mt Eccles lava-flow landscapes of south-western Victoria, Australia’, The Holocene 18(3), 2008, pp. 413–24.
8 Rosengren; Context Pty Ltd, Lake Condah Heritage Management Plan (report prepared for Victoria Archaeological Survey, 1993).
9 Builth, 2004.
10 Galaxia is anadramous while the short-finned eel is catadramous, which means that galaxia are spawned in fresh water and migrate to sea water to mature, returning to fresh water to spawn their own offspring, whereas the eel is spawned in sea water and migrates to fresh water to mature, leaving for sea water when it is ready to spawn.
11 Massola, 1963, p. 29.
12 Ian J McNiven et al., ‘Phased redevelopment of an ancient Gunditjmara fish trap over the past 800 years: Muldoons trap complex, Lake Condah, southwestern Victoria’, Australian Archaeology 81, 2015, pp. 44–58; Ian J McNiven et al., ‘Kurtonitj stone house: Excavation of a mid-nineteenth century Aboriginal frontier site from Gunditjmara country, south east Victoria’, Archaeology in Oceania 52, 2017, pp. 171–97.
13 See Aldo Massola, ‘The native fish traps at Toolondo, in the Wimmera’, Victorian Naturalist 79, 1962, pp. 162–6; Massola, Journey to Aboriginal Victoria (Rigby, 1969); Massola, The Aborigines of South East Australia as They Were (Heinemann, 1971); Harry Lourandos, ‘Aboriginal settlement and land use in south-western Victoria: A report on current field work’, Artefact 1, 1976, pp. 174–93; Lourandos, Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Peter JF Coutts, RK Frank & P Hughes, ‘Aboriginal engineers of the Western District, Victoria’, Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey 7, 1978; Jill Wesson, Excavations of Stone Structures in the Condah Area, Western Victoria, Masters preliminary thesis, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 1981; Steven Hemming, ‘An Aboriginal fish trap from Lake Condah, Victoria’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia 23(4), 1985, pp. 2–6; Katrina Geering, Management Recommendations for Aboriginal Stone Houses at Allambie, near Macarthur, South West Victoria: Report of the Victoria Archaeological Survey (Ministry of Planning and Environment, 1985); Elizabeth Williams, Wet Underfoot? Earth Mound Sites and the Recent Prehistory of South West Victoria, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1985; Williams, ‘Complex hunter-gatherers: A view from Australia’, Antiquity 61(232), 1987, pp. 310–21; Williams, Complex Hunter-Gatherers: A Late Holocene Example from Temperate Australia (British Archaeological Reports, 1988); Context Pty Ltd; Anne Clarke, ‘Romancing the stones: The cultural construction of an archaeological landscape in the Western District of Victoria’, Archaeology in Oceania 29, 1994, pp. 1–15; Heather Builth, Lake Condah Revisited: Archaeological Constructions of a Cultural Landscape, Honours thesis, Faculty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, University of South Australia, Adelaide, 1996; Builth, ‘Analysing Gunditjmara settlement: The use of an appropriate methodology’, in G Carver & K Stankowski (eds), Proceedings of the Third National Archaeology Students’ Conference (Southern Archaeology, 2002a), pp. 15–32; Builth, The Archaeology and Socioeconomy of the Gunditjmara: A Landscape Analysis from Southwest Victoria, Australia, PhD thesis, Department of Archaeology, Flinders University of South Australia, 2002b; Builth, 2004; Thomas Richards, ‘A late nineteenth-century map of an Australian Aboriginal fishery at Lake Condah’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2, 2011, pp. 64–87; Ian McNiven, & IJ Bell, ‘Fishers and farmers: Historicising the Gunditjmara freshwater fishery, western Victoria’. La Trobe Journal 85, 2010, pp. 83–105; McNiven et al., ‘Dating Aboriginal stone-walled fishtraps at Lake Condah, southeast Australia’, Journal of Archaeological Science 39, 2012, pp. 268–86.
14 Massola, 1963.
15 Lourandos, 1976.
16 Peter Coutts et al., ‘The mound people of western Victoria: A preliminary statement’, Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey (Ministry for Conservation) 1, 1976; Peter JF Coutts, P Henderson & R Fullagar, ‘Preliminary investigation of Aboriginal mounds in north-western Victoria’, Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey (Ministry for Conservation) 9, 1979.
17 Coutts, Frank & Hughes, p. 24.
18 The page numbers in the main text of this chapter are from the second edition of Dark Emu, published by Magabala Books in 2018.
19 Context Pty Ltd.
20 Context Pty Ltd.
21 Coutts, Frank & Hughes; Clarke, 1994.
22 Coutts, Frank & Hughes, p. 16.
23 Coutts, Frank & Hughes, p. 42.
24 The Age, 21 January 1981, cited in Clarke, 1994, p. 13.
25 Lourandos, 1976.
26 Lourandos, 1997, p. 112.
27 Approximately 220 stone circles had been recorded by 1990 (Context Pty Ltd).
28 Context Pty Ltd, p. 69.
29 Clarke, 1991 and 1994.
30 Cited in Clarke, 1994, p. 12.
31 Clarke, 1994, p. 13.
32 Context Pty Ltd.
33 Pascoe, 2018, p. 85.
34 Clarke, 1991 and 1994.
35 Pahoehoe lava flows are gently undulating and smooth, sometimes hummocky. See ‘Pahoehoe: Lava flow’, Encyclopedia Britannica website, n.d., https://www.britannica.com/science/pahoehoe (accessed 20 July 2020).
36 Rosengren, p. 92.
37 Rosengren, p. 93.
38 Rosengren, p. 94.
39 Context Pty Ltd, p. 69.
40 Clarke, 1994, p. 6.
41 Clarke, 1994, p. 5.
42 Context Pty Ltd, p. 69.
43 Context Pty Ltd, p. 71.
44 Wesson.
45 McNiven et al., 2017.
46 Builth, 2002b, p. 316.
47 Builth, 2002b, p. 317.
48 Builth, 2002b, p. 68.
49 Pascoe, 2018, p. 84.
50 Builth, 2002b, p. 117.
51 Rosengren, p. 91.
52 Rosengren, p. 90.
53 Builth, 2002a and 2002b.
54 Builth, 2002b, pp. 150–1.
55 Coutts, Frank & Hughes; Clarke, 1991 and 1994.
56 Builth, 2002b, p. 134.
57 Massola, 1963, p. 38; Aldo Massola, Aboriginal Mission Stations in Victoria (Hawthorn Press, 1970), p. 99.
58 Portland Guardian, 23 February 1891, p. 4.
59 See Charlotte Beck & George Jones, ‘Bias and archaeological classification’, American Antiquity 54(2), 1989, pp. 244–62.
60 Clarke, 1991, p. 19.
61 Builth, 2002b, p. 163.
62 Builth, 2002b, p. 209.
63 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia (George Robertson, 1881), pp. 94–5.
64 Daisy M Bates (ed. Isobel White), The Native Tribes of Western Australia (National Library of Australia, 1985); Ronald M Berndt & Catherine H Berndt, The World of the First Australians: An Introduction to the Traditional Life of the Australian Aborigines, 1st edn (Ure Smith, 1964), pp. 110–12.
65 Dawson, p. 95.
66 Builth, 2002b, p. 314.
67 Builth, 2002b, p. 173.
68 Robert Edwards, Aboriginal Bark Canoes of the Murray Valley (Rigby, 1972).
69 Edwards; Rhys Roberts, The Peramangk and Culturally Modified Trees: Significant Heritage Sites, Honours thesis, Department of Archaeology, Flinders University of South Australia, 2000; Greg Carver, An Examination of Indigenous Australian Culturally Modified Trees in South Australia, Honours thesis, Department of Archaeology, Flinders University of South Australia, 2002; Andrew Long, Aboriginal Scarred Trees in New South Wales: A Field Manual (NSW Department of Conservation, 2005).
70 Long.
71 Builth, 2002b, p. 137.
72 An example is shown on p. 163 of Builth, 2002b.
73 Builth, 2002b, p. 177.
74 National Center for Biotechnology Information. Pubchem Compound Summary For CID 444899, Arachidonic Acid, n.d., https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Eicosapentaenoic-acid and Pubchem Compound Summary For CID 446284, Eicosapentaenoic Acid, n.d., https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Eicosapentaenoic-acid (accessed 22 January 2020).
75 Coutts, Frank & Hughes, p. 13.
76 Ian Keen, ‘Constraints on the development of enduring inequalities in late Holocene Australia’, Current Anthropology 47, 2006, p. 27.
77 The Leader (Melbourne), 7 September 1867, p. 20 (3).
78 WB Emison et al., ‘Survey of the vertebrate fauna in the Grampians-Edenhope area of southwestern Victoria’, Memoirs of the Victoria Museum 39, 1978, pp. 281–365.
79 Builth, 2002b.
80 Ronald Strahan (ed.), Mammals of Australia (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) and references therein.
81 Interestingly, dingoes lack the enzyme necessary for digesting starch, which is a marker of dogs closely associated with agricultural communities; see Alex Cagan & Torsten Blass, ‘Identification of genomic variants putatively targeted by selection during dog domestication’, BMC Evolutionary Biology 16 (10), 2016, pp. 1–13.
82 Builth, 2004, p. 179, Figure 9.
83 Gib Wettenhall with the Gunditjmara People, The People of Budj Bim: Engineers of Aquaculture, Builders of Stone House Settlements and Warriors Defending Country, Heywood, Vic.: em PRESS Publishing, 2010.
84 Builth, 2002b, p. 163.
85 For example, see Michal Rybka, ‘Smoked eel: A delicacy made in your back yard’, Tasfish website, 2014, https://www.tasfish.com/196-other/eel/2533-smoked-eel-a-delicacy-made-in-your-back-yard-michal-rybka (accessed 24 January 2020).
86 For example, Berndt & Berndt, 1964, p. 110.
87 Builth, 2002b, p. 208.
88 Keen, p. 27, citing Blandowski.
89 Dawson, p. 94.
90 Wesson; McNiven et al., 2017.
91 LR Smyth, The Aboriginal Population of Australia (Aborigines in Australian Society no. 14, Canberra: ANU Press, 1980), p. 111.
92 Aboriginal Heritage Office, A Brief Aboriginal History, Aboriginal Heritage Office website, 2014, https://www.aboriginalheritage.org/history/history/ (accessed 15 January 2020).
93 Context Pty Ltd; Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Lake Condah Heritage Management Strategy and Plan: Report by AAV in Conjunction with the Kerrup Jmara Elders Aboriginal Corporation (Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, 1993).
94 Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, Australian Government, World Heritage Places: Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, DAWE website, n.d., http://environment.gov.au/heritage/places/world/budj-bim (accessed 15 January 2020).
1 Peter Sutton & Ken Hale, Linguistic Organisation and Native Title: The Wik Case, Australia (Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2021; in press).
2 For a lay reader’s introduction to the rich ethnographic fields of Aboriginal land tenure, see Peter Sutton, Native Title in Australia: An Ethnographic Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
1 R Wood et al., ‘Towards an accurate and precise chronology for the colonization of Australia: The example of Riwi, Kimberley, Western Australia’, PLOS One 11(9), 2016.
2 C Clarkson, Z Jacobs, B Marwick, R Fullagar, L Wallis, M Smith, C Pardoe, ‘Human Occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago’, Nature 547, 2017, pp. 306–10.
3 M A Smith, I Ward, I Moffat, ‘How do we distinguish termite stone lines from artefact horizons? A challenge for geoarchaeology in tropical Australia’, Geoarchaeology, 35(2), 2020, pp. 232–42.
4 M A J Williams, N A Spooner, K McDonnell, J F O’Connell, ‘Identifying disturbance in archaeological sites in tropical northern Australia: Implications for previously proposed 65,000-year continental occupation date’, Geoarchaeology, 36, 2021, pp. 92–108.
5 Q Fu et al, ‘The genome sequence of a 45,000-year-old modern human from western Siberia’, Nature, 514(7523), 2014, pp. 445–9.
6 Tobler et al, 2017; James F O’Connell et al., ‘When did Homo sapiens first reach Southeast Asia and Sahul?’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(34), 2018, pp. 8482–90.
7 J-J Hublin, ‘How old are the oldest Homo sapiens in Far East Asia?’, PNAS 118(10), 2021.
8 O’Connell et al; Williams et al.
1 Ian D Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900 (Monash University, 1990), p. 317.
2 Buckley gave a reason for leaving: ‘… we started again for a new locality, our supplies of game beginning to fall short in consequence of our continued hunting’ (Morgan, p. 31).