READING THE AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE: European and Aboriginal perspectives

by Jim Bowler

First published in Cappuccino papers  No. One, Imagine The Future Inc, Melbourne, 1995, and based on a 1993 presentation at the ecoversity.

Farewell Australia! you are a rising child and doubtless some day will reign a great princess in the South; but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.

These were Charles Darwin's parting words as he left King George Sound on 14 March, 1836. Darwin was travel-weary, homesick for the green groves of England and the damask tints of deciduous autumnal woods. He found no solace in the unremitting dull greys of eucalypt woodlands, populated by a bizarre array of hopping marsupials. The sight of a dark and barbarous population of natives, their dancing bodies `all moving in hideous harmony', reinforced his faith in the supremacy of the white race that had come endowed with ships, guns and machines.

Subsequent immigrants, initially drawn almost entirely from the British Isles, set about converting this strange landscape into something resembling the one they had left. In the better-watered coastal fringes of the south-east and south-west where the early settlements were concentrated, dense forests were seen as standing in the way of development. 'Development' meant clearing the forests and introducing English pastures to nourish the cloven-hoofed domestic animals that had long been adapted to the humid landscapes of England, Scotland and Ireland.

And clear the land they certainly did! My earliest ancestral arrival in Australia, Tom Bowler (1840-1936), a representative of the great exodus following the potato famine in Ireland, selected a 640-acre prospect in the rich red volcanic soils of South Gippsland at Leongatha. Though he had only one good eye, Tom Bowler, alone and unaided, cleared almost every stick of the huge bluegums and rainforest that covered that square mile of country, until it resembled the treeless hills of his own green homeland on the windswept western tip of County Kerry.

The newcomers reacted to their new environment with hostility and alienation, a sense that is expressed powerfully in Henry Lawson's `The Drover's Wife'. Hostility to the land was matched by an even more vigorous hostility to its occupants. Though there were some notable altruistic benefactors, most settlers' attitude to the Aboriginal occupants was at best one of scientific, almost zoological curiosity; at worst, and all too frequently, it was one of outright oppression and destruction.

If the dispossession of the Aboriginal people amounted to gross injustice, the institutionalised denigration perpetrated in the name of science was an abomination on humanity itself. The invaders set about collecting in their new land, driven by an insatiable urge to possess. In the words of historian Tom Griffiths, the settlers became the hunters and gatherers, hunting the occupants and collecting their artifacts, often without reference to the people who used them. Stone tools were collected by the truckload. Today they still crowd the basements of Australia's museums, legacies of a sad and misguided phase of collection mania.

It was not only the stone tools that attracted the collectors' attentions, but also the skeletal remains of the occupants themselves. Darwin's dramatic account of the evolution of humanity fuelled notions of racial superiority in the minds of those whose task it was to expand the frontiers of empire and commerce. Darwin's opponents, on the other hand, believed that the dark and barbar íous races had regressed from a more advanced ancestral phase, and set out to prove this by measuring the capacity of Aboriginal skulls.

Medical scientists raced to test the theory that racial superiority could be verified by measurable anatomical differences. Anatomical samples from morgues were dispatched to England and Scotland. Only in the last two years have some such skeletal remains been returned from the University of Edinburgh.

Closer to home, the youthful National Museum of Victoria embarked on a major collecting spree. One of its most enthusiastic collectors was a young mining engineer, George Murray Black. Son of George Black, who took up a large tract of land at Tarwin Meadows near Inverloch in 1851, young Murray was among the earliest engineering students at the University of Melbourne. After graduating in 1898 with special interest in mining, he spent many years in Kalgoorlie and other mining fields, where he became fascinated by Aboriginal burial sites and the scientific possibilities raised by the skeletons they enclosed. In collaboration with the University of Melbourne and the new Museum, Murray Black set about collecting a huge number of skeletons.

In the early 1960s, as a young geology graduate, I was living in the same area, under the shadow of the pioneering George Black and his innovations at Tarwin Meadows. I ventured to interview his now aging son, Murray, who had retired on the homestead property. Already well into his eighties but lucid and very articulate, Mr Black recounted tales of his younger days, including his education in palaeontology by Fred McCoy, founder of the National Museum of Victoria and an avid opponent of Darwin. He also told me of his later excavations of Aboriginal skeletons.

Murray Black's interest in his skeletal excavations seemed to be confined to questions of orientation - extended versus upright burials, whether the body was lying on its left or right side, and other variations of interment practice. There was no reference to the living populations whose ancestors' remains, regardless of how recent the death, were being collected in the name of science.

On one occasion Black worked over summer in the Murray-Murrumbidgee area, and accumulated two truckloads of skeletons. There was a long delay before the trucks were organised to deliver the material to Melbourne. By the time they arrived, silverfish had eaten the labels, so it was impossible to tell which cranium belong to which post-cranial remains. The entire collection was useless to the university's Anatomy Department; it was dispatched to the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra, where it stayed until just a few years ago, when the remains were repacked and returned for burial as close as possible to where they came from.

As we talked, Murray Black remarked on the antiquity of skeletal examples. If we were searching for ancient remains, he said, an important clue lay in the Cohuna region. Here, on the margins of a lake, rabbits had exhumed fragments of human remains heavily encrusted by soil carbonate, which the observant engineer knew took a long time to form. He provided a sketch diagram, which subsequently proved to define the channelled margin of Kow Swamp. Some twelve years later, following the detective work of Allan Thorne, Kow Swamp became a household word.

In the absence of an attempt to understand the continuity between past and present Aboriginal cultures, `scientific research' was simply grave-robbing. In the eyes of the disempowered remnants of the indigenous occupants, it was sacrilege. Their sense of deep indignation, of institutionalised oppression and exploitation, cannot easily be absolved by modern compromise. The wounds are many and deep; the scars will take a long time to heal.

The dualistic dilemma

The indignities visited on the Aboriginal people by the bone collectors and others were a reflection of the times. Human biologists of the past perpetrated some great atrocities; in so doing, they perpetuated obsolete philosophical views of nature. Can we, the scientific community today, yet claim to have shaken off that baggage?

Prepared by Descartes, nurtured by the great advances of Newton in the context of Judaeo-Christian notions of conquest of the earth, the grand synthesis of Charles Darwin served multiple purposes. It entrenched earlier conservative attitudes, and created and justified new ones. It emphasised the idea that there was a dichotomy between science and nature. The superiority of the white races seemed at last to be underpinned by scientific justification, and the gap between western `civilised' people and the barbaric races of the earth was absolute. For many years the now-discredited theory of social Darwinism was used to condone body-snatching and justify racially motivated research. Yet Darwin's evolutionary views also inspired a new sense of enlightenment among human biologists, a sense that was to spin off into the burgeoning science of anthropology.

The new view of the world as a predictable system, with its Cartesian time-space co-ordinates, was premised on a new culture, that of the scientific method, in which the observer was assumed to be disinterested and detached from the object observed. That system, incorporated into science and technology centres of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provided the new power on earth. The power and influence of science and its technology brainchild, however, have been achieved at a price. Concepts of progress and development have been incorporated into the international global economic system, and form its philosophical basis. The price of such innovation is now evident in the enormous damage the human race has visited on the fragile resources of the planet - damage that has arisen directly from explosive populations empowered by expanding technologies, but with little awareness of their long-term impact.

Addressing the question of the separation implicit in the scientific method, the renowned nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg remarked in 1962: 'This partition has penetrated so deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude towards the problem of reality. [My italics.]

The rate of change that has brought us to the present predicament is no less mind-boggling. We stand today at the arrowhead of further changes of such immensity that we can little imagine the effects our actions will have on future generations.

In just my own lifetime, in the person of Murray Black, I knew and conversed with a student of Fred McCoy, who inducted Black into the wonders of palaeontology from the now fundamentalist viewpoint of special creation. A contemporary of Darwin who was dedicated to demolishing the radical views of the Cambridge upstart, McCoy at one point commissioned the acquisition of an entire family of Congo gorillas, and proceeded to deliver a three-hour marathon lecture to the good citizens of Melbourne on the evils of the Darwinian heresy.

Through Murray Black via McCoy to Charles Darwin, in just two generations the entire way of looking at the earth and the way we perceive ourselves in it has changed. We ourselves are both products and agents of that change.

It is often difficult to recognise and adapt to such rapidly changing, almost kaleidoscopic views of humanity and nature. It is even more difficult to convince society of the need to change course when notions of progress and development are so widely entrenched.

Two such major changes confront us.

The first involves a realisation that the mechanical view of nature is no longer adequate. As physicists found when studying the nature of light, we cannot predict nature with mathematical accuracy. Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave, depending on what experiment is conducted. It cannot be both, yet it is.

With the arrival of quantum theory and Einstein's revolutionary demonstration of curved space as embedded in that elegantly simple formula E= MC2, an entirely new approach to reality is required. Heisenberg, the author of the Uncertainty Principle (another manifestation of the unpredictability of nature), commented 'I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at nights and ended almost in despair. . . . I repeated to myself again and again the question. . . . can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?'

Although we are now in a milieu that has thoroughly demonstrated the inadequacies of the mechanistic view of nature, few of us have actually begun to change the way we view the earth and ourselves in it. The mechanistic view of reality is alive and prospering. It is enshrined in our economic systems, institutionalised in major corporations in which the profit motive is driven by the ordained precepts of progress and development.

Yet some movements, no less remarkable for their spontaneity and emergence of human spirit, are now making major impacts on society. The awakening of environmental awareness, the emergence of green politics, the radical and sometimes strange tree-hugging yearnings for nature are manifestations of deep and permanent changes in the way we see nature, in the way we see and react to each other.

The second major challenge confronting Australians involves coming to terms with the original inhabitants of this country. Most people see this in terms of accommodating the current social, economic and political aspirations of the Aboriginal people, but the issue is a much deeper one. Unless there is a real sense of mutual learning and empathy between the competing cultures, the current agenda of reconciliation will remain little more than a political apologia.

In a special way, these two major issues are interrelated. On one hand we seek a paradigm that integrates humanity and nature more closely than the Newtonian mechanistic model permits. On the other hand we seek to understand a people whose vision of reality has never suffered the rupture between body and soul, between matter and mind, between humanity and nature. The spiritual bonds that emerge from the land to provide Aboriginal people with their own identity and integrity remain mysterious to us; they are placed in the realm of mythologies, somewhat unreal to the Western mind. The route we take in rediscovering our own ties to nature, our own sense of place in this land, may well involve a deeper understanding of those long-standing cultural traditions, Aboriginal mythologies.

The challenge we face today is not only to accommodate Aboriginal aspirations but also to become more aware of their own living landscape and their sense of place in it. In that context, we should ask the question: `Do we have something to learn from Aboriginal culture?'

As a largely European culture, now sharing a continent with a people who had at least 60,000 years of continuous occupation, we have an extraordinary opportunity to produce a synthesis of the old and the new, of the material and spiritual, of humanity and nature. The key to that synthesis involves opening our minds to mythologies and cultures that remain alive in Australia as in no other place on earth.

Learning from mythologies: Mungo to Mulan

The sciences of geology and prehistory, often working together, have opened our eyes and imagination to the immense time depth of humanity in this land, and to the no less remarkable expressions of the human spirit in times past. Nowhere has this been more dramatically expressed than at Lake Mungo in western NSW.

In 1967 I commenced a study of ancient climates to explore the impact of ice-age environments on inland Australia. I was particularly interested in the ancient lakes, most of which are now dry. One peculiarity of the Australian lakes is that they almost always have a substantial windblown dune on their eastern or downwind margins. Termed `lunettes', these dunes seemed likely to preserve much ancient evidence of lake-shore environments. None was to prove more productive than the eroding lunette on the eastern shores of Lake Mungo.

The margins of that desiccated basin preserve the shorelines of a once-great freshwater lake. The reconstruction of the epic stories of the people who lived on those lake shores more than 40,000 years ago now amounts to a mythology or Australian legend in its own right. Lake Mungo has come to represent Australia's most sacred place, sacred both to white Australians, as represented by its World Heritage nomination, and to those original Australians who see it as the central embodiment of their ancestral people. In 1969 and 1972 we discovered and excavated the remarkable remains of ancient human occupants dating back to 30,000 years. This not only changed the dimension of Australian history but, in a special sense, it also changed the whole notion of being Australian.

The realisation that this land nourished and was known by whole populations of people for 40,000 years instantly changed the nature of that landscape. Furthermore, the cremated lady (Mungo Lady, as she has become known to her descendants) had been ritually buried, and Mungo Man had had a fully articulated extended burial by red ochre, two kilograms of which had to be brought in from at least 100 kilometres away. That this should have occurred in a burial now reliably dated to 30,000 years ago indelibly marks the landscape with the imprint of the sense of spirit.

In a special sense, the people and the land that supported them were both enlarged by the growth of consciousness. Yet the realisation that the Australian landscape has been humanised for tens of thousands of years has yet to be welded into the Australian conscience.

Other Mungos?

If the Mungo evidence opened new insights into ancient people in this ancient land, what of other equivalent sites? Do other areas similarly demonstrate the huge changes in past climates? What other places reveal that integrity of people-land interaction so dramatically portrayed on those ancient lake shores?

In the search for other Mungos, we undertook an exploration that scanned a very large part of the continent. Satellite images, aerial photographs and ground expeditions revealed that, although many sites doubtless preserve evidence as dramatic as Mungo's, nature has not yet uncovered them for us. In the Mungo case, extensive erosion spanning probably the last 2000 years has exposed the internal anatomy of the dune, revealing the secrets of its past in a way rarely achieved elsewhere.

One place in northern Australia does offer intriguing evidence of past changes, where greatly expanded lake shorelines bear witness to climates much wetter than today's. Moreover, this is in an area of present-day Aboriginal occupancy.

Sturt Creek runs south along the eastern margin of the Kimberley Block, terminating in a series of lakes in the Great Sandy Desert. Lying within the dune-fields of the now fossil desert, the area falls within the traditional lands of the Walmatjiri people. Today the Aboriginal owners hold title to the land surrounding the lakes, where they run a cattle property. The community takes its name from the major lake in the interconnected system, a basin known as Mulan.

When we first entered the area in 1978, the success of our enterprise depended on the goodwill of the traditional owners. In my very first discussions with them, I was treated to a striking example of cultural continuity between land and people.

Seated in the red dust in a concentric circle of elders, younger men and onlookers, we examined maps - some on cartographic paper, others drawn there in the red sand. When we examined a satellite image, the Mulan people read it in a way that would put most geology students to shame. Their ability instantly to recognise and translate subtle features on the image to real places on the ground immediately portrayed a different sense of spatial perceptions to my own.

Do these different perceptions ever intersect, or are they destined to remain poles apart, one to be accepted by the scientific community, the other destined as a wall piece in some museum of the future? In the minefields that underlie the Aboriginal-European cultural interface, that question and its various manifestations remain of crucial importance.

Humanity-nature recombined: Mulan creation story

While we continue to explore the geological account of the Mulan lake and dune system, it is instructive to record the equivalent indigenous account, as narrated by Rex Johns, the Chairman of the Mulan Community, in 1992.

The creation of the lakes involved two dogs chasing two emus. One dog chased one emu down the eastern branch of Sturt Creek; the other chased an emu down the western channel. The dogs caught the emus and killed them at the point where the channels meet; there a great body of water appeared. The dogs, then tired, but still very hostile, travelled along an eastern tributary. As they advanced up the channel, two boys heard them coming, panting and sweaty after their chase and recent kill. The boys, terrified for their safety, hid in a clump of bushes in the spinifex until the dogs passed by. They continued up the creek and entered a small cave, leaving their salty trails still to be found today as crystalline efflorescences along the margins of the creek and on the entrance to the cave.

Meanwhile, the boys were saved from the predators. The site of their escape is marked by a sacred stone. It remains there today, representing a special place in the cultural rituals of the community. It is known to and visited by the women and children, although various levels of information are concealed, some known only to the initiated. Squatting beside the sacred stone in a remote spinifex swale, Rex Johns narrated this account in hushed tones; the sense of mystery and reverence was pervasive.

In the mid-1970s a scientific party from Perth was exploring the region. They came across the sacred stone and, puzzled because it was entirely out of context in the stone-free desert sands, they collected it. They returned it to Perth, oblivious to the trauma their enthusiasm had produced in the lives of its owners. When we arrived shortly afterwards, the community desperately sought our help in getting the stone back. Fortunately, inquiries to Perth produced a positive response. The stone did return, and remains today in its traditional position.

This story and the living elements embodied in the presence of the sacred object encapsulate many expressions of the forces that link the community with nature: the sense of conquest endemic to nomadic life, animal against animal; death as the source of life - the death of the emus giving birth to the lake; human survival despite harshness of nature - the boys' triumph over the angry dogs; ritual celebration of life P the stone monument commemorating the epic.

What value this mythology? An archaic remnant of a disappearing culture, or a window into a tapestry of life in which we of European descent have long since lost the threads?

Mythology vs science - alternative or complementary perceptions?

As soon as we begin to explore Aboriginal perceptions alongside a European view of the world, we encounter language difficulties. The Aboriginal mythology becomes the `dreaming', a word that conjures up concepts of the unreal, transitory and make-believe. `Landscape', on the other hand, the English-language entry into issues of our environment, is a poor substitute for that concept of `earth-sky-trees-life-water', an integral unity that underlies Aboriginal concepts of nature. To discuss nature, we dissect it - geology, biology, zoology in all its parts. The very act of dissection destroys the unity we seek to understand.

So is it possible even to conduct a useful dialogue in terms acceptable both to science and mythology? (Teilhard de Chardin got into a lot of trouble with Peter Medewar for trying to do just this.)

In one sense, science and mythology are closely related; both provide a life-vision through which the individual apprehends and relates to the world around them. As a geologist with a special interest in landscape evolution, I see the constancy of change everywhere I travel. My life's work has given me a view of Australia that is probably quite different from that held by any of my colleagues, or even my own family.

The mythological story of the creation of Mulan Lake almost certainly provides a similar moulding influence on the way Rex Johns and his community relate to their lands. In a sense, both science and mythology act as the methods by which different people of different cultures apprehend the world they live in. Our attempts to reconstruct the world about us through science are subject to constant change; they certainly do not have the status of absolute truth, but rather function as models of reality. In that sense, science is another form of mythology.

At this point most of my scientific colleagues would disagree. In terms of their methodologies, the concepts are quite different; like fire and water, they are mutually exclusive. Does that mean that one is irrelevant to the other? I certainly cannot become Aboriginal. We all must work within and be true to our own cultures. But can we not learn from each other?

The Jungian philosopher Joseph Campbell has eloquently demonstrated the relevance of ancient cultures to modern humanity. In their often mysterious symbols, they preserve values and traditions that Western society has lost. In our own separation from nature, we in Australia face an extraordinary circumstance. We share this land with representatives of the world's most ancient culture, who still preserve such traditions. But how many of us have any understanding of this reality?

In their structural and spiritual links with nature, the Aboriginal people of Australia hold a mirror to our Western, pragmatic values. By closely examining its reflections, we may yet succeed in discovering our own sense of place in this strange land and, at the same time, build those bridges of understanding with the Aboriginal people so essential to reconciliation and cultural growth. The future notion of a distinctively Australian culture may well depend on the success of that educational enterprise.

Perhaps the `really different attitude towards the problem of reality' that Heisenberg so earnestly sought awaits its discovery in Australia. We must explore these possibilities in our journey towards achieving the status Darwin predicted for the `Great Princess of the South'. In this endeavour human biologists, anthropologists, even geologists and especially museums have a major role to play.

Copyright Jim Bowler, 1995.

Jim Bowler is a geomorphologist with a lifetime interest in the evolution of the Australian landscape. His early work on the climatic history of this continent resulted in major archaeological discoveries in the Lake Mungo area of western NSW. Jim is currently a professorial associate in the School of Earth Sciences at Melbourne University where he continues his work on climatic history and the interaction of people and the natural environment - with special reference to Australia's semi-arid regions.