The Grampians in Vic. are alight again & threatening farms and small towns like the fires there in Feb earlier this year. The Aboriginal word for this place is “Gariwerd” and there are many ancient rock paintings as well the threatened Greater glider & Brush tailed Phascogale living there. ‘Precious environmental assets’ going up in smoke twice in the same year & everyone will be crying climate change when its mostly poor land administration. Australian landscapes have been managed in one way or another for millennia so to just lock up the country & expect it to look after itself is stupid. All the operational guidelines, biodiversity strategies, vegetation assessments & ecological/ cultural reviews mean nothing if you don’t protect the site from bushfires. The Federal Govt. is responsible for all the Ramsar listed wetlands in Australia via the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.Our local joint management committee of the Narran lakes nature reserve needs to implement traditional burning practices or create modern firebreaks with preventative prescribed burns to protect what cultural heritage remains ….dont shift the blame – Just Do Your Job!
On a more positive note, I have had another paper published by Corpus Publishers this time called “Australian Aboriginal Arboriculture”. Here is the link https://www.corpuspublishes.com/assets/articles/cjoah-v1-24-101.pdf This article is sort of a summary of what I know about CMTs up to this point and when it cools down next year I will do one more paper only. The 2025 project will involve some collaborative research with Wailwun T.Os to put to bed any lingering doubts about the cultural origins of TinTs. If you want to be involved you can email me at [email protected] but keep in mind this study is not funded. Aboriginal institutions and Australia’s universities are not interested in what I do because I’m neither an academic nor indigenous. Individuals Like Dr Jen Silcock (UQ) & Prof. Steve Hopper (UWA) help me but no one in the NSW University sector has contacted me despite runnin Indigenous studies courses all over the state. Nest featherers and colonial box tickers who wouldn’t know a scartree if it bit them on the arse & this one below might do just that …
Another wonderful recent find in our warrambool paddock was this connected coolabah (CC) below. There is another couple of CCs over on wailwan country in the Ginghet nature reserve but late 19th century ringbarking around the Ginghet muddies the waters. Jen Silcock & I agree that these 2 coolabahs were the same tree originally but have been separated over time. What happened to the original trunk will never be known now but I can guarantee the people who used this section of the Big Warrambool were involved. Just how old are these steadily moving coolabahs? The forced inosculation of trees was a pastime of the people here as was growing trees in other trees. The effects of their efforts have taken generations to unfold in many instances. Nobody cares about these CMTs now because no one knows about them. Nobody knows they exist because the heads of departments for Aboriginal studies at our universities – often with dodgy claims to ‘aboriginality’- don’t do their jobs. The academics who should be conducting research on these CMTs, don’t. The Land councils & Elders groups who should be requesting research, don’t. Instead, we have ‘Welcome to country’ rituals that are just a cover for big corporations/ Govt not caring about or addressing Aboriginal disadvantage. Smoking ceremonies that are simply a woke smoke screen for the lack of research that could help reconnect the people with their heritage. DO YOUR JOBS
Dispossession causes a disconnection so deep that the descendants of the “old clever people” (quoted from Allan Tighe) don’t even know what they are missing. Some do, like kamilaroi man Andrew Oldfield (AEO from southern Sydney) who can make a canoe or a fishnet or a coolamon using traditional tools & methods. Or my school mate James Briggs now Project Manager at the Butchulla Native Title Aboriginal Corporation (BNTAC) who says “Coolabahs are incredible survivors, especially in tough environments. If these are new growths from the root system of an ancient tree, they could be as old as the original tree itself—possibly hundreds of years and they keep regrowing and finding new ways to survive.” So do the people …
