You may not have heard of Budj Bim (pronounced ‘Boodgie Bim’) as it was only declared a World Heritage Area in 2019. So, what is Budji Bim? What am I missing and why is it important? This site joins a prestigious list of places you’ve definitely heard about: Machu Picchu, the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Great Barrier Reef, the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China. All of these locations are globally recognised for their universal heritage values. But unlike many archaeological monuments or wilderness areas, Budj Bim is a living, breathing and functioning landscape. It has always, and still is, supporting the lives of people today.
This is an example of sustainable aquaculture on a scale that modern people can only dream about. But the 37,000 year old dreamtime stories of the people who built these landscapes are real. They offer an insight into a history we can once again imagine. In a time when the world is struggling to rebuild failing ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More, I am certain that the Gunditjmara Nation’s story will make an important contribution to all our futures.
A story of the past and glimpse to our future
It’s never simply people who define an ecosystem’s significance. It’s always through connection to a specific other animal that we succeed and learn the true nature of ourselves as other animals. In this instance, humans chose to create the world’s largest (and longest-surviving) aquaculture system to farm short-finned eels (called kooyang, in native language).
Constructions, built by people, connect eel ecology and human values to one of the longest-lasting stories in living memory. Its origins date back to an event which occurred 37,000 years ago, when a volcano erupted. The ponds and channels that describe the landscape are like the features of a wisened face. The enduring relationship provided everything that a thriving society needed to survive longer than any other civilisation on Earth.
This fish, as much as its people, defines the region’s health and prosperity. Without it, there would be no towns, no water and no farming today. But a full notion of their importance, including to our future, was lost with the destruction of the Gunditjmara culture.
The Budji Bim World Heritage Area is where we can relearn how humans can be a force for good. It’s a glimpse of what our future might look like.
These insights might just be key to reinventing sustainable food systems that also combat multiple complex problems of climate and biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More loss. Hence, it is the greatest privilege to have the opportunity to learn the truth and become part of this story’s future too.
Why Budj Bim is important
#1 – Telling truth from fiction
The first thing I noticed after passing through the gate into Aboriginal-owned land was the health of the vegetation. The landscape was tussocky and diverse. The nearby Lake Condah Estate floodplain is bowling-green flat: featureless, dusty and barren. It’s fringed by drainage ditches and stripped of moisture. You see a few cattle on the horizon. Inside the World Heritage Area it’s been brought back to life. There is a thriving mosaic of lush green phragmites, dense stands of juncus and basalt-strewn grass plains.
Bill Gammage commented about how quickly the deep reds and violet hues of native vegetation become obliterated by sheep and cows. Mere decades after colonials arrived, artists began depicting grassy landscapes as golden in colour. This romantic impression is fake. Rather like the name ‘Mt Eccles’, given to the 60m high dome of an ancient volcano visible just above Lake Condah’s tree-line.
‘… the settlers renamed the sacred site of Budj Bim as Mt Eeles in honour of an English aristocrat. Due to a map misprint later in the century, this in turn became the totally meaningless Mt Eccles’.
The People of Budj Bim, Second Edition, June 2022. By the Gunditjmara with Gib Wettenhall
Australia’s second-longest serving Prime Minister, John Howard, famously advocated the forced teaching of history. Apparently this was in order to learn from past mistakes. But what’s the point when such history is based on a negligently poor historic records?
#2 – The world’s oldest story
What I learned on my first half-day tour of Budj Bim is a globally important and remarkably recent history of Australia.
In four hours, standing near a single spot of land, a story so old and compelling, can describe much of what we need, in order to imagine and build a better future for all of Australia. Trapped among patterns of boulders rearranged in the landscape after a volcanic eruption 37,000 years ago, is the oldest story in the world. But this isn’t simple folklore.
This Dreamtime story of Budji Bim’s domed head spewing forth teeth across the landscape is a mere headline (forgive the pun).
The complex relationship that evolved after the volcano, was carved into lost traditions, behaviour, customs, rituals, songs and dances. There are typically five generations in a century. Europeans settled in Portland Bay in 1834, about nine generations ago. The Gunditjmara’s creation story was created 2,000 generations ago. The most recent uncovering of their advanced land use, trade routes and artefacts through archeaology, bushfires and satellite reveal a civilisation perhaps as large and sophisticated as the city of Cusco during Inca rule.
‘Noel Butlin’s estimate of 30 – 35,000 as the immediate pre-contact Aboriginal population of the Western District indicates the potential number of people involved in the fishery.’
Ian J. McNiven and Damein Bell
But it was never just about people. The key to living sustainably has always been to respect wildlife. Why animals are humanity’s best hope it the subject I cover in detail in my book Wildlife in the Balance. Westerners mostly treat wildlife with contempt and that will be our downfall.
#3 – How animals and people shape landscapes
‘The animals are here to look after the land. We are here to look after the animals.’
– Reuben Smith, nature guide, Budj Bim
There is no doubt in my mind that Aboriginal people would have enhanced the population of eels or kooyong living throughout this region. Also, that the eels themselves created much of the farmland nutrientA substance that contains the raw materials for life. At a chemical level, these are contained inside compounds that are absorbed into the body and essential energy-containing molecules are extracted, so that energy can be transformed into other chemical processes that use the energy for living. More on which European-style agriculture was first based. As we’ve exhausted the soil though, farming will again become dependent on these animal-driven processes, so restoring the Budj Bim methods will be critical to our farming future.
Can you believe, that the people who know how to do this, live among us today? It begs the question why we continually turn to modern science to reinvent the wheel, while referring to indigenous wisdom as ‘primitive’ and ‘unadvanced.’
Eels connect land and oceans
We now know that migrating northern hemisphere salmon are responsible for spreading critical nutrients throughout farming landscapes. Salmon, eels and other migratory fish, bring nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More from the deep ocean (this connection we have to the sea is vastly underestimated). Though due mostly to a decline in species like eels, 96% of that nutrient transfer capacity has been lost. In other words, eels were laying the foundations for our farming systems long before any humans arrived on the continent.
Our short-finned eels migrate about 4,000 km to spawn in the coral sea. They then swim back along the East Australian CurrentA warm water current that runs south down the east coast of Australia, starting in the Coral Sea before turning east and heading towards New Zealand. The south extent can sometimes reach south of Tasmania. The sea level can be almost a metre higher in the north (because the warm surface expands), causing it to flow 'downhill' at rates of More and climb waterfalls. They spend the next 10-15 years living on land. People living in the Budj Bim region caught a proportion of eels to store and fatten them up in purpose-maintained reed lagoons. The remaining bycatch was returned to the land. Eel numbers at the time would have been vast. But the cooperative nature of eel and human ecology would have increased landscape fertility.
Inching towards collapse
Aquatic systems have been shown to be dependent on short-term (decades) and long-term (up to geological timescales) sources of nutrient. But these studies don’t imagine how people and fish could be a principle and beneficial driver for building fertility over tens of thousands of years. Yet here we are. The Budj Bim is showing us how that was possible. Instead, we ‘manage’ fisheries as though the resource is of only short-term significance.
The Victorian Fisheries Authority is supposed to manage fish stocks but eels barely register as a concern. Yet their numbers have plummeted by 95% or more. Fisheries stock assessment simply ignores the socio-ecological role of animals and turns fishing into an ecological ‘sink’. Meaning, while fish populations can stay measurably unchanged for a long time, the ecosystem beneath inches towards total collapse.
Once that happens, everything disappears, including whole farming economies. The disappearance of waterbirds, which would have flourished as a consequence of good behaviour, is a sign of that impending collapse.
I’ve heard this referred to as ‘fishing from the bottom of the barrel’. Fishing should instead be done like it was in the Budj Bim. Where the barrel was kept overflowing and only food required for local sustenance was creamed off the top.
Globally, most fisheries management is a shameful example of how not to manage a landscape. It treats animals as commodities rather than part of a functioning ecosystem.
Large-scale aquaculture that worked
To be a source of human nutrition for tens of thousands of years, the eels would need to be ‘farmed’ in a manner befitting the entire landscape. It’s all the more remarkable to think that this was done throughout an ice-ageA period of reduction in Earth’s temperature of between about 4–7 degrees that resulted in the rapid expansion of ice sheets and glaciation of much of the Earth’s surface. More. At times, sea levels were 125m lower than today. The aquaculture and community trading environment was resilient enough to maintain eel migration and feed a resident human population. It’s thought the Budj Bim was one of the most stable and sedentary societies. Because the food was so abundant and reliable, they didn’t need to be nomadic. They lived in villages and traded as far north as Broken Hill and, when sea levels were 125m lower, into Tasmania.
#4 – Slowing water down
Thinking like a mountain
I asked our guide Reuben about the land’s history. ‘It was farmed intensively for livestock since the 1850s’, he said, ‘we acquired it in 2008 and decided to remove the cattle. The landscape has recovered since then.’
In just 15 years you can see the difference. Red-necked Wallabies burst-forth from cover habitat. We’re joined by a pair of curious wedge-tailed eagles. These majestic predators are sentinels for the environment. Their presence, along with Swamp Harriers, skeins of pelicans, marsh (whiskered) terns, Glossy Ibis and grazing Black-tailed Native Hens, are all indicators of the otherwise hidden potential for an ecosystem to breathe back into life.
Australia is still arguing over water rights. The once mighty Murray River, navigable all the way to the sea, is now lifeless in places. Fish die in their millions and the river dries up. Water is allocated wastefully to farm wasteland with no soil to retain moisture, with the majority draining back out to sea. Or, evaporating, to re-enter the land-to-sea water cycle and build massive storms that destroy whole towns.
To survive, the Gunditjmara had to learn to think like a mountain.
‘That humans have not learnt to think like a mountain is why ‘we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea’.
Quote by Alan Leopold, from Beastly by Keggie Carew.
Reducing drought and deluge
As Erica Gies, author of Water Always Wins says ‘slow water’ is the means to combat drought and deluge. It can even adapt to avoid the increased fire risk of 48 percent of global land areas and half the world’s population.
What little water does reach crops is used for export, while local people (everyone) suffer as the very landscape is destroyed from beneath their feet.
Ironically, Budj Bim has to fight to divert a tidal wave of water pouring wastefully off land elsewhere, while creating an ecosystem sponge that would retain it longest for everyone downstream. Since 85% of Australians live on the coast, this is quite important.
‘In summer, although outflows exceeded inflows, water still remained. While a late 19th century sketch depicts a much-reduced Lake Condah with one of the fishtraps high and dry, there was generally permanent water in the northern section of the lake’
The People of Budj Bim, Second Edition, June 2022. By the Gunditjmara with Gib Wettenhall
Why, I wonder, aren’t more surrounding landowners not screaming advocates for this plan? Why aren’t they begging to be part of restoration efforts for every creek and wetland throughout the area? The farmers of this region need this water wisely allocated, just as much as they need the nutrients the fish bring. What better way than to create a holding area to refill the aquifer, while also reducing extreme cycles of flood and drought?
Embracing a better future by learning from our past
Only a fool would wish to subvert our continent’s history with falsehoods and deny us the chance to learn something critically important to all our futures. But that seems to be what’s happened. There is deliberate suppression of indigenous wisdom in science. But in any case, these attempts are feeble. All but a few words of local Gunditjmara dialect remain. But the stories persist because they are as old as time and as enduring as the steely basalt rocks that characterise the landscape.
For thousands of generations, Aboriginal people learned through trial and error. They would pay the ultimate price, if they didn’t learn to behave sustainably. Such stories endure because culture and nature are so tightly bound it ultimately means the difference between life and death.
Today, modern tools like Light Detection and Ranging Lasars (LiDAR) are helping to right history by once again revealing the scale and significance of this remarkable place. But we must remember, that the associated customs, cultures and harvesting techniques were still in use this century. The people who know this live among us today. It’s just the artefacts that remain hidden below the thin veneer of a post-colonial landscape: flattened and dessicated.
Visiting here this Christmas was truly wonderful and I wish to extend my thanks to our tour guide Reuben Smith and the Gunditjmara for the invitation.
I am certain that more and more people will visit. It’s a rare example of the capacity we all have, as humans, to live alngside animals while rebuilding a habitable planet.
