Transcript

We're here on the land of the Dharawal people, specifically the land of the Gweagal clan of the Dharawal nation. But before I start talking about our natural resources I'd like to just let you know that for us, in our culture everything has a spirit. So all the animals have a spirit and of course for us all plant life has a spirit and plants and animals in our culture have a way of speaking to us.

So I'll give you some examples of that a little bit later on but first I'd like to talk about a particular plant that has high medicinal value for us. So it may look like a normal vine, for Aboriginal people of this area this particular vine provides ways of purifying our blood. It's often referred to as Sarsaparilla because of its taste. So what we do is we actually pick the vine. So we might pull a big batch of that off and let it dry and then we'll soak that in water and then we'll drink the water. But you have to drink it you know over time, it doesn't happen immediately.

This one here is an important plant as well known as the Grass Tree. The Grass Tree is very vital to our survival. It's vital in terms of you know being able to make fires with this particular plant, make spears and also obtain resin from those as well, you know, for sealing the joints on their spears and also plugging up holes in their canoes. So as you can see the grass tree has a stem in the centre and when you get the very narrow stems you can use them as shafts for making fires with, but also we can make spears out of these, our plants as well. But there's a vital substance that comes from these plants that we utilize, there's a particular resin we use to bind our spear prongs in our spear shafts with. That resin you can actually find at the base of the shaft. So very often a particular insect will eat into the base of this shaft and what it does it leaves a hole in there and when the shaft bleeds out that's actually the resin you know coming out of a plant. It's a very important, you know, product for us because we can use it also to, you know, plug up holes and leaks in our canoes as well. So you can see that there's three major purposes you know to this particular plant.

Over here we have a tree and as you can see it's smooth on the outside. So in our culture even plants can be male and female. So if you have a look at some of these rougher trees like this one over here, for example, because it's rough we would see that as a male tree and because this one here is smooth we would see that as a female tree. We can sometimes call particular trees like this possum trees and a possum tree is a tree where possums actually go up to feed at night time. So you often can see claw marks like these ones here going up the tree. So possums live in a particular tree but at night come out and go up another one to feed, you know, during the night time. So you know what we should do now, we should just move on a bit further and we'll see what else we can find further on.

So we found another tree we can talk about. This tree here is the Banksia. So there's all different kinds of Banksias but they all have the same uses for us in terms of resources. We call the Banksia in our language Wattangaree and as you can see I've got a cob. So these cobs, you can actually put them in fires and they work like barbecue beads that you might buy from a warehouse. But most importantly we can use the bark of the Gurridja or Banksia tree as a base for making our fire. So just as I said before, we use the stem of the Grass Tree as the shaft for making the fire, we can use the bark of these trees as the base in which to position that shaft so we can make our fires. These cobs are very important as well because on days you know when the rain is quite drizzly and while people used to find ant mounds and hollow out the base of those mounds they would make a fire and they would use the fuel from these cobs, you know to keep the fire really hot and we just put whatever we're cooking inside of those mounds and just leave it there for a few hours to cook and that way you can actually cook when it's raining as well. But we also use rock shelters so sometimes you can find low-lying rock shelters that are quite hollow. You can use those as fireplaces as well.

You remember when I spoke about how we can use the tip of the grass tree, the very narrow one, to make a fire with? On days when the weather is really wet, you don't want to get those shafts too wet because it'll make it hard to make a fire. So our old people used to catch either a kangaroo or wallaby and they would use this for food of course and the pelts for clothing but inside the wallaby or the kangaroo they would get the stomach lining, they would clean that out, they would let it dry and they would use that to put the shaft of those grass sticks inside of it to keep it dry during wet times.

So there's another tree here that's very interesting. Now this one here is the Eastern Wattle. So you have the Broadleaf Wattle and the Long Leaf Wattle. And these trees here actually speak to us. So do you remember when I spoke about our country talks to us? It can talk to us you know through particular animals and particular plants as well and this plant here in particular when it comes out in season and the golden blooms are very prominent on the plant and the plant’s branches are hanging very heavy with those blooms, that's Country telling us Gweagal Dharawal people that it's time to go and catch particular species of fish. And the two main species of fish is the bream, which we call Barri in our language and the whiting which we call Warraboogan in our language. But we can also make soap with this leaf as well. So if we select a few of them, mainly the soft ones, and we just slightly twist it a little bit, because we're actually after the sap inside, we can basically just put a little bit of water on it and just rub it in your hand like this. Can you hear the suds starting to form? And if you squeeze it a little bit you can see the suds more clearly. So this is a very good one for making soap and in fact the soap you can produce from this particular leaf is actually better than the soap you can buy in any of the supermarkets. And as you'll see in a moment it leaves your hands incredibly clean.

So if you look over here, there's another plant we can use that has medicinal purposes for us as well so this is called a Bracken Fern. And it's quite a dry plant but if you find the really young ones like we can see here, you see the different colours so one's dark and one's a lighter green. You could actually select a few leaves off that and if you got a tick bite or any other kind of sting, you can actually just crush that a little bit and rub it on the bite to alleviate the sting and the itchiness that might be caused so it has a medicinal purpose. But also we can make fires with this plant as well. And if you have a look just down here, you'll find some dead leaves of this Bracken Fern. So all you do you, just pluck a few of those leaves off and you can just crush it really finely, like that and you can put that on you know the base of your Banksia tree. You can actually use that to make a fire with, so the shaft would go in the centre of it. You would rub the shaft, you know, back and forwards vigorously. So it could take more than one person to do that and you can actually use, you know, dry Bracken Fern like that to kickstart your fire. But there's other, you know, resources we can use as well. So even kangaroo or wallaby dung when it goes really dry can be crushed and used to make those fires as well. So we'll just move on now. We might go on a bit further, see what else we can find.

End of transcript.