Transcript

I hope you all enjoyed our outdoor excursion. So now I'm going to talk about the sorts of artifacts and tools that we can make from the natural resources that we learned about.

So, one of the artifacts that you can make, you know from the natural resources, is an axe. So, as you can see this axe here has a wooden handle and a stone head but for this to be an effective tool the head needs to be properly fixed to the handle. And to do that, our people used to get sinews from the kangaroo or wallaby tail and they used to use that to bound this stone axe head to the handle. And do you remember that resin I spoke about, that we get from the grass tree? That resin would have been used to actually cover where the axe head is joined to the handle, not only to protect it, but to reinforce the joint. You can also use tools like this to take bark from a stringybark tree to make those canoes that we spoke about earlier on.

Here is another implement we can make from the natural resources. This a club but in our language, we call that a nulla nulla. This one is a small one so it could be used by both males and females. So, you can get all different sizes and this one would have been used to catch, you know, small marsupials and reptiles. You'll notice on the tip here of this handle it's quite sharp, so this could also have a dual use as well, so it could be used to dig in the ground for yams.

And here we actually have a full-length digging stick. So, it has two different tips on it. This one is for digging the dirt and this end, which is much pointier, is used for actually digging down deeper to try and lever, you know, the yams away from its root system. It can always be used as a small narrow club as well.

Now what I got here is the fibres we spoke about that could be obtained from the bark of the stringybark tree. So those fibres can be either rolled on your leg together or in your hands to make different kinds of rope. So, this one is a much thicker rope that could be made from those fibres. A lot of these more thicker fibres can be used to tie up the end of your canoes. Because when we made our canoes they had to be bound at the end by fibres, such as this, and it's nice and strong so it would last, you know, much longer.

We needed to have our own form of entertainment so we had what you call corroborees and sometimes it was just dances, so these are clap sticks and when they are hit together like that, you get a nice sound. You can either make big ones like this or you can make them much more smaller, much more narrow.

There’re all different kinds of shields we made from the bark of trees as well. This one is made from a solid wood. This particular shield is what we call a heelamin. So, this one was actually used for punishments because it's so narrow. So, anyone who's caught trespassing on somebody else's foundational lands, would be given one of these, and spears would be thrown and they would have to ricochet them off as part of being taught a lesson about trespassing on someone else's foundational land without permission. But as you can see the tips of these are pointy as well. So again, this is a multi-use, it can be used to also dig for yams and other types of tuber vegetables that may be under the ground.

We had all different types of clubs, some of them were half clubs and half boomerang and we call these wadis. So, wadis were used for hunting and that was often used to throw at an animal. You can see it's got the curve like a boomerang and a head on it like a club. We also have a different one as well, so again it's a wadi that's more like a boomerang so to catch animals with these for food. We'd actually throw these at the feet of the animal to try and knock it over and this type is very traditional, you know, to the Gweagal Dharawal people.

We also have a boomerang. This particular boomerang has been made to actually return, as you can see this one is shaped just like an aeroplane wing isn't it? It's round on the top and flat on the bottom and it's been shaved just along the edges here, which gives it aerodynamics. So, to make a boomerang like this, you need to go into the bush. A lot of boomerangs around here was actually made from mangrove trees but also other types of trees as well and you would look for what you call boomerang knees or boomerang elbows. So, you would look for a branch in the tree that was shaped like your elbow or a bent knee, and our people would take that branch off, take it back to their camp, they would split it in half and they would try to do their best to get two boomerangs out of that branch. This one here was perfect for throwing into flocks of birds, but it could also be used for games as well.

It's very important to mention at this point too, that animals like plants have spirit for us, so anything that we acquired for food, whether it was plants or animals, once we acquired that as food we would say a little prayer to the spirit of that plant or animal just to thank it for providing us with food. We believe strongly if we looked after land, that is the other life-forms on it like animals and plants, that the land would help us back as well. So, for us if we keep our lands healthy, we keep ourselves healthy as well.

And here we have another implement this one could be used for two reasons. It could be a woomera where you fix a spear in it. The tip here, this gives the spear tremendous force, so we can get a lot of power and distance by using implement like this. But they can also be used as a base for making those fires as well. So, if we had the grass trees shaft like this, this could be the base and we would just make the fire in here. This is one of the most important artifacts for Aboriginal people. Because thousands and thousands of years ago, when the megafauna still roamed Australia and we were still hunting that megafauna for food, the megafauna was so large that we needed something that would give our spears enough force to be able to catch those large animals. Without this it wouldn't have been possible to catch any of that megafauna whatsoever, cause we're talking about wombats as big as a horse.

Now we've got something else here, we use it to actually manufacture food from plants, so this is what you call a grinding stone. And the grinding stone is not functional, it cannot be worked, unless we have a base for it. So, we've got the base here. We have a plant which we call lomandra. At certain time of the year the lomandra grows these sorts of seeds on it. So once these seeds are removed from the plant and dried, they can then be ground on one of these grinding stones to create a flour. We can then mix with water to make our own bush bread.

Possums are very important to us as well. The gurruraa as we call it. We will only acquire possums or gurruraa during winter time, because during winter time is when they grow a much thicker fur. So, we would catch them, utilize them for food as well, but also acquire as many skins as possible and then we would stitch all those skins together with sinews from a kangaroo or wallaby. We would use needles made of the bones of animals, stitch them all together to make our own cloaks for winter.

What we've got here is a coolamon. Coolamons were usually made from the branches of particular trees. So, we'd look for a big branch that had the potential to become a coolamon for us. So, we would remove the bark. This one can be used for various reasons. It could be used to carry shellfish in, or berries, but it could also be used as a baby cradle as well. So if you put the possum fur in there like that, that would create a soft base to lay the baby in there and put another skin over during winter to keep the baby warm.

The kangaroo skin was utilized in the same way as the possum skin. So, we call kangaroo a Burroo. Possum and kangaroo skins were used in a similar way. Again they would be acquired in wintertime when their fur is thicker than in summer and they would be used to also make cloaks as well, but also they can be laid on the inside of gunyahs, which I spoke about earlier on, or in some of our rock shelters where we were camping to create a nice soft flooring for those dwellings.

So, ceremonies were a very big part of our way of life. So, to do that well we needed to use natural resources as well to adorn our bodies with. There's two types of colours that we use mainly. There was red and white and these colors could be obtained from what we call red and white ochre. And what we would do is just break a little bit of ochre off. Like that. Just grind the ochre down into almost a paste. It takes a little bit of work to get it as smooth as you possibly could. So, as you can see it's almost turned into a powder now. So, it takes a bit of work to do this it's not something that you can do almost immediately, you need to put time and effort into it. So, it’s almost a paste now. Now what we would do is add a bit of water to that. You can use your finger just to mix the water around a little bit. A little bit more grinding to ensure that the powder blends in with the water. And as you can see we just created some red paint. So, I’ll just put a bit on my hand to give you an example. The white ochre, which we make white paint with, when you first put it on, it's more of a grey color, but after it dries it goes into a beautiful white colour.

So, if we wanted to make different coloured paints, we'd get the dye from the roots of plants. Soak it in water for a few days. Crush the roots of those plants, mix it with the white ochre and you can get different colours, a purple, dark blue or a green colour. And it all depends on what plant that you're utilizing. But as you can see this red ochre, has just created paint that we would use to adorn our bodies with for when we participate in ceremonies and also larger events such as corroborees.

We would always use our own body markings. So, at times when different clans came together everyone would know who belonged to what clan according to their body markings.

So, what I'd like to talk about now is how our people made canoes. So, one of the most important artifacts to be able to do that, was this axe here. So, our people would, you know, find a nice straight stringy bark tree like the one that we saw earlier today. And they would cut it around the top and around the bottom and straight down the centre somewhere and they would use huge pointed sticks, something like these digging sticks here but much bigger, to lever the bark off the tree. So once the bark was levered off the tree, we would come up with a longer version of what we got here. Sometimes the fibres were removed from the inner part of the bark, the fibres such as this, and these fibres were then worked to be able to create the rope that I just showed you a moment ago. This sort of rope. But better still, our people used to make canoes from that particular tree. We depended heavily on these canoes to catch fish in our waterways. So, our people would take the bark after they've levered it off the tree, put it over a fire while it was still green and fresh, then try and straighten it out. Then they would fold it back again but this time ensuring that there was big sticks at both ends to just up from the middle of the canoe, and that would also allow them to bend up the sides and at each end of the canoe, where it was then bound with this sort of roping, made from the same tree itself. So, when the bark was removed, almost every part of that bark was used. When these canoes were made here at Kamay Botany Bay, our people would have fires inside of them. So, some of the ways they made fires. You can get a clay base and let it dry and then put sand on top of it. Or, you can use wet seaweed as well. It was important to have fires in these canoes. Fires allowed us to cook the fish as we caught it but it also allowed us to fish at night as well, give us some light to be able to see because at night time that's when some of the biggest, you know, fish come out to feed.

Before I thank, you know thank everybody for wanting to learn about our culture and learn about the way that we utilized some of their natural resources I would like to thank my nephew Rod Mason for everything he's taught to me, about how we utilize our natural resources but also about the cultural philosophies for using those resources as well. You see in our cultures we have a particular law and that law is never to waste so we only utilize what we want from our lands to ensure that there is plenty left the following year. So, thank you very much for being a part of our learning lesson today and I really look forward to doing more lessons with you in the future, particularly when it comes to ways of utilizing our natural resources and the cultural philosophies that drives the way that we utilize those resources.

Thank you

End of transcript.