Primitive hunter-gatherers or sophisticated farmers?

Ancient Australians are frequently remembered merely as primitive nomadic hunter-gatherers without any estates or farms. 

More recent explorations of ancient Australian culture and agricultural practices have, however, revealed an array of advanced farming techniques and practices such as fire-stick farming, granaries and store houses. Scholars also believe that aquaculture was also an integral part of the pre-settlement Indigenous economy.

Budj Bim

Budj Bim is a dormant volcano in South Western Victoria on Gunditjmara Country. The landscape around Budj Bim was first formed by volcanic eruptions around 27,000 years ago. The volcano erupted at least 10 times and the last eruption happened about 7000 years ago. 

Budj Bim means High Head in the language of Gunditjmara people and is home to one of oldest aquaculture systems in the world. 

The Budj Bim lava flows made a landscape of lakes, ponds and swamps rich in animal and plant life. Lava flows formed Tae Rak (Lake Condah) and Condah Swamp.

Aquaculture and Eel Traps 

Budj Bim is home to one of the oldest aquaculture systems in the world. 

Aquaculture is the farming and breeding of water creatures including fish, eels, shellfish and plants for food and other human use. Aboriginal people are pioneers of aquaculture and there are examples across the Country of sophisticated fish trapping systems that are thousands of years old. 

Another famous example besides Budj Bim is the Brewarrina Fish Traps on Ngemba Country in NSW.

The Budj Bim eel traps have been in use since the Dreaming and throughout this time they have been rebuilt as needed. 

The eel traps have been dated back to over 6000 years ago.

Gunditjmara people managed the water flow from Lake Condah, creating dams and blockages to ensure the water flowed as they needed it.

The eel and fish traps supplied enough food to sustain their community all year-round so that they never had to leave and also allowed the Gunditjmara people to trade with other nations.

Gunditjmara people built stone houses and huts to assist with living permanently on the land and today there are over 200 registered and recorded stone houses.

The Budj Bim eel traps and stone houses challenge a long held belief that Aboriginal people were hunters and gatherers who lived a nomadic lifestyle across the land. It shows that we had farming and land management practices and strong economic and agricultural lifestyles.

Heather Builth is a consultant archaeologist whose work in the 1990s recognised the ingenuity of the Budj Bim eel traps that were used in the Lake Condah district of western Victoria.

The stones and foundations that remain today have been dated to more than 6000 years old, and are just a fraction of an enormous system that weaved its way from the ocean to inland areas of the district.

At Lake Condah, evidence remains of the stone foundations of wooden and thatched domed homes where Indigenous people once congregated.

Local man Jimmy Onus says his grandfather still used the eel traps when he was growing up and he remembers being told stories of how they were used.

‘He told us we used to get the eels and how important they were to our diet and way of living,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t just food. We also used the oil to keep warm and even to keep insects away.’

Eels were smoked in the hollows of trees, stored for lean times or traded with other Indigenous clans in the district. Builth says this was ‘a marvelous system’ that sustained a village of thousands three seasons out of four.

‘I have mapped 100 square kilometres of man-made, constructed, modified land which ended up resulting in a network of channels and connected wetlands,’ says Builth.

‘The connected wetlands themselves are all in a mosaic, but they were not natural. The wetlands had been dammed up to ensure the water stayed in them in times of drought.’

Investigations in the 1970s

In the 1970s, Dr Peter Coutts of the Victoria Archaeological Survey carried out site surveys at Lake Condah (Tae Rak), the centrepiece of the Budj Bim cultural landscape. Lake Condah is a rugged lava flow terrain of basalt rises, swampy depressions, and waterways formed as a result of the eruption of Mt Eccles (Budj Bim) at least 30,000 years ago.

Coutts and his team found what local Gunditjmara people had long known about – extensive Aboriginal fish-trapping systems comprising hundreds of metres of excavated channels and dozens of basalt block dam walls constructed over innumerable generations before European contact. Coutts estimated that the volume of basalt blocks moved measured in “the many hundreds of tonnes”.

How the traps operated

Determining how the Budj Bim traps operated was made difficult after European alteration of Lake Condah’s water flows through installation of drainage channels in the 1880s and 1950s. Luckily, heavy winter rains in 1977 revealed how some Aboriginal-made channels fed water and eels into natural depressions that Coutts termed “holding ponds”. 

In addition, numerous C-shaped basalt block structures, averaging 3-4 metres across and representing house foundations – possibly clustered into villages – were recorded in the same area as the fish traps.

3D computer maps

In the 1990s and 2000s, Heather Builth, a PhD researcher from Flinders University, worked closely with the Gunditjmara to create sophisticated 3D computer maps of channels and basalt block dam walls and fish traps along Darlot Creek (Killara) at the southern end of the Budj Bim cultural landscape.

Builth computer-modelled water levels and revealed that these stone features were constructed across the lava flow to form a complex system of artificial ponds to hold floodwaters and eels at different stages of growth.

These holding ponds allowed eels to grow in a restricted and protected area and be available to the Gunditjmara for much of the year. 

Critically, increasing the availability of the eels centred on improving eel survival, given that the eels breed in the Coral Sea. Builth described this complex network of ponds as “aquaculture”.

In summary

The Gunditjmara people used stones to build a system of channels, weirs and traps using their knowledge of the seasonal rise and fall of water levels. The Gunditjmara trapped eels by placing long, funnel-shaped woven baskets in the weirs. They also trapped turtles and fish. The trapping, harvesting and farming of eels provided a plentiful supply of food for the Gunditjmara people. 

They also traded the eels, which were very valuable, at meetings with other Aboriginal groups.

Heritage Listing 

The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape became  part of the National Heritage List on the 20th of July 2004 and almost 15 years later to the day  was granted World Heritage Listing. 

Budj Bim being included on the world heritage list means the site is recognised as having "outstanding universal value" and is 1 of 19 other locations in Australia that have made the list.

This was a landmark decision as it is one of few places recognised purely for its importance to the First Nations Peoples.

Budj Bim Cultural Landscape

The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, located in the traditional Country of the Gunditjmara people in south-eastern Australia, consists of three serial components containing one of the world’s most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems. The Budj Bim lava flows provide the basis for the complex system of channels, weirs and dams developed by the Gunditjmara in order to trap, store and harvest kooyang (short-finned eel – Anguilla australis). The highly productive aquaculture system provided an economic and social base for Gunditjmara society for six millennia. The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape is the result of a creational process narrated by the Gunditjmara as a deep time story, referring to the idea that they have always lived there. From an archaeological perspective, deep time represents a period of at least 32,000 years. The ongoing dynamic relationship of Gunditjmara and their land is nowadays carried by knowledge systems retained through oral transmission and continuity of cultural practice.