Budj Bim heritage areas
Budj Bim heritage areas includes several protected areas in Victoria, Australia, the largest two being Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape and the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape. Within the latter, there are three Indigenous Protected Areas: the Tyrendarra Indigenous Protected Area, Kurtonitj Indigenous Protected Area, and the Lake Condah Indigenous Protected Area.
All of the protected areas are related to the volcanic landscape created by the eruption of Budj Bim more than 30,000 years ago, and the dormant volcano is included in the National Heritage and World Heritage sites. The various areas are of great historic and cultural significance to various clans of the Gunditjmara, the local Aboriginal people: Budj Bim features in their mythology as a creator-being, and the Gunditjmara people developed an extensive system of aquaculture on the land created by the lava flows up to 8,000 years ago. Tae Rak forms part of the wetlands, and its English name is remembered for the Lake Condah Mission which was established a few kilometres away in 1867.
Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape was added to the National Heritage List on 20 July 2004, and Budj Bim Cultural Landscape was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 6 July 2019. The land is owned and managed by Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, a Registered Aboriginal Party, along with various other bodies involved in landcare.
Historic and cultural significance
Volcanic eruption
The creation story of the local Gunditjmara people is based on the eruption of Budj Bim more than 30,000 years ago. It was via this event that an ancestral creator-being known as Budj Bim was revealed. Budj Bim's eruption was dated at within 3,100 years either side of 36,900 years BP, and nearby Tower Hill similarly dated, in early 2020. Significantly, owing to the presence of human artefacts found under volcanic ash at Tower Hill, this is a "minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria", and also could be interpreted as evidence for the Gunditjmara oral histories which tell of volcanic eruptions being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence.Eel traps
The Tyrendarra lava flow changed the drainage pattern of the region, and created large wetlands. From some thousands of years before European settlement in the area in the early 19th century, the Gunditjmara clans had developed a system of aquaculture which channelled the water of the Darlot Creek into adjacent lowlying areas trapping short-finned eels and other fish in a series of weirs, dams and channels. This provided a year-round supply of eels which were harvested with woven traps and often smoked in hollows of the manna gum, and permitted a forager society to develop into a settled society constructing permanent stone dwellings. The engineered wetlands provided the basis to sustain large groups of people to dwell permanently in the vicinity.The first European to see the traps was Chief Protector of Aborigines in Port Phillip district, George Augustus Robinson, in July 1841. He reported "an immense piece of ground trenched and banked, resembling the work of civilized man but which on inspection I found to be the work of the Aboriginal natives, purposefully constructed for catching eels", in a swampy area near Mount William, in south-western Victoria. He estimated that the area covered at least. The evidence was buried or ignored for 135 years, until Peter Coutts of the Victoria Archaeological Survey carried out surveys at Lake Condah, altogether different terrain, in the 1970s. He found extensive fish-trapping systems, with hundreds of metres of excavated channels and dozens of basalt block dam walls, the volume of which he estimated at "many hundreds of tonnes". Europeans constructed drainage channels in the 1880s and 1950s, but in 1977 heavy rains revealed more of the original work, as well as house foundations made of basalt blocks. Dating the use of channels by various means and different people put them at up to 8,000 years old.
Harry Lourandos, researcher from the University of Sydney, investigated a huge Aboriginal fish trap at Toolondo, north of Lake Condah, which he named "eel farms". In the 1990s and 2000s, 3D computer maps recreated the channels, showing that the stone walls were built across the lava flow to form a complex system of artificial ponds to hold floodwaters and eels at different stages of growth. Researcher Heather Builth called the systems "aquaculture". The discovery of these large-scale farming techniques and manipulation of the landscape, highlighted in Bruce Pascoe's best-selling book Dark Emu in 2014, shows that the Indigenous inhabitants were not only hunter gatherers, but cultivators and farmers. The work of Peter Kershaw, noted palynologist at Monash University, suggested that the complex was about 8000 years BP.
After the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires had burnt more than around Lake Condah and in the Budj Bim National Park, further areas of aquaculture, previously concealed under vegetation, were revealed, in an area known as the Muldoon trap complex. A smaller system, including a channel of about long had been hidden in the long grass and other vegetation. A further cultural heritage survey is planned, in collaboration with archaeologists familiar with the site and local Indigenous rangers.
Frontier wars
After European settlement began in western Victoria from the late 1830s, attempts to colonise the Gunditjmara led to the Eumeralla Wars, which did not conclude until the 1860s. The rocks and uneven land of the lava flow gave the Gunditjmara some advantage, as the terrain was unsuited to horses. However, many Aboriginal people were killed, and the rest displaced. The Victorian Government created Aboriginal reserves to house them; some were moved to Lake Condah Mission after establishment in 1867.Lake Condah
The Kerrup-Jmara are a clan of Gunditjmara Aboriginal people, who lived around the shores of the lake, which they called Tae Rak, for thousands of years pre-dating the arrival of Europeans, and had specific responsibility for it.Lake Condah was first happened upon by European settlers in 1841, when David Edgar and William Thompson Edgar were travelling through the area. Edgar gave it the name Lake Condon. Anglican pastoralist Cecil Pybus Cooke, who in 1849 acquired Lake Condah station, changed the name of Lake Condon to Lake Condah in the mistaken belief that it meant "black swan", which lived on the lake. The lake itself is a shallow basin, about in length and wide.
In March 2008, Lake Condah was returned to Gunditjmara people. The Lake Condah Restoration Conservation Management Plan was completed in a way that ensured that cultural heritage values were maintained, and works were completed in 2010, winning the Civil Contractors Federation Earth Award.
The Mission
The Lake Condah Mission was established in 1867 as a Church of England mission, approximately from Lake Condah, which had been home to the Kerrupjmara people, after displaced Gunditjmara refused to move from their traditional lands. The site, on north of Darlot Creek, was formally reserved in 1869, the same year that the Victorian Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines was created by the Aboriginal Protection Act 1869. The mission was overseen by the various incarnations of the Central Board. In 1886 the Half-Caste Act 1886 was passed, which provided for the removal of "half-caste" Aboriginal people from reserves. The Aborigines Act 1910 rescinded that decision, and many people returned.Local bluestone was used build the houses and the church, named St Mary's. There were 26 buildings in total, with cultivated. By 1871 there were about 80 residents, and by the late 1880s about 120.
The mission closed at the end of 1918. The last residents were transferred to Lake Tyers Mission apart from four elderly people. The residents' request for the land to be handed over to them for farming was refused, and blocks of land were sold to soldier settlers. Former residents living in the area continued to attend the church and send their children to the mission school, which continued to operate until June 1948.
In 1950 it was decided that the Mission would close, and the church and other facilities were destroyed to facilitate this. According to Noel Learmonth's Four Towns and a Survey: "Condah Mission Station Church, 1885. Destroyed 1950. Stones used to enlarge Church of England Hamilton and to pave cowyards". Other sources say that the church was demolished in 1957.
Lake Condah Mission Station was mentioned in the Bringing Them Home Report as an institution that housed Indigenous children removed from their families.
Mission land
On 1 January 1987, the mission lands were returned to Gunditjmara people, specifically the Kerrup-Jmara Elders Aboriginal Corporation, following the Aboriginal Land Act 1987, when the former reserve was vested to the Kerrup Jmara Elders Corporation. The transfer included "full management, control and enjoyment by the Kerrup-Jmara Elders Aboriginal Corporation of the land granted to it". The Parks Australia and the Kerrup-Jmara people undertook a project in which part of the Mission was recreated, with buildings rebuilt, including tourist accommodation.The Kerrup-Jmara Elders Corporation entered liquidation during the 1990s. The reserve was first handed to the Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation to manage the lands, before they were vested to the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation in March 2008 by the Commonwealth government., GMTOAC continue to hold and manage the land.
The mission land was included in "The Mt Eccles Lake Condah Area: About 7880ha, 6km south west of Macarthur, comprising Mount Eccles National Park, Stones State Faunal Reserve, Muldoons Aboriginal Land, Allambie Aboriginal Land and Condah Mission", which was declared part of the Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape in July 2004 under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.