Gunditjmara Erotic

The Gunditjmara are the people of the lava country of southwestern Victoria, and they are known above all for something that upends the old textbook picture of Aboriginal Australia: they were engineers and fish farmers. On the basalt flows that spilled from the volcano Budj Bim, their ancestors cut channels, built weirs and ponds, and managed the seasonal movement of kooyang, the short-finned eel, in a system parts of which date back at least 6,600 years. Beside the waterworks stand the stone footings of clustered houses. Eels were smoked and traded, and people stayed put for much of the year. In 2019 the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape became a UNESCO World Heritage site, the first in Australia listed for Aboriginal cultural values alone.

Their country runs along the coast around Portland and Port Fairy and inland across the stony rises to Lake Condah, which they call Tae Rak. Offshore lies Deen Maar, the island where the spirits of the dead are said to travel. The language, Dhauwurd Wurrung, belongs to the Pama-Nyungan family and was spoken in several dialects. It fell out of daily use under mission rule and is now being rebuilt from records and family memory. Society was organized into fifty-nine clans under hereditary headmen, and every person belonged through the mother to one of two moieties, named for the white cockatoo and the red-tailed black cockatoo. The creation story of Budj Bim, an ancestral being whose forehead is the mountain and whose teeth are the scattered lava stones, may preserve a memory of the eruption itself, around 37,000 years ago.

British whalers and then pastoralists arrived in the 1830s. The killing at the Convincing Ground near Portland, a fight over a beached whale, is among the earliest recorded massacres in Victoria. What followed were the Eumeralla Wars, two decades of guerrilla fighting launched from stony ground where horses could not follow. Survivors were gathered onto the Lake Condah Mission from 1867. Gunditjmara men served in both world wars, then saw mission land carved up for returned soldiers while they themselves were refused blocks. The turnaround came through the courts: a 1981 High Court case brought by two Gunditjmara women against the Alcoa smelter established their standing to defend heritage sites, the mission land was handed back in 1987, and native title was recognized in 2007. Today Gunditjmara rangers manage Budj Bim, water has been returned to Tae Rak, and the eel is once more a working part of community life. Singer Archie Roach and Reg Saunders, the first Aboriginal commissioned officer in the Australian Army, were both Gunditjmara.