Human Interaction with a Karst Landscape
The arrival of man
Human interaction with any Australian landscape is currently believed to date back approximately 50,000 years, which places it in the late Pleistocene epoch, continuing into the Recent, in earth terms.
Man arrived as the period of glaciation was waning, but the exposed land area of Australia at that time was still probably nearly 20% greater than that of the present. The sea still lapped only the outer edge of the continental shelf, resulting in continuous land, or land broken by narrow straits and channels by which travellers could move from Asia into Australia. They could also move from what is now mainland Australia into Tasmania or other smaller off-shore islands such as Kangaroo Island. The swamps and forests of the Tertiary had adapted to the changing climate, and the vegetation, dominated by eucalypts, was not very different from that which the first Europeans saw.
Many theories have been put forward to explain Aboriginal presence in Australia, and it is accepted now that they were migrants from Asia. The multiple streams of migration theory, which postulated three streams of migration, down both east and west coasts and inland through the river systems west of the great divide, has given way to the conviction that the 'migrations' were a gradual movement of people from some not-yet-determined part of Asia in steps and starts, using small boats or rafts to cross in stages to the Australian mainland. Modern events and evidence in the country's north and north west show that there has been frequent traditional traffic between Australia, and New Guinea and Macassar to its north, with exchange of both goods, such as trepang, or ideas and cultural patterns, such as exist in the Torres Strait Islands and Cape York.
But perhaps after all, the idea of coastal streams of migration, even if what we visualise is a sort of time-lapse picture, may not be so far away from the truth, based on recent evidence of the age of settlements. Coastal settlements, even those in the south are significantly older than inland settlements. Anthropologists claim that the whole of the coastal hinterland of the Australian continent was populated by 30,000 years ago, the arid centre by 10,000 years ago. So we know, on this basis, that for thirty thousand years at least, there was probably human interaction with the predominantly karst landscape of the South East region of South Australia. It must be added, however, that no confirmation has yet been obtained in this region of that level of antiquity.
The next cultural group that we know of to make touch with this landscape came in 1800 when Lieutenant Grant, commanding The Lady Nelson, sighted the volcanic hills of the region. This first interaction with Europeans was eventually to change the region dramatically and permanently, but it was another 38 years before an overlander, Charles Bonney, actually set the first European foot here, at least so far as the records can tell us.
The settlement patterns and cultures of both groups were a response to the landscape in which they found themselves, but it must be remembered that the landscape itself was changing ... the first Aborigines adapted to a landscape different in both geomorphology and climate to that experienced by the first Europeans. The later Aborigines inherited also the changes on the landscape wrought by thousands of years of modification at the hands of their forebears and in turn passed on this changed territory for even more rapid change by those who brought European patterns of settlement there.
The journey to a separate existence
The 'ground rules' were, quite literally, beginning to evolve at the beginning of the Universe, but in terms that we can recognize and understand, even before Gondwana began to fragment into its continental rafts, each built of crust broken from the larger continental pattern. And each too carrying its cargo of plants and animals which had once moved freely over the unrecognised cracks which fractured the supercontinent's land surface. Australia undoubtedly carried a great deal of luggage with it on its rotating journey south.
For the South East, the most important part of this 'luggage' was probably the layer of gravel deposited by the rivers of Antarctica as they poured down the mountains of the continent's heart and shed their burden of eroded rock on the lowlands where the crack between Antarctica and Australia was to form. This sediment became the confined aquifer. Carried on the plate were also gas pockets, and coal seams formed from the rain-forest which flourished on the continent in the Cretaceous, more than 100m years ago.
Begun 150 million years ago, the separation from Antarctica was slow and the Australian continental mass continued to be shaped and re-worked during the 100 million years it took to finally break free. Change came through shifting climates, erosion, compression, deposition, faulting, inundation: all the normal process of geological evolution. The last link with our sister continent, it is conjectured, was in the South East. The Tartwaup Fault near Millicent and a string of volcanic rocks in the deep ocean off the coast may mark the point of final separation.
Aside from the nature of the raft itself, the region owes much of its particular character to its position on the edge of the new continental mass. Here it was in touch with the sea; a sea whose later incursions and retreats were to create the limestone sediments that made this a karst landscape. The ebb and flow of the coast line was also the cause for the lines of parallel stranded beach dunes that shape the region's surface Here, at the edge of the plate, there is weakness and instability; here there were volcanoes in the course of time. And later, as the gap widened and we drifted away from Antarctica and both of us were carried into the colder latitudes in our southward journey, the warm, shallow seas of our first independent existence grew to be the cold, deep Southern Ocean, rich with a huge variety of marine life. Here too we are under the influence of the westerlies, streaming across the Bight and drawing moisture from their passage across the seas to the south, generated from systems originating from our once intimate, but now more distant neighbour, Antarctica.
It is interesting to reflect that both ground water and rain come to us as a direct result of our relationship with this frozen continent few of us will ever see.
A single continent ... 50 million years of development
Free now to make its own path across the surface of the planet and open to the full influence of the surrounding ocean the next phase of the continent's development began. During the millenia since separation the patterns for today's landscape were set in place: the limestone plain, divided by the Kanawinka Fault; the lines of parallel stranded beach dunes, the natural flows of water; the volcanoes, the unconfined aquifer, the caves and runaway holes. And during that time too came the colonisation of the new landscape with plants and animals, using landbridges which have now been inundated.
The interaction between Aboriginal people and the south Eastern landscape
That those Aborigines who were here when European settlement began had come while this landscape was evolving is clear from their stories: stories of Craitbul, a giant ancestor, who built ovens that we call volcanoes. Another story I have read describes how Craitbul sat with his legs straddled, letting water flow round them as he sat near the sea. Then, bringing them together, he formed a bridge across to what is now Tasmania, before parting them again to let the water flow between once more. The Aborigines told of hunting on 'The Plain of Sweet-Smelling Trees' where Bass Strait now lies.
The changing water levels have been a potent influence on their culture in another way:
The Ngerundjeri saga describes how he chased errant wives along the Coorong for many days, then as they strove to escape across to Kangaroo Island, he raised a great storm, drowning them. There is a belief that once Aborigines lived on this island, but when the seas cut it off, the population dwindled and perished. It became known as the island of the dead, and the Coorong marked the pathway along which the souls of the dead walked and whispered as they made their way to the island by way of Cape Jervis.
The Coorong, a lagoon formed as part of the beach dune system, was regarded with some awe. Those of you who have been there at dusk or early dawn, or when a storm is coming in will recognise the eerie quality of the light and the sombre thrumming of the sea beyond the dunes of the peninsular, and understand.
But the Coorong was also an abundant food source and along its length and back through the lower reaches of the Murray, a federation of Aboriginal clans became the Ngarrindjeri, a group described by Rev George Taplin, who worked with them at Raukkan for many years, as the aristocrats of the whole Aboriginal race. He found them extremely intelligent and gifted in many ways acknowledged by European society as well as their own. Probably the most famous of them today is David Uniapon who was a gifted public speaker and philosopher, a scientist of repute and credited with having invented the first machine hand-piece for shearing, some time before the Wolseley company introduced theirs to the world. A major literary prize for Aboriginal writers is now named for him.
Taplin was particularly impressed by their form of government and enforcement of their law, and it was here that the sense of federation comes through most strongly, with formal joint decision making between distinct and sometimes widely separated groups who may even have used a different form of language.
But it was not always so, in the opinion of researcher, Dr Roger Leubbers, whose research was reported in The Advertiser of March 2 1988. It is his finding that evidence of occupation goes back at Coorong sites he has studied for 6000 years, but the early settlement was intermittent 'with short term visits by swimmers or canoe loads of hunter-gathers'. He goes on to suggest that the subsequent phase of settlement dated back 2300 years and 'featured intensive use of the Younghusband Peninsular and the associated aquatic environment by large sedentary or semi-sedentary populations'. During this phase, he claims, 'the Ngarrindjeri maintained one of the largest, if not the largest population in prehistoric Australia' which implies 'that Aborigines in the South East successfully manipulated their population levels throughout the year.'
In a period of population increase in other parts of the world the tendency has been to settle, cultivate and defend in a social climate of growing conflict. But it would seem that in Australia this pattern did not always obtain. Here, in the words of Sylvia Hallam, (The Australians to 1788, p47) 'population increases and the related more intensive use of resources was constrained by social and economic behaviour instead of transforming it'. Australian Aborigines never became agriculturalists. They were able to manage their population to live on the naturally occurring food they found without the labour entailed in an agricultural existence. Once more in Hallam's words, 'Australian societies channelled effort into providing sufficient leisure for a full religious, ceremonial and artistic life' ... comments that appear to apply very closely to the Ngarrindjeri before white settlement and which may well have resulted in their aptitude for intelligent discourse observed after it.
However it would be a mistake to see Aboriginal society as having no impact on the landscape. The practice of burning has certainly acted as a selective process in developing a vegetation cover which is resilient to fire and eliminating those species which were not. Selective hunting practices are believed by many to have contributed to the extinction of many species of megafauna, and the introduction of the dingo has been clearly demonstrated as a major factor in later extinctions.
Further south, between Mount Gambier and Millicent there is plentiful evidence of Aboriginal creative activity in the caves that abound there. A number of examples of rock art have been found and recorded by Geoff and Fred Aslin. Kelvin Smibert has made replicas in fibreglass of some which have been exhibited in a number of galleries. It is interesting, first of all that the caves were so widely used. There is some magnificent art in deep chambers far from daylight in this region. One, Karlie-ngoinpool, contains the largest gallery of rock art yet found in Australia.
The art forms that have been recorded seem to offer important evidence to add to what we know of Aboriginal movements across the continent.
In a rock shelter within a sink hole close to Cape Northumberland, investigators found an area of deeply engraved circles and lines made in the style found in several places in Tasmania. The Bassian Plain begins at this point so the finding suggests a connection between the people who made these engravings and those who made the journey to Tasmania. But add to that, similarities were also found with art on the Nullabor: interesting questions arise.
At Nene Valley on the Karst plain between Mount Gambier and Millicent there is a rock shelter where the past and the present meet with almost a shock. It is a sea cave, smoothly worn by the waves, with a wide sandy floor. Once it perched above the beach, but today it is out of sight of the sea Above its entrance is a chert quarry, where fragments of worked stone lie scattered. Inside there are simple engravings on the wall. But the contact point with history is a deposit in a wash hole in the ceiling of mont milch. In its soft surface a child has gently dragged his fingers. But it isn't soft anymore. The passing years, ... millenia?, have changed the soft powder to hard stone in which the idle hand mark is permanently preserved. To add a sharp finish to the experience, the nails in the cave walls on which skins were hung show evidence of the time 80 years ago when white rabbiters (no, they were not hunting white rabbits) made this their base. They did not damage the art work in any way. Not just one history, but two! A team from Latrobe University has spent time excavating a hearth site there with positive results, despite disturbance of the sediment by human and animal trespassers.
It is interesting to apply Tindale's theories on the importance of ecological boundaries in defining territory to this region. His argument is a compelling one showing how a natural community demands and develops particular skills from those that depend on it, so that in fact they become specialist inhabitants of swamplands or estuaries or heaths. His reasoning can be applied with some ease to the South East /Western Victoria, though my suggestions are based on familiarity with the landdscape rather than detailed research, and are certainly open to challenge.
The group of clans that were the Buandik were people of the Glenelg River region and the coast near its mouth. The Meitangk were people of the coastal plains from Kingston across to Naracoorte. These plains were frequently inundated, and contained the Bool Lagoon complex and the outflow of the Mosquito Creek. The Kanawinka Escarpment was its eastern boundary. Water was easily available from soaks as the water table was close to the surface.
From the escarpment west into Victoria was higher ground, called euphemistically 'the Naracoorte Plateau'. Here the ground water regime was quite different, with a much deeper water table and no easy access to the unconfined aquifer of Gambier limestone. Much of the region's red gum country lies along the Kanawinka escarpment line and areas of waterlogged soil with buloke stands may occur. This was Marditjali country North of Binnum and westward to the Coorong is the Tatiara country of the Potaruwutj. This is harsh heathland ... Ninety Mile Desert country for much of the area, but blessed with an oasis of redgum swamp and more fertile soil near Mundulla. It would seem that in this area the careful use of resources and population control of the Coorong people was replaced with the alternative solution of population control by conflict. The Tatiara people had a fearsome reputation for aggressiveness and hostility.
The coastal strip was Ngarrindjeri territory, occupied by the Tanganekald clan
No single territory held all the resources needed or desired by its people, so trade was essential. Word of mouth evidence from an old lady, now dead who lived as a child on the outskirts of Naracoorte, tells of large ceremonial gatherings at Gare's Swamp where goods were traded between groups who came from many miles around.
The weight of probability is on the side of this being an accurate report. A kind of ceremony, in which gifts were exchanged is known widely across Australia. Add to that the central geographic position of the site in respect to tribal territories (Naracoorte District Council area contains four different Aboriginal groups) and the fact that in a place where no suitable stone for axes is found, the translation of the name Naracoorte (a Potaruwutj word) is 'stone axe' (SA Museum data base of Aboriginal names) and the argument is quite compelling.
The last phase of traditional Aboriginal occupation shows starkly how disruption of the patterns of access to resources took them to an occupation situation which Leubbers describes as that of refugees. The Ngarrindjeri could well be seen as the lucky ones of all the region's tribes. They had the good fortune to attract the attention of a man such as Taplin who, evangelical though he was, could nevertheless communicate sensitively with these people and recognise their quality. The settlement at Raukkan was an attempt to wean them to white, Christian ways and to a certain extent it succeeded. But Taplin placed value on the indigenous culture and did much to preserve it within the limits of understanding at that time. The settlement also kept the remnant of the people together so that today, in a different climate of thought, there is still an identifiable interactive group of truly Ngarrindjeri people, though not all of the same clan. In a similar way, the Buandiks in their refugee phase were nurtured by Christina Smith.
European interactions with the region's water
When Europeans first came to the region, they had much to discover about what the land could do. Unashamedly agriculturalist in their outlook, they were scornful of Aboriginal ways and few took time to learn from those they had dispossessed. They took advice on water sources, however and early settlement was invariable near surface water. A winter on the land below the Kanawinka fault was probably sufficient to teach them about springs and wells, and the lakes in cenotes were also put to use, with ramps being cut down to the water table in some, to allow stock to drink or access for water carts. On the plains, wedgeholes, a wedge-shaped incision down into the water line was commonly used, with a 'whip' built nearby to lift buckets of water to troughs.
Wells were frequent along the Coorong, the Government commissioning a group of Chinese to sink wells for the coaches at intervals along the route ... the better-known Chinamen's Wells of today. Others were sunk between the coast and Penola to cater for Chinese who landed in South Australia to avoid the poll tax applied during the gold rush days in Victoria. A recent Chinese visitor has pointed out that these are quite different in construction ... with workers from a different Province.
Above the escarpment the problem was more challenging, but in many places the soils were underlain with clay which would retain water, and many dams were built before first wells, then bores were sunk from which water was lifted by windmills.
There were few creeks and the only river was on the boundary of the region, the Glenelg. The Morambro, Naracoorte and Mosquito creeks may all have preceded the build up of the dunes and are the only ones to flow down from the 'plateau'.
The discovery and exploitation of underground water is a story in itself
I would have to add the personal comment that to me the wanton use of water to produce profitable luxuries may well be held up against us on Judgement Day and is already beginning to turn neighbour against neighbour in the region with an attitude of how much? rather than, how little? is flourishing.
Water in a different guise has always been a blessing and a problem to the region. The lines of dunes effectively block the flow to the sea of water trapped in the swales, and waterlogging and flooding have been a dominant issue since early settlement. The first drain to be excavated, in the late 1850s, was made by Seymours, draining excess water into Bool Lagoon. The first publicly built drain was the Narrow Neck, built in 1860 as part of an extensive drainage scheme on the peat flats round today's Millicent. Interestingly, the drive behind this was to be a massive employment scheme, applied in this way to provide land for surveyed Agricultural Areas.
This project was later followed by a series of schemes of much wider scope in which the drainage of the whole South East was envisaged, essentially by cutting through the dunes to allow access for water to the coast. It was not until 1968 that draining the eastern part of the region was completed, and this was encouraged by work done on soil deficiencies which led to the AMP Scheme for clearing and settling large areas of the one time 90 Mile Desert.
But oddly, what goes around comes around, and this very development has created such serious problems of soil degradation that yet another drainage scheme is on the way, this one in the Tatiara. Water and soils are inevitably linked What is done on the surface has repercussions on ground water. Clear the trees ... lift the water table ... and lift too the salts it has leached from the soil. Irrigate unwisely and you replace useable water with poison.
The combination of clearance and drainage and now irrigation has been the most profound interaction of Europeans with this landscape. This one is not about aesthetic conservation or small adjustments to improve profitability, but a fundamental interference with the land/water system which makes it possible to sustain settlement in the region. This is one we have no choice but to get right.
Changing soils
The evolution of soils in this relatively new landscape points inevitably to deficiencies. Interestingly in a map analysing soil profitably across Australia, there were only a few small pockets of land ... in SA, one near Clare and one west of Whyalla that were seen as having no physical or chemical shortcomings. Tim Quinlan-Watson, a distinguished Manager of the Kybybolite Research Centre in the mid South East held the often-stated opinion that the fundamental problem of all agricultural research in Australia came back to soil deficiencies.
The South East has been part of this research: firstly in demonstrating the phosphate/ nitrogen deficiency in many parts of the world and in showing how it could be overcome by a combination of Superphosphate and clover pastures. It was first trialled in this area and a four-fold lift in productivity was achieved very quickly. Farms that had taken one generation twenty years simply to hold, with no principle paid off, were free of debt in less than five years. Tim was also involved in the work on trace element deficiencies that began in Kangaroo Island and led to the opening of the heathlands for agriculture. In this case the problem elements were copper and cobalt.
One of the bonuses that its geological past has provided to this landscape is that silty red soil, caused from the breakdown of the limestone: Terra Rossa. Greatly sought after and bought at high cost this soil exists in pockets throughout the region, the most famous of which is the Coonawarra where John Riddoch established a Fruit Colony in 1890, including vines among the fruit to be planted there. This soil can produce magnificent red wine. New plantings in the northerly extension of this pocket in the Koppamurra district as well as 'red hills' on rocky outcrops all over the area are the region's growth points.
Because of its maritime phase, the South East overlies traps in the sediments which contain natural gas.
Another natural bonus that our geology has handed to us is the presence of caves throughout the region.
They give it a unique character and have until recently provided local people with the same natural recreation and challenge of experiencing the environment face to face that the beach or the mountains give others. Nowadays they are the source of interest, education and tourist dollars for the region.
But even more importantly they have opened up new and challenging knowledge to researchers ... knowledge of past life and climate that are of direct importance to us today.
Progressive changes to the balance
From the time the first people populated this land mass, there has been change ... inevitable, sometimes a minor adjustment of a balance, some times an irrevocable move to a new balance. Not all of this change is due to humans, and certainly not all to Europeans, although one could be forgiven for believing this if one listens to the zealots in the conservation cause. But with a growing population of humans, the changes they cause are becoming more and more important in changing the balance in a major way.
The Aboriginal people altered the continent's vegetation pattern by their use of fire ... but some of this alteration was due to climate shifts,. They helped to destroy the megafauna, but again, so did changing climate. They introduced the dingo, which wrought havoc among small native mammals. In turn, the land influenced them and wove itself into their art and religion. If all humans had been removed from the continent before the advent of Europeans, it would have been a vastly changed continent, but still in an assured balance.
Europeans caused changes of varying degree. Just as the dingo caused great harm in its time, so did the rabbit when it was introduced ... perhaps the greatest agent of change in the pastoral period to the start of this century. Pastoral settlement itself caused no irrevocable change to the landscape in other ways, though it caused irrevocable change to the Aboriginal people. The balance was shifted, but still stable.
Closer settlement ... the establishment of small intensive farms was another matter. Clearing was extensive, the timber was used by the farmer for building, fuel, fences, railway sleepers and as a saleable asset. A range of plants was introduced and tried in paddock and garden ... some have now established populations that are out of control, many are serious weeds. The successful farmer was the one who changed his landscape the most. Hard work was the ultimate virtue, and clearing was a shining example for all to see that here was a hard worker! He rarely had adequate capital, so he overcropped and overgrazed. He did not have the tools to control fire and the increased and undisciplined population made the risk of fire much greater. He often had little education or knowledge of agriculture ... only a shining dream of security and independence and believed that his hard work must bring success.
It is conceivable that at that stage a balance could still be retained if all farming activity stopped and all people had been removed from the continent, but in the first fifty years of this century, the nature of the balance of life on this continent had been substantially changed, in many ways quite irreversibly.
Post-war settlement was probably the most damaging of all. By now extensive clearing and drainage, and vastly increased use of chemicals had attacked the fundamentals of the balance, fuelled by the strident demands for food, fibre and raw materails by a rapidly growing urban population. Then came irrigation to this area, and a dramatic increase in water use. Farmers were better informed, but perhaps a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The landscape is arguably more productive in economic terms than it was fifty years ago, though considering that wool prices were high then, even that is not certain. What is certain is that it costs far more in money and environmental damage to earn that money than it did fifty years ago. Now we are looking at a hunger for water that is a new phenomenon, pouring it on to a landscape that is already damaged by previous careless use.
I do not subscribe to the attitude that everything must remain untouched ... every living thing interacts with its environment to cause some kind of progressive change ... the balance has always been a dynamic one, not a static one. Until recently I had faith that the ultimate good sense of mankind under pressure would ensure that we made the right moves to maintain an ecological balance, even if a steadily changing one. But now, as I watch our small part of the earth quarrelling for water, I do fear greatly that we are approaching a point, where through ignorance, desperation or greed we will go too far, where our interaction with the land and its water will steadily build up so many negative factors that the positives will be overwhelmed and we will begin to slide to mutual destruction.
References
Mulvaney, DJ, The Prehistory of Australia, New York,Frederick A Praeger, 1969
Mulvaney, DJ and White, JP, ed Australians, a Historical library: Australians to 1788, Sydney, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 1987
Tindale, NB, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: their terrain, distribution, limits and proper names, Canberra, ANUP, 1974
Jenkin, G, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri Adelaide, Rigby, 1979