Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Newstead Landcare Group is hosting a talk by Barry Golding at the Newstead Community Centre, starting at 7.30 pm next Tuesday April 18. All are welcome to attend. 

The arrival of Europeans on the continent we now call Australia had profound effects on the indigenous peoples and the landscape they cared for. This dramatic impact was greatly accelerated by the gold rushes that swept through Central Victoria. Is the way the landscape once looked now lost to our knowledge, or can historical research help us re-imagine our land as it once was?

Professor Barry Golding of Federation University has spent much time in combing through historical documents to reconstruct a picture of the former natural splendour of the land of the Dja Dja Wurrung peoples of Central Victoria. He will be sharing some of his findings at Newstead Landcare Group’s presentation on Tuesday April 18th.

“We are so excited to have Barry presenting to us on this complex and fascinating story” said Newstead Landcare Secretary Patrick Kavanagh. “Some of the imagery of great fields of Yam Daisies (Myrnong) and Kangaroo Grass with large Casuarinas and Silver Banksias is just breathtaking. And then there are the accounts of the great pools along the course of the Loddon with extraordinary schools of Murray Cod and other native fish” Mr Kavanagh said. “Prof. Golding was booked to present this work at Newstead Landcare’s AGM last October, but floods had cut many roads in the area so it’s great that he’s been able to reschedule the talk.”

Our Goughs Range FOBIF walk will take place next Sunday 16 April. You can contact the leader Harley Parker (0409 135 889) for more information. 

The date for the following month’s walk is Sunday 21 May, not 28 May as previously written in our walk’s program. This Mount Lofty walk will be led by Bernard Slattery (0499 624 160).

FOBIF has been having another look at the heritage question. As we’ve pointed out before, heritage is a funny business. Sometimes it’s unintentionally funny—as when the national heritage listing for the Diggings Park tells us that the miners had ‘a lifestyle intimately connected to the earth.’ Does this mean they dug holes? We do not wish to denigrate the miners, who were people of their time: but the heritage industry has an apparent obsession with putting a positive spin on things, an obsession which can sometimes seem slightly gaga—as when they use the phrase ‘extensive vegetation modification’ to refer to wholesale environmental destruction, for example.

An example of ‘extensive vegetation modification’ and its consequences. The relentlessly positive language in heritage documents oversimplifies history and might amount to a cover up.

More seriously, check this out, offered as evidence of ‘outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance in the course, or pattern, of Australia’s natural or cultural history’:

‘The goldfield, which played a major role in drawing overseas immigrants to the colony, and in raising from the ground so much of the golden wealth which flowed into Australian and overseas markets, played a substantial part in all those changes which gold wrought on Victoria and Australia: increased population, increased wealth, the growth in manufacturing, the improvement in transport, the development of regional centres and townships, the further development of a middle class, democratization of political institutions, reform of land laws, the genesis of an Australian Chinese community, and so forth…’

All true. All very positive. But is there anything missing?

We wonder what might be covered in that harmless phrase, ‘and so forth’. Like, is there anything notable missing from that list of entirely positive stuff about changes in demography?

You might find a clue in this book: Black Gold—Aboriginal people on the goldfields of Victoria, 1850-1870 by Fred Cahir (ANU Press 2012). It’s online, and free here.

The heritage listing comes perilously close to endorsing a terra nullius idea of our history. Maybe it’s time for a revision?