aboriginal women’s fishing in new south wales aboriginal women’s fishing in nsw: annotated...

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Aboriginal Women’s Fishing in New South Wales

An Annotated Bibliography of Documentary Sources

Cover photo: Unloading a boatload of fish on the Murray River, c. 1910. Reproduced courtesy of Museum Victoria.

This publication was compiled and written by Johanna Kijas and Alex Roberts.

Disclaimer: The Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water NSW has prepared this publication in goo d faith exercisin g all due care and attenti on, but no re presentation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to the relevance, accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of this publicat ion in respect of any particular user’s circumstances. Users of this publication should satisfy themselves concerning its application to, and where necessary seek expert advice in respect of, their situation. © State of NSW and the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water NSW The Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water NSW and the State of NSW a re pleased to all ow this material to be reproduced for educational or non-commercial purposes, provided the meaning is unchanged and its source is acknowledged. Aboriginal readers are warned that this publicat ion contains the n ames and images of som e Aboriginal people who are deceased. Published by: Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water NSW 59–61 Goulburn Street PO Box A290 Sydney South 1232 Ph: (02) 9995 5000 (switchboard) Ph: 131 555 (environment information and publications requests) Ph: 1300 361 967 (national parks information and publications requests) Fax: (02) 9995 5999 TTY: (02) 9211 4723 Email: [email protected] Website: www.environment.nsw.gov.au ISBN 978 1 74232 558 3 DECCW 2010/132 May 2010

Using this document

This annota ted reference list is arranged in alp habetical order by author’s name. A context and interlin king discussion, where relevant, is pro vided for each entry. The annotated references can thus be read from A to Z as part of an ove rall narrative about Aboriginal women’s fish ing practices, o r can be dipped into if readers are interested in the work of a particular author. An index at the end of the document can guide readers directly to topics, places, or names of interest.

Each reference is followed by two te rms in blue. The first denotes the type of reference. Examples include: Academic; Autobiographical; Biographical; Cultural heritage, General

The second term deno tes the typ e of geographical place the source document relates to, or occasionally a specific geographical place. Examples include: Beaches and ocean; Inland rivers, North coast rivers; Sydney region

Methodology used to compile this document

This review of documentary historica l evidence f or Aboriginal women’s fishing in the twentieth century was carried ou t through secondary library research, interne t searches and primary research in local historical societies on the north coast of New South Wales. Similar evidence for t he eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was later added to the list of sources.

Regarding secondary sources, a survey of relevant general texts on Aboriginal life in the twentieth cent ury was carried out to ascertain what coverage there was of Aboriginal women’s fishing practices. Little was found. Mo re productive were sources which in cluded Abor iginal women’s biograp hies and au tobiographies and specialist anthropological and cultural heritage texts. The survey of secondary literature att empted to cover New South Wales as a whole , but the e mphasis ha s been on th e south co ast, north coast and w estern regio ns of the st ate, plus the Sydney reg ion. Academic analyses, local histories and personal accounts we re surveyed. Library collect ions surveyed were the State Libra ry of NSW, including the Mitchell Library; Sou thern Cross University Library; Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation Library; an d some e xploration of the University of New En gland Library and its thesis collection.

For an in-depth discussion of the post-1788 history of Ab original women’s fishing in New South Wales, plea se see the companion text Aboriginal women’s fishing in New South Wales: a thematic history.1

A variety o f spelling s occur regar ding the names of Aboriginal gr oups currently and historically. Throughout the te xt, the spellings used a re from the documents from which they are cited. In the index, the spelling used is taken from the Aboriginal New South Wales Map (NSWALC, NRAC, DECC, 2009)

1 Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water NSW, Aboriginal women’s fishing in New South Wales: a thematic history, Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water NSW, Sydney, 2009

Aboriginal Women’s Fishing in NSW: Annotated Bibliography 1

A

Allen, Harry. Aborigines of New South Wales: People of the plains, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney, n.d.2

General; Inland rivers

This text is part of a NSW National Parks series fro m the 1980s about t he predominantly pre and early contact ways of lif e of Aboriginal groups across New South Wales. In this bo ok Allen discusses the ‘Wiradjeri’ and ‘Bagundi’ groups of t he broad Darling River re gion. The author is generally clear when refe rring to either male or female fishing p ractices. He is also clear when referring to the whole group including men, women and children , as oppo sed to many other texts where the use of ‘people’ or ‘Aborigines’ often denoted men only. p.4: [During times of sufficient rain] … ‘Aborigines moved to the river margins and set up small villages of gr ass-thatched huts. The re, in group s of fifty or sixty people spaced every 59 km or so along the river, communal hunting and gathering techniques were used to harvest the resources of the river and plains. One important method of exploiting t he river plain environme nts involved the large-scale use of hunt ing and fishing nets. Net s used f or fishing were up to 100 m long and 1 m wide. They had reed floats and were weighted at the bottom with lumps of fired clay. The entire community dragged them through waterholes to catch perch, catfish and the occasional Murray cod. Sto ne fish tra ps, such a s the one at Brewarrina, and traps of clay or brushwork were placed in favourable locations to catch fish as water flowed out of billabongs and creeks. Women tended the shallower weirs, while the men caught fish by spearing fro m the bank, canoes and underwater. Fishhooks do not appear to have been used on the Darling. Shellfish, fr eshwater mussels and yabbies were gathered by women, who dived for them or felt th em with thei r toes in the soft mud. T he catch was placed in net bags and brought back to be roasted in the fires at the camping place.’

Ainsworth, John. Reminiscences of James Ainsworth, Beacon Printery, Ballina, 1922. [Richmond River Historical Society]

Archival; North coast rivers

Ainsworth has a large, sympathetic section o n Aboriginal li fe around Ballina in the late 1840s to 1850s. There are long description s of fishing by ‘them’, but there is an assumption in the tone of the text that he was referring to men. In particular he refers to the use of spears when referring to ‘them’.

2 The terms ‘Aborigine’ and ‘Aborigines’ are used throughout this Bibliography where they are part of direct quotes or book titles. These terms accurately reflect the language of the time when these texts were written, and are not intended to cause offence.

2 Aboriginal Women’s Fishing in NSW: Annotated Bibliography

Ardler, Gloria. The wander of it all: recollections by Gloria Ardler, Burraga Aboriginal History and Writing Group Inc, Darlinghurst, 1991.

Biographical; Coastal rivers

Stories are predominantly of the Burragorang Valley on the south coast. p.13: ‘… The Shepherd children attended the Catholic School… They loved to fish for perch in the Cox’s River.’

Attenbrow, Val. Sydney’s Aboriginal past: investigating the archaeological and historical records, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002.

Academic; Beaches and ocean

p.82: Referring to archaeological a nd ethnographic evidence Attenbrow says that women ‘in coastal groups of the Sydney region played a predominant role in catching fish.’ The fir st British co lonists note d that the women were in their canoes fishin g ‘which is th eir constant employmen t’. Men and women used different equipment to each other when fishing, with women using shell hook an d line, sometimes using a spear to strike and haul in a large fish, while men used spears and were never seen to use lines in the very early colonial period. Once steel ho oks were int roduced men were seen fishing with lines. Women fished fro m canoes and less ofte n from roc k platforms.

There is little mention in the early observations of the colonists about she llfish collecting. Attenbrow speculates th is could be because people were not often see n collecting, or that it was not considered important enough to r ecord, bein g ‘unspectacular, unobtrusive and humdrum’. p.62: Fish a nd shellfish made up an important part of the diet of Aboriginal people living in the Sydney reg ion. However, there were regional variations in the types o f seafood eaten. For example, more shellfish we re collected and eaten on the coa st then in the hinterland and upper reaches of the Hawk esbury River. Eels and freshwater mussels were widely eaten in the hinterland, but not closer to the coast. p.81: ‘Fishing in communities where traps and weirs were used was often a communal activity.’ p.82: ‘Women in coast al groups of the Sydney region played a predominant role in catching fish. The first British colonists noted that “[t]he women, when we first came on the beach, were in their canoes fishing, which is th eir constant employme nt”’. Furthermore, Attenbrow says that this differ s from fishing pr actices in other parts o f Australia, where fishing was more of a male p astime. In the Sydne y region, women generally fished with hooks and line s from canoes and men fished with spears while standing on rock platforms, in shallow water or in canoes. p.82: ‘…fish ing gear, including metal hooks, was amongst the first objects that th e British gave from the time of first contact, initially as gifts and ‘trade’ items and later in order to encourage fishing ventures.’ There is some suggestion that Aboriginal me n would fish with Europe an metal fish-hooks and line, but not shell-hooks, which were made by Indigenous women. p.82: Observations of t he First Fleeters indicat e that Abori ginal men i n the Sydn ey region collected shellfish, which suggests that there was not always a strict gendered division of labour when it came to hunting and gathering.


p.83: ‘In co ntrast to fishing there is only a small number of descrip tions about shellfishing or plant collecting in the Sydney region. In other Australian communities, men did collect shellfish, but women were the main collectors.’ Attenbrow speculates: ‘In the Sydney region shellfishing by m en ma y have been an opport unistic activity when they were fishing from rock platforms.’ p.83: ‘Statements by recent resear chers that women in the Sydney reg ion were th e principal collectors of shellfish and plant foods are based on observations in ot her areas, usually northern Australia. If women h ad the primary responsibility for the routine gath ering of sh ellfish and plant foods in the Sydney region, one can on ly assume the colonists did not observe them, as these activities either happened away from the British set tlement, in woo ded env ironments (in th e case o f plant foods) o r were “unspectacular, u nobtrusive and humdru m”. In addit ion, on ma ny occasions men made sure that their women were kept at a distance from the British men, and i t may be that the women hid themse lves when they heard the British ( usually men) coming. Th ese combin ed practice s and op inions may account for t he dearth of references t o women a nd their activities, except when the y were fishing on open waters.’ p.84: ‘As the British settlement expanded, areas of land and wa ter that were accessible to the local inhabitants b ecame smal ler and smaller, and traditional food resources were removed through land clear ance for fa rms, buildin gs and oth er activities … Along the coast, fishin g was one of the few activities th at provided a viable avenue for exchange for ot her items such as food and clothin g as well a s alcohol and tobacco. Phillip and la ter governors (particularly Macquarie) were eager to convert the local people to a British way of life and in this context several attempts were made to encourage fishing ventures. By mid-1791 several people, includin g Ballederry, began trading in fish with officers w ho lived at Parramatta. In exchange for mullet, bream and other fish they received a small quantity of either bread, or sa lt meat. Later, from about 1815, Bungaree and his group traded fish usin g a boat an d fishing lines provided by Macquarie. Neit her Ballederry’s nor Bunga ree’s ventures continued long.’ p.84: ‘By the end of the 1820s, there was no-one in the Sydney region that was not in some way affected by the British presence … For coastal people, fishing was one o f the few pre-colonial subsistence a ctivities that continued to provide them with a substantial source of food as well as a medium for exchange. In the mid-1820s nava l surgeon Peter Cunningham described how people still caught fish with hooks provided by individual colonists, so me of which they traded for clot hes, bread a nd rum. People were seen spear-fishing as well – f or example, from bark canoes along the Cooks River until the mid-1830s, and in Middle Harbour in the 1850s.’ pp.86–8: description of f ishing equipment, including fishing spears, hooks and line s, nets and traps, and canoes.

Attenbrow, Val and Steele, Dominic. ‘Fishing in Port Jackson, New South Wales – more than met the eye’, Antiquity, vol. 69, no 262, March 1995, pp.47–60.

Academic; Sydney area

This article focuses on the fishing methods used in Port Jackson. It assesse s archaeological evidence and the written evidenc e left by members of the First Fle et


in an attempt to draw conclusions about Aboriginal fishing methods and equipment in the late eighteenth century. p.47: ‘In the earliest historica l records for Po rt Jackson (those of the First Fleet diarists and artists), fishing is the most frequently mention ed subsistence activity of the local Ab original people. Only two methods are describ ed and illust rated: spear-fishing and angling. First Fleet documents state that spear-fishing was undertaken by men using multi-pronged spears (o ften called ‘fizz-gig s’ or ‘gigs’) fro m the rock y shores as w ell as from bark canoes and in shallow waters. Angling (or line-fishing) was carried out by women who fished from canoes using shell hooks and line s in deep water.’ p.47: ‘The gender division in fishing was not absolute and Tench, for example, noted that: ‘women sometimes use the gig, and alwa ys carry on e in each canoe, to strike large fish which may be hooked, and thereby facilitate capture.’ p.49: ‘In other parts of Australia historical and ethnographic accounts describe a wide range of fishing methods: not only spear-fishing and angling, but also tidal weirs and traps, communal drives and a variety of nets and poisons.’ p.49: ‘To the north and south of Port Jackson, the use of poisons as well as brush and stone weirs or traps have been describ ed … South of Port Jackson, the historically described weirs were all made of brush; no stone traps are d escribed for that region.’ p.49: ‘Fishing nets were used on the NSW north coast, and in the Hunter Valley, near Newcastle, hand nets were used in shallow water.’

Attenbrow and Steele suggest, based on archaeological evidence, that a greater variety of fishi ng methods were utilise d by Aboriginal peop le in the Port Jackson area than are recorded by European observers. They suggest that the use of traps and weirs ma y not have be en as visible as spear and line fish ing because they may h ave taken p lace in closed and less visible estuarine and bay settings (see p.58). p.58: ‘Many women’s a ctivities (except fishing in canoes on the harbour) ma y have had very low visibility a s much of t he plant and shellfish gathering would have taken place away from the area of (British) settlement … Collecting fish caught in tidal traps or rock pools may h ave been embedded within women’s shellfish gatherin g activities.’


B

Bayet-Charlton, Fabienne. Finding Ullagundahi Island: a story of family, place and belonging, Allen and Unwin, 2002.

Novel/autobiography; North coast rivers

The author declares that while her book is a novel it is pr edominantly autobiographical. The r elevant sections are about Fabienne’s journey from Adelaid e where she grew up, to the Clarence, to learn more of h er grandmo ther’s life a t Ullagundahi Island (author’s spelling) before she moved to Coober Pedy. pp.34–6: An elderly man at the mission at Yamba tells the story of the d olphins who used to be t he old people’s friend until the ‘greedy man’ killed one to se e if he could gain its spirit. Although the old people killed the man and threw his body into the sea, the dolphins were never again so friendly. p.34: ‘They’d [elders/old people] all go down to the river, they could feel the fish swimming through the water. A whole mob of t hem … the river would be full of f ish. Then, when everybody was down there, they would get together and beat their spears and coolamons on the wat er. They’d be calling o ut to the d olphins. Se e? They’d be calling them to round them fish up. The men wou ld beat for the dolphins to come and t he women would walk with the nets into the water. The dolphins would come and chase those f ish into the nets. That way the old p eople would catch a big mob of fish. They’d scoop them up with their nets and everybody would share.’

The story about the dolphins is oft en told as if it was only a relationship between the men and the dolphins, whereas in this story wo men are equa l participants and the ones who take out the nets. In Ruby L angford’s memory of he r holiday at Yamba, accompanying th e annual Casino Christmas camps at the beach, it was a woman who called to th e porpoises each day while everyone was on holidays, to keep the swimmers safe (see Langford 1988, p.38).

Becker, Alice. Grace Roberts: her life, her mystery, her Dreaming, Northern Rivers College Press, Lismore, 1989.

Biography; North coast rivers

Alice Becker came to know Grace Roberts in h er later years. Grace ha d been stolen from her home at Boxridge Mission near Coraki on the Richmond Rive r, far north coast New South Wales. When she returned after her teenage years at Cootamundra Girls Home and later working life as a domestic, she returned first to her Bundjalung Country an d later moved to Coffs Har bour after marrying , where sh e became a significant figure in fighting for Aboriginal rights. Becker says of her return to Coraki: p.14: ‘Back in her own territory … Grace began to make up for the lost years of her teens. She mixed in wit h a young g roup, she loved to go d ancing, swimming, fishing and follow the boxing which was a very p opular spor t among the Aboriginal community.’


p.27: Alice says ‘The river was and still is a very happy place for these people and they have a rare knowledge of the fishing in t he district . They watch the flowers: when the white ti tree is in full blo om the dogfish are bitin g; it is the flowers that tell when the turtles are fat and plentiful; and when certain clouds appear in the sky it is the time fo r bream, and when th e silky oak blooms th e time has come to g o hunting …’

Alice refers to the ongoing traditional stories of Bundjalung people . ‘A grandmother, a friend and confida nt of Grace’s, speaks h er thoughts, beliefs and actions which would also be those of Grace. “It is something that goes a long wa y back. You know there in Coraki, w ay back the re is a little creek, with a water hole here and there. I went fishing there one day. Grace loved to go fishing t oo. This day there was n obody about yet all the time I could feel peo ple around me. I cou ld feel them very strong, I caught fish too. After a while I asked the people back at the camp, about the place. It was alright for us to be there, it was ve ry old, something sacre d was there, it was very strong. It was alright for me to be there but if I took a stranger I would catch fish but their line wouldn’t even pull.

I take my sister in law fishing, but I can’t take her to all the places, there are some she can’t go to. We know the places. Th ere’s a bend in the river, a lagoon, we cast out our lines and w asn’t catching any fish, so I called out in our lingo and then we caught fish. But if I didn’t call o ut, or get some of the old ones to call out, she would sit there all day and not catch fish. It is strange but it is true. It is a spiritu al thing with us. It is a spiritual thing with us.

There are some parts of the river we are not allowed to go. If we disobeyed the older ones, (p.28) and it is important that we do obey t hem, certain things would happen that I couldn’t tell you about. I’ve been places I sho uldn’t go, but I’ve neve r been back. There’s this strong thing” – placing her hand over her heart.’ p.28: ‘“… There are sa cred places that are happy places. We get a drawing back to those places. I’m drawn back to the river, it’s peaceful and happy. I can speak to the spirits and I do for the children so metimes. I t alk to them before they go to the river and tell them where they can go and where they have to be very quiet.

When we go up to the lagoon, if we can’t ca tch any fish I can ta lk t o the spirits. That lagoon belongs to our people, so I can talk to them, but some people don’t believe this.

My grandchildren are learning Bundjalung. That is why it is important to speak our language. When they grown up they will need to speak to the spirits.”’ p.28: continued, with the older woman remembering Grace: ‘“Certain animals are looked upon as sacred – protected. When we went fishing one day o n a bridge in South Australia, we fish ed on the le ft hand side but caught no fish. The n I saw this willy wag tai l going on and on flapp ing his wings … I got up and moved to the o ther side. It followed us over and started again. So I got up and went across the bridge to the other side of the river but it kept on goin g on in the same way. I took it a s a warning not to come round and fish. We gave up.”’ p.29: ‘Near Boxridge is the junction of the Rich mond River and the no rth arm. Thi s junction is very sacred to the Aboriginal people. Spirits of the past linger there, so it is a place the people dare not linger. They do not fish nor swim there … Among the Aboriginal people not only are peo ple created custodian s of stories a nd of sacred sites but bir ds, animals even fish can also be custodians f or sacred sites and are known to react to encroachment …

In all triba l districts ther e were special pla ces t hat belonge d to the wo men. Many still exist today, but unfortunately some have di sappeared i n the path of progress. Those that re main are to be found in quiet gullies, seclu ded areas awa y


from prying eyes. They were always by a creek, river or sea , where water and food could be got easily …’

Bennett, Michael. ‘The economics of fishing: sustainable living in colonial New South Wales’, Aboriginal History, vol. 31, 2007, pp. 85–102

Academic

p.87: Bennett points out that much of the research into Aboriginal fishing has focused on the far south coast of New Sou th Wales, as part of preparations in 1992 for the defence of seven Aboriginal men charged with breaches o f the NSW Fisheries Act 1935 (e.g. works by Brian Egloff, Wreck Bay: an Aboriginal fishing community and Scott Cane, ‘Aboriginal fishing rights on the New South W ales south coast: a cour t case’ in Nicholas Peter sen and Br uce Rigsby (eds), Customary marine tenure in Australia, Oceania Monograph 48, Sydney, 1998). p.87: ‘The historical a nd anthrop ological evidence com piled for the case sho ws continuous fishing activ ity in the ni neteenth and twentieth centuries b y nu merous families occupying land between Batemans Bay and Eden.’ p.87: ‘Egloff’s study of fishing at Wreck Bay shows a group of closely related families establishing a community in the late nineteenth century and continuing to occupy and fish from the area throughout the twentieth century. Pro minent among the residents were me mbers of the Campbell, Nyberg, Ardler, Bloxsome, Timbery, McLeod and Chapman families. Some came from as far north as Kempsey, bu t others we re originally from the Coola ngatta Estate on the Sh oalhaven. By the 1950s, up to eight boat crews were operating out of Wreck Bay using nets to h aul in their catch, most of which was transported t o Sydney for sale. The f ishing season lasted from Christmas to Easter.’ p.88: ‘Ther e is conse nsus that A boriginal w omen along the Sydney coast we re responsible for catching fish, a major component of the diet, with hook and line. The fishhooks were generously curved and made mainly from shell. Fishing line consisted of two strands of bark fibre twisted t ogether although other materials such as animal hair were sometimes used. Women sat in bark canoes and dangled their hook a nd line overboard. The successful cat ch was some times cooked there and then upon a small fire in the canoe. Men fished with multi-pronged spears called ‘fizz gigs’ by th e British. Shaf ts ranged in length bet ween 3.7 m and 6 m, and were ma de from the protruding spiral shoot of the yellow gum tree. Men stood on rock ledges or balanced themselves on bark can oes to launch their dar ts at the fish below. Other aspects of the sexual division of labour are n ot evident from the reco rds of t he o fficers of th e First Fleet. Women were rarely seen and there are no direct observations, as ther e are from other parts of t he country, of them specialising in t he gathering of shellfish and plant foods.’ p.91: ‘In the 1830s, Obed West observed the u se of weirs, or “mouls” made of sticks and brushes at Mullet Creek near La ke Illawarra to trap fish for large gatherings. The large numbers of fish caught at w eirs allowed large socia l gatherings, sometimes exceeding 200 people.’ p.91: Bennett points out that European accounts of fishing o n the south coast rarely specify the gender of fisher people . Yet one o bservation suggests that there was at least some partial division of labour along gender lines. ‘In January 1840, Reverend Clarke of the Illawarra asked an A boriginal man named Frying Pan to obtain, if h e


could, a po rtion of pra wns; Frying Pan drew himself up angrily and replied tha t catching pr awns was women’s work and that men fished only with s pears. This is little to go o n, but it does suggest th at the divisions noted in Sydney also applied on the south coast.’ p.92: ‘Fishing also drew Aboriginal people into the European economy of the south coast. As in other pursuits su ch as guiding set tlers acro ss the landscape, trackin g lost cat tle through the bush and stripping bark from trees, Aboriginal people possessed a comparative ad vantage in fishing that few recent arrivals could match. Most were ignorant of the cycle of the fishing season and unaware of the best fishing spots. Taking advantage of their su perior knowledge, Aboriginal fisher men supplied an unknown number of fish to the Coolangatta Estate in January 1837 for which they received three pounds of flour. Ma rgaret Menz ies commen ted two yea rs later that Aboriginal men and women often brought in fish and crayfish for the residents o f Jamberoo for which they received tea and sugar.’ p.93: ‘Thro ughout the second ha lf of the nin eteenth cen tury traditional practices continued to be modified with the introduction of new techno logy, particularly boats.’ The NSW g overnment distributed boats to co astal communities beginning in 1868 when it gave a boat to Aboriginal people at Jervis Bay. pp.93–4: ‘F or the remainder of t he nineteen th century, boats and f ishing gear, including nets, were regularly supplied to south coast groups and some on the nort h coast as well.’ Over 20 boats were supplied to communities on the south coast in the late nineteenth century. p.95: ‘Mrs Lizzie Malone of La Perouse was one of the few Aboriginal women to own a fishing bo at, although it seems th at she did n ot fish herself because she suffere d from bad knees. In the late 1880s, she let her boat out to other Aboriginal people in return for money or fish.’ p.95: Bennett argues that many Aboriginal men identified as fishermen and gave it as their occupation on government and church forms. pp.95–6: ‘As the ninete enth century proceeded, Aboriginal people increasingly so ld fish to local white resid ents as ano ther means to raise m oney. Samu el Elyard of Nowra wrote in August 1874 of purchasing 13 fish from local Aboriginal people after returning from a boating trip on the Shoalhave n River. Th e APB ann ual report for 1890 recorded that the Aboriginal residents of Greenwell Point raised a “fair” amou nt of cash selling fish to local inha bitants. Similar comme nts were made for t he communities further south at Ulladulla, Bega and Eden. The fishermen at La Perouse were so successful that by the late 1890s they complained to the APB of interference from white commercial operators.’ p.98: ‘The introduction of boats and nets diminished t he importance of so me traditional f ishing techn ology. In October 1879, a reporter for the Shoalhaven Telegraph could find only one Aboriginal woman who could manufacture shell hoo ks and fibrous lines in the o ld style. Her implements were collected by Henry Moss and taken to Sydney for the Garden Palace Exhibition.’ p.98: ‘Overall, there is no clear evidence after 1 850 of the continued op eration of the traditional gender division of labour. Observers rarely specified the sex of the person doing the fishing. Some traditional knowledge, however, was retained, particularly the important skill of spott ing schoo ls of fish from th e land whi ch continued to be used into the twentieth century.’


Blomfield, Geoffrey. Baal Belbora: the end of the dancing: the agony of the British invasion of the ancient people of the three rivers: the Hastings, the Manning and the Macleay, in New South Wales, Colonial Research Society, Armidale, 1981.

General; North coast rivers

This book is well known as a b ook about massacres aroun d the mid-north coast of New South Wales. But it also ends up being a good example of how one can f ind evidence of Aboriginal women also being fishe rs in spite o f the dominant messag e that it was the men onl y who fishe d. This message about men being the fishers is demonstrated in a number of the photos and te xt in the book – and is noted below. However, s ome of the photos and captions not ed below also provide examples of evidence by accident that women were also fishers.

Second ima ge in the b ook: a cheerful looking Aboriginal man with a spear and head dress and a smiling woman beside him holding a big fish. Caption: ‘Cranky Tom and Dilburee, natives of the Yarrahapini Tribe. Called “Cranky Tom” for his irrepressible hilarity.’ [no acknowledgements – however the painting is by Clement Hodgkinson] p.17: Quote from te xt 4, The Australian Aboriginal People: ‘The men di d the hunting and the women gathered the vegetables.’ [References are mainly to Elkin] p.23: Painting by Clement Hodgkinson of the men spearing fish on t he bank of t he Macleay River and other men spearing fish from canoes. The two canoe s also have someone sitting in them (gender not discernable). p.66: Thomas Dick photo of two men fishing in a canoe – one standing with his spear poised at the water and the other sitting, also w ith a spear. Caption: ‘Aboriginal men fishing with pronged spears on the Hastings River … The c anoe is quickly made of a strip of bark and the man usually has his wife with him. They also usually had a small fire on a clay base.’ p.74: Thomas Dick pho to – this time of a man with his spear poised at the river fro m the end of a log on the bank of the river [hence another dominant imag e of the me n as the fishers]. p.123: Presumably anot her Dick photo (although it doesn’t say) of a young woman. The caption talks abou t her good figure – h ence not yet ‘corpulen t’ from the Europeans … Despite all the images and text in this book which point to men being the fishers, within this caption Blomfield quotes from a squatter who says ‘… In return for the fish she had given me … [he gave her a looking glass]’. The assumption could be that the girl handed on the fish f rom a male who had caught it – but it’s just a s likely that she had caught the fish herself.

Boileau, Joanna. Community based heritage study: thematic history, report for Tweed Shire Council, 2004. [Tweed Heads Historical Society]

Heritage; North coast rivers

The central aim of this thematic history of the Tweed Valley area of the far north coast was t o identify heritage sites (places and objects). C hapter 2 concentrated on the Bundjalung, predominantly in the pre and early contact period.


p.26: An ea rly observer of the area JJ Byrne commented about coastal technology: ‘They made stone axes, spears and fishing nets from twine spun from the flame tree. The women used to we ave beautiful, peculiar a nd artistic b ags from the rushes an d reeds, which they treated by some process to give them colour and durability … Women carried the material of which their huts were composed together with fishing nets …’ [JJ Byrne. ‘More about the Tweed Aborigines, The Tweed Daily, 5 January 1946, p.2] p.27: Boileau reports that: ‘The use of fishing nets by groups in estuarine and riverine zones was r ecorded by several Europeans. Sandy Logan, a child aged ten living in the Tumbulgum [far north coast river country] in 1870 report ed that: “The nets were made a couple of yards long with a stick at ea ch end and used individually or in a combination with many of the sa me.”’ Boileau argues that ‘… all the availa ble evidence points to a high level of skill amongst the women in the manufacture of nets and bags.’

She says ‘The use o f long net s described b y [Mary] Bundock for h unting kangaroo and fish ing on the Upper Richmond are also reported on th e Tweed bu t only for fishing.:

“ … they could combine man y of th em to form one net some fifty feet long then move along the bank trappin g them [the fish] in a selected spot .”’ [Footnote: Personal communication between Sandy Loga n and Mr B Seymour, Tweed Heads, no date]. p.31: In the section on twentieth century history, Boileau notes that Aboriginal an d Islander populations established a camp at Fingal, where th ere were few Europeans between the 1930s and 1960s, living relatively i solated lives from the Europeans at Tweed Heads. ‘The men found sea sonal work fishing, cutting cane et c… while the women worked as do mestics or took on lau ndry work. They supplemented their income by keeping go ats, cows and chicke ns, fish ing and colle cting tradition al marine resources such as mud crabs, oysters, pipis and other shellfish.’

Boileau, Joanna. Caldera to the Sea: A History of the Tweed Valley, Tweed Shire Council, 2006.

Heritage; North coast rivers

This book was developed out of the community based heritage study report (above) on a thematic history of the Tweed Valley. In Chapter 5 the fishin g industry is discussed. The section talks about the men’s commercial fishing, and like the fishi ng communities on the south coast, there is no mention of women and fishing.

Board of Studies NSW. Talking Lapa: a local community history of La Perouse, Board of Studies NSW, North Sydney, June 1995.

Biographical; Beaches/ocean

This book documents some of the memories of the older Aboriginal co mmunity who grew up at La Perouse, Sydney. They spent much time at the beach where the predominant memory of the women is co llecting sea she lls with their mothers or watching for the mullet with their fishermen fathers. p.10: Dulcie Simms: ‘W hen we were children w e were told that if you were troubled and you wanted the answer to something, you had to go down, on the beach, and put


your two feet in the wet sand and you’d feel the vibes of the spirits of your own. You’d come away without any troubles on your mind.’ p.25: Collecting shells; Lola Ryan: ‘Well we used to collect a lot on Narrabeen Beach, Cronulla Beach, Boat ’arbour, Wanda Beach. An d if we wanted the real pretty ones, you’d have to go down t he south coast to Wreck Bay. There were butt on shells, star shells and brown ones we call nuppies or gubbens.’ p.36: ‘Fishin g in the bu sh’; Shirley Murphy and Lucy Sutto n: ‘Mum’d sit us on the table and there was always mullet from the fishermen when there was a haul, so she used to give us a line and say if we sat there long enou gh with a line out the door we’d catch a fish. Of course we believed it. Wh en we was f inished scrubbing, she’d tie a mullet on the end of our line s and we’d think we caug ht a fish in t he middle o f the bush. We were very gullible kids.’ p.42: Shellwork; Christie Moore and Sandra Mu rphy: ‘… Th e glue is sp ecial and to make it they used Davis Gelatine then they boiled it. After t hey boiled it they added plain flour.’

Bowdler, Sandra. ‘Hook, line and dilly bag: an interpretation of an Australian coastal shell midden’, Mankind, vol. 10, no 4, 1976, pp.248–58.

Academic

p.249: ‘In hunting societies world over it is women who gather and th ey gather th e shellfish. This is so in the societies o f t he northwest Pacific coast o f America, and among the Yahgan, Ono, Chono and Alacaluf hunter- gatherers o f the Chile an archipelago. The gathering of shellfish as the task of wome n has been observed in many parts of coastal Australia: Arnhem Land, the Daly River region, Cape York and Tasmania. Men ma y gather a few shellfish for immediate consumption to stay thei r hunger while engaged on other pu rsuits; it is not, however, a male ta sk to collect shellfish for delayed consumption.’ p.249: Bowdler argues that there were a number of techniques for cat ching fish in Australia – spear, line a nd hook, nets, traps, da ms and weirs, poisoning with bark or other vegetable poison s. Furthermore, Bowdler argues th at the most widesprea d method of fishing was with spears, which was an almost exclusively male practice . However, Bowdler also suggests t hat this shif ted with the introductio n of the shell hook approximately 60 0 years ag o, which saw wo men becoming increasingly involved in fishing (p.254–6). p.249: ‘The use of poisons to kill fish is quite widespread in Australia and seems also to have bee n a male practice. However, it is of necessity used in fresh water pools and lagoons.’ pp.249–50: ‘Nets may be used by e ither sex, with much local variation. Thus, in the Darwin area nets were employed by two people, ‘usually female’, and in the Archer, Holroyd and Edwards Rivers area of western Cape York net s were likewise used by women. In northwest Queensland – an inland situation – nets were used by men and boys; and nets were used by men around the Moreton Bay area. In western Arnhe m Land, in inland pools, nets were used by both men and women.’ p.250: ‘Line fishing with hooks may also be done by either sex.’


p.250: ‘More communal methods may invol ve seine nets, a s on Dunk Island where men carry t he net out into the sea and wome n pay it out from the s hallows; an d various sorts of traps, weirs and dams. Most of these are used in creeks or estuaries; but they are also found on the open coast in situations where they can trap fish on the tide. Stone dams may be erected in small shallow bays; and on the north coast of New South Wales a stone-built fish trap has been described built on a rock platform.’ p.250: ‘Another commu nal method is for a group of people to wade o ut to sea an d drive the fish in before them; men only or men and women may participate.’ p.250: Another method was ‘the cat ching of sm all fish by women in their dilly-bags, which might be construed as a form of netting.’ p.250: ‘Another more or less communal form described for southeast Queensland is getting “porpoises” (i.e. dolphins) to herd schools of tailor into the shallows where they were speared or netted by men and th rown onto t he beach where wo men picked them up.’ p.252: Bowdler suggest s that ‘fish caught by wo men is treated like othe r gatherable foods, i.e. eaten on the spot or kept for family use; and fish caught by men is eaten by men. If the fish is large enough, or if there is a large haul, it is probably distributed amongst other men.’ p.253: Bowdler argues that ‘wome n except when out in their canoe s on Sydne y Harbour had very low visibility as far as the First Fl eeters were concerne d. Systematic gathering of shellfish and perhaps plant foo ds may well have been carried out away from the area of settlement: Hunter comments of the men that “we had frequently observed , that they t ook particular care upon every occasion to kee p the women at a distance.”’ p.253: ‘women were s een to spend much time fishing. Here we ha ve one of t he clearest in stances of th e division of labour according to technique. Men invariably used the four-pronged, bone-barbed spear; women fished with hook and line, using a shell hook and a vegetable fibre line.’ p.254: ‘Surgeon J White saw on the harbour women fishing who then came ashore and cooked and ate their catch.’

Brayshaw, Helen. Aborigines of the Hunter Valley: a study of colonial records, Scone and Upper Hunter Historical Society, Scone NSW, 1986.

Academic; Lower north coast

p.60: ‘Canoes at Port Stephens were “nothing but a sheet of bark pressed and tied together at either end”, and at Maitland they we re “made of bark”, the e nds tied with curridgeon [ sic] bark, a nd sealed with grass-t ree gum. T hose seen on the lowe r Hunter by Barrallier were propelle d along the river by a long pole, a nd went well against the current. In deeper water “short battledor like pa ddles” were used, one in each hand.’ p.60: The manufacture of canoes: ‘… the bark was softened and shaped by the u se of fire and tied at the ends with vines. Stays were placed across at either end and a vine cord tied across the centre to maintain the shape. A hea rth of clay was made in the centre for cooking freshly caught fish and a source of warmth and light at night.’


p.63: Women made string from bark. Ebsworth described how: ‘they twist and roll the bark in a curious manner with the palm of the ha nd upon the leg; with this string they form nets of curious workmanship.’ p.75: ‘Shellfish formed a particularly significant element of the diet of coast al Aborigines. At Lake Macquarie, Threlkeld wrote, “Cockles were the every day dish on the lake, no t because t hey are the favourit e fo od, but, be cause they can be at all seasons, most easily obtained.”’ p.75: Brayshaw argues that substa ntial numbers of oyster s were con sumed on the coast evide nced by co lonial ob servers’ accou nts of oyst er collectin g and shel l middens. For example, the party from the Lady Nelson foun d ‘the shore covered to a great depth with oyster-shells’ on the Hunter estuary. p.76: ‘There is no direct evidence as to wh o traditionally collected the shellfish. However, F itzpatrick re membered that it was the women who colle cted oyster s, cockles and pippis3, and who dived off the rocks in search of crayfish.’ p.76: ‘Early observers believed that fish constituted the main item i n the diet of coastal Aborigines.’ p.76: ‘Vario us methods of cat ching fish ap pear to have be en employe d. The hoo k and line, not used on the north coast of New South Wales and believed to have come into use further south only within the last 2,000 years, was used in the Hunter region. The hook was “of a sh ell ground d own on a stone until it became the shape the y wished.”’ p.76: ‘This mode of fishing was usually undertaken by the women in canoes, a fire lit on clay in t he centre to roast the b ait, which might be cockle, a piece of starfish o r other fish, and to roast the fish as soon as it was caught.’ p.77: ‘Weirs were used. Grant came across th e remains of one in a small cree k flowing into the Hunter estuary; part of a net made of strong grass was lying on th e creek bank. The net he assumed to be of European manufacture, bu t the weir was “the work of the native i nhabitants, this being one of their pri ncipal devices for taking fish.” Threlkeld descr ibes a method of “planting sprigs of bushes in a zig-zag from across t he streams, le aving an int erval at the point of every angle where the men stand with t heir nets to catch what others frighten towards them by splashing in the water.” … Hand nets were also u sed in the shallow waters by mean s of forming a circle and enclosing the fish.’ p.77: ‘It is possible that nets were used further up the river, near Morpeth, where the lagoons of Wallis Plains “swarmed with deliciou s fish.” Peter Cunningham noted that during the dry summers, when the water was low, the Aborigines would wade in “and actually drag out cartloads thereof, including immense eels.”’ p.77: In the Port Stephens area ‘the fishermen, generally about half a dozen at once, would rush into the wat er up to thei r middles, with spears and womera hs all poise d ready, then when the school was within striking distan ce, the leading fisherman would give the word “muh” (now) and the spears would all be launched together.’

3 ‘Pipi’ is the correct spelling for this kind of shellfish, however is sometimes spelled ‘pippi’, ‘pippis’ or ‘pippies’ throughout this document where that was the original spelling in the quoted source


p.77: ‘According to Vinn icombe, the shoaling of the sea mullet begins in late March and continues through April and May. Grant remarked on their being v ery numerous at Newcastle even in June and July. Overall fish tend t o be most numerous in summer and least so in winter.’ p.77: ‘Apart from sea mullet and fresh water eels, there is evidence of a variety of other fish species being consumed in coastal areas, including perch, flathead, bream, schnapper, whiting and flounde r. Stranded whales represented a feast for Aborigines, and Threlkeld noted that on t hese occa sions messe ngers were despatched to all the n eighbouring tribes who gathered to partake. Porpoises also were eaten if occasion presented them, although there is no evidence of their being actively pursued.’

Briar, Tibby. Tibby Briar my story, as told to Phyllis Collie, Wilcannia, no date.

Biographical; Inland rivers

Tibby was born near Ivanhoe and th e family worked on the surrounding stations until moving to Carowra Tanks in the dr ought and d epression years of the 1930s. When they were forcibly removed to Menindee they thought the Darling River must be like a huge tank and were very confused when they c ouldn’t get around it. The meeting o f the desert people and the river peo ple was very difficult. In later years Tibby talks about loving the bush around the river country where the y would hu nt – but she doesn’t mention fishing.

Briggs-Pattison, Sue and Harvey, Bev, Illustrated by Elaine Russell. Fishing, Scholastic, Sydney, 1998.

Children’s book; Inland rivers (Victoria)

This is one of a series of colourful children’s books written about Yorta Yorta Country on the Rive r Murray. While Yorta Yorta Country is in Victo ria, the stories are about the same river that flows through Ne w South Wa les. As is co mmon amongst written and oral stories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people from the Murray, it tells of the colonisation of the river by European carp and how it is regarded. Back cover: ‘Being river people, fish was one of the staple f oods of the Yorta Yorta people. When European carp was introduced t o the river it quickly began to compete for food with the native fish. When anyone went fishing and caught carp, it was either left on the river bank or cooked up for the dogs and cats. It had too many bones and was too tough to eat.’ Inside text: ‘When Nan went fishing and caught one carp, at tea time one dog wa s happy. When Nan went fishing and caught two carp, at te a time two dogs were happy.’ And so on to six – ‘When Nan went fish ing all day and caught lo ts of carp, at tea time all the dogs were happy.’

Bruce, Mary Grant. A little bush maid, Angus and Robertson, 1996 (first published 1919).

Children’s novel; Inland rivers


This is one of Mary Bru ce’s famous Billabong children’s series begun in 1910, and describes w hat her character of the non-Aboriginal girl No rah (aged 12) did in the bush. In th is book ther e is a whole chapter called ‘F ishing’ where Norah’s fishin g excursion with her older brother and a ‘hermit’ is described. For Norah the bush life which inclu ded stock work, horse riding and constant e xploration o f the bush, including fishing, reflects the real life childhood of Mary Ellen Bundock in the previous century in the Upper Richmond Rive r Valley. Wh ile there’s nothing much to make of this – fish ing seems to have been a part of m any non-Aboriginal girls lives in inlan d river areas.

Buchan, Rosemary. The Aborigines of New South Wales: Murray people, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney, n.d.

Heritage; Inland rivers

Although fish and other river foods and the me ans of catching them a re discussed, the gender roles in fishing are not d iscussed. But unlike earlier texts wh ich presume that fishing was a man’s role, no such underlying assumption exists in this book.

Bundock, Mary Ellen. Notes on the Richmond River blacks c.1890 [Richmond River Historical Society]

Archival; North coast inland rivers

Mary Ellen Bundock was the daug hter of Wellington and Mary Bundock who were one of the first settler fa milies on the Upper Ric hmond River in 1847. Their station at Wyangerie close to present-day Kyogle was near the banks of one of the Richmond’s many tribut aries, and Mary Ellen writes abou t a blissful childhood p laying on its banks, ridin g, and expl oring. Her writings about ‘the blacks’ are widely read, b ut unlike Katie Langloh Parker, she takes much less interest in the specificit ies of daily life of the Aboriginal p eople around her. In the few places where she discussed fishing she refers only generally to ‘blacks’. Elsewhere she said that the men hunted and the women cooked – it may be assumed from this that she was generally referring to men as the fishers. She also re lays stereotypical notions of gender roles and the idea that the women were downtrodden.

Byrne, Denis and Maria Nugent. Mapping attachment: a spatial approach to Aboriginal post-contact heritage, Department of Environment and Conservation NSW, Sydney, 2004

Cultural heritage; North coast rivers

Mapping attachments documents some of the heritage pla ces of pred ominantly the Biripi and Worimi people of the Manning River and Forster areas of the mid-nort h coast of New South Wales. In Chapter 10 ‘Purfleet & Saltwater’ Aboriginal men are ide ntified as those who were the professional fisher s in the mid twentieth century. Like Wreck Bay on the sout h coast, from the late nin eteenth century the Ab origines Protection Board had started providing boats and nets to the communities a t Taree and Forster (see p.44 Ch. 5). Although the Board d ocuments referred to the boats and nets being used by ‘Aborigines’ they were given to the men and the men were expected t o carry on t he


commercial fishing. Pag e 88 discu sses the men’s practice in the 194 0s, ’50s an d ’60s of leaving their fish ing boats, n ets and oth er gear on t he banks of the creeks around Purfleet Mission and other creeks near the Mannin g River. However unlike the unintended silence s about women’s fishing practices in other Aboriginal communities where fishing has bee n a commercial enterprise, women’s stories ar e included below. p.88: ‘These were places asso ciated with professional fishermen, those who sou ght to make a living from fi shing and who sold their catch through the local fish co-op. Many other Aboriginal people from Purfleet fished for pleasure and to feed their families. Betty Bungie, who moved to Purfleet f rom Nambucca in ab out 1950, loved fishing, and would go out every weekend with her husband and children. H er favourite places were Saltwater, Redhead, Blackhead, Old Bar and Forster. She told us that she’d “stay all d ay fishin’”. Her husband Johnny (Bungie), usua lly had an ol d truck or car, so they’d drive to their fishing places. If they didn’t go to the coast, they’d go along th e Manning River to the bridges a t Coopernook and Cu ndletown a nd around Pampoolah.’

The photo on p.88 is of Betty Bungie fishing off the bea ch at Saltwater in c. 1960 with her young daughter Isabel. Page 89 is a map showing the site of the Saltwater Christmas Camp and fishing places. Ch. 13: ‘Forster & Wallis Lake’; ho wever, despite the story of Betty Bungie’s love of fishing, the authors diff erentiate beach-going a ctivities alo ng the following gender lines, for the mid twentieth century, where women are not remembered as the fishers amongst the interviewees in this part of the book: p.113: ‘Bea ches’; ‘Aboriginal men used the b eaches aro und Forster mostly for fishing, diving for lobst ers and collecting bea ch worms for bait, while women’s activities included taking children there to swim, to have picnics and to collect shells and shellfish … ‘ pp.113–14: ‘Being Aboriginal’; ‘Goin g to the beaches, espe cially on Sundays, was part of the process by which Aboriginal peop le were able to develop and maintain “their sen se of themselves, part of what it me ant to be Aboriginal an d kin” [Bain Attwood The making of the Aborigines, p.79] . Intergenerational inter actions wer e particularly important an d highly val ued. For example, older Aboriginal women are remembered as taking the young children from the mission to the beach for picnics. They would cook dampers in th e sand and th e children would swim or play aroun d the rocks … In the same way, during the 1950s and 1960s, men in their thirties would take young teenage boys, usually th eir nephews, on fishing and diving excursions to Burgess Beach. The older generation men in their fifties a nd sixties, would regularly go along to o. These w ere important occa sions for passin g on cult ural knowledg e from one generation to the next.’

As speculated in the report above, in place s where commercial f ishing along the coast was important, it is the men who are most often remembered as the fishers and not the women. Unlike Aborig inal women’s biographie s along the rivers where women fished while looking after the children, similar stories rarely appear for coastal women.

It was also the men who took the tourists out for fishing trips (p.114), presumably confirming the Anglo colonial gende r roles where in the pu blic realm it was the men who owned and operated the boat s. However women remember back to their childhoods with glee in remembering their boating and fishing adventures as follows:


p.116: ‘Near the Little Baths were boatshed s, where Aboriginal pe ople would sometimes hire boats. Fay Pattison recalls that boat hire was cheap in the 1940s and 1950s: “You know what we used to get boat s for? When we was kid s? Fifty ce nts and twenty-f ive cents! … Yeah, we used to run home fro m school and straight out fishing. Because we loved fishing. We’d row out. We’d get about a hundred and eighty six mullet. Now you’re lucky if you get twenty or forty now. Yeah, because they was thick then, you know…”’ p.117: ‘Fay Pattison t old us: “Gladys Simon used to t ell me that down at the breakwater Aborigines years ago u sed to talk to the porp oise in the lingo and tell them to round the fish up and they’d bring the f ish in.”’ It is assumed that the authors knew that Fay was talking about both women a nd men when referring to ‘people’, as in other sections of the text where Fay has meant men they have clarified that in brackets. Women also called in the dolphins around Yamb a – see Ru by Langford’s reference. Ch. 17: ‘Ma dge Bolt’, p. 147: [childhood memories around Forster] ‘We used to walk out that wa y [to One Mile Beach]. We’d walk out that wa y. But we used to walk to Little Beach too … Yea h, we used to walk out there and fish and have a picnic and that.’ p.148: ‘Going Fishing’; ‘We used to go fishing. One day we went and we caught a lot of lovely bream. My sister still go es fishin’. S he likes her fish. Both my sisters go fishin’. We ’d go out on the lake. W e used to g et a pullin ’ boat and g o fishin’ ove r there. Go prawnin’. We used to go prawnin’ some nights. But we had a really goo d life. Now, it’s nothing now. Yeah, we used to hire a pullin’ boat, and go fishing. Oh, it used to be good around the lake . We used to get some nice big f latheads and tha t. And look ’ow it is now!’


C

Campbell, Valerie. ‘Two fish traps located on the mid-north coast of New South Wales’ in Isabel McBryde (ed.), Records of times past: ethnohistorical essays on the culture and ecology of the New England tribes, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1978.

Academic; Mid-north coast

p.122: The most well-known exa mple of fish tr aps in New South Wales ‘is the vast network of traps in the Darling River at Brewarrina in northern New South Wales.’ p.123: Campbell identifies four fish traps on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, one on Broughton Island , north of Port Stephens, one at Point Plomer, north of Port Macquarie, one at Arra warra, north of Woolgoolga, and one at Ango urie, south of Yamba. Campbell cites evidence, which suggests that the Arrawarra fish trap s were in use until 1900 (or perhaps later) by local Aborigines. ‘Mr England of Coffs Harbour has reported meeting a n Aboriginal party in the 1930s that had just collected about one hundred pounds of fish from these traps.’ p.130: ‘Mr L aurie Ferguson of Yamba recalls t hat bream were caught in the trap at Angourie and that winter was the best time for this fish. As bream spawn in the winter they are most plentiful in the shallow harbours in the colder months an d are readily caught in b aited traps along the fo reshore. Both “Australian salmon” and sea mullet come close to the shore when spawning; Ainsworth and Hodgkinson mention th at these fish were valuable elements of the Aboriginal diet.’ p.130: ‘Sea mullet are available t hroughout t he year, but in April a nd May wh en spawning occurs they appear in large numbers close to the shore. It is such an event that W Scott describes at Port Stephens: “The schools u sed to travel from west to east close inshore on the northern side of the harbour, at high water … th e fishermen, generally about half a dozen at once would rush into the water up to their middles … then when the school was within striking distance the spears would all be landed at once.”’

Campbell, Valerie. ‘Ethnohistorical evidence on the diet and economy of the Aborigines of the Macleay River Valley’, in Isabel McBryde (ed.), Records of times past: ethnohistorical essays on the New England tribes, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1978.

Academic; MacLeay River

p.91: Clement Hodgkinson, who officially explored the Macleay River region in the early 1840s, emphasised the importance of fish in the diet of local Aboriginal people. ‘Hodgkinson claims that “… the blacks … at the Macleay and Nambucca rivers spear in a few mi nutes sufficient fish for the whole tribe, on the shallow san d-banks and mud-flats on that part of the river, which rise s and falls with the tid e.” He also describes them spearing sea mullet and salmon in the surf.’


p.91: John Henderson, a squatter in the Macleay district in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘reports the use of “smart-weed” to stupefy fish in small pools, and this would appear to have been a traditional fishing method. Nets, “in size and sh ape like two large kites … joined together down one side”, were also employed to capture fish.’ p.91: ‘Fish t raps were also constru cted, small creeks and tidal streams being fenced off with brush and sticks. There is a stone fish weir some fifty feet square at Point Plomer. While it is completely submerged at hig h tide it is g enerally exposed during the ebb, and local people remember it catching fish about thirty years ago.’ p.91: ‘The waters of t he ocean and tidal zone were also rich in crustacean s, Hodgkinson recording t hat large cr ayfish and crabs were “caught among the rocks ” along the coast, and lobster from the tidal creeks.’

Cane, Scott. The Red Rock mob: Aboriginal relationships with the Red Rock–Corindi area, NSW: a report to the Grafton Lands Office, ANUTECH Pty Ltd, Canberra, March 1988 [Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation].

Cultural heritage; North coast beaches

The back section of Scott Cane’s report cont ains transcr ipts from in terviews with elders of the area who once lived around Corindi Lake s on the mid-north coast. Cane’s inter views are amongst the early interviews with p eople who became key informants in their own organisation (Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation) and became involved over the coming decades in partner ships with academic researchers from the University of New England (for example, see the Yarrawarra Place Stories series) and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Se rvice (see Tony English 2002) an d carried out further interviews.

In these transcripts there aren’t any particular fishing stories – rather fishing is referred to as just something everyone did. For example, Marie Edwards talks abou t the regular weekends o r weeks tha t they would move fro m their place around th e lake to a camp at Red Rock: ‘… you know, when my fathe r went to se ll worms and that’s where we made the place. They built there … and then we used to come down here camping to the corner, you know, just fishing and that.’

Val (no sur name) talking about her older people: ‘They used to fish , a lot of fishes, and they used to go out to that farm … spuds, corn, stuff like that. But mostly they lived off fish, shellfish, nothing they didn’t eat off the beach and the sea.’

On the whole the women remember the men as the fishers: ‘Scott: Did you get much fish out of the river and stuff, crabs and crayfish? Marie: Oh yes, Jewfish like that, from that river, crabs. My father used to know

every spot, you know.’ However in a later interview in 1997, reproduced in sections in the Yarrawarra Place Stories 4 (see below) she and Vi Wilson give a vivid description of their own worming practices.

Marie talks about getting oysters a nd prawns. Stories of abundance of fish and other marine life are also told as a way of demonstrating the death of the Corindi Lake through pollution runoff from septic tanks of the encroaching holiday and permanent white settlers moving into the area from the late 1960s.

Marie: ‘Used to go down the lake … the grandfather was fishing and I vy and Cecil and I came down the truck [ track?] up th ere camping. We’d co me here and we’d get the bark off the ti-tree and wound it up and made a light. The prawns would jump out of the water in the lake – three ker osene bin s full in about half an ho ur. Took it home, got home about 11p m got the salt water and put them on and cooked them. Kerosene tin full. Sat down with bread and butter and ate them that night’.


Cane, Scott. Welcome to Fingal: Aboriginal associations with Fingal Head, NSW: a report to Ocean Blue Pty Ltd, National Heritage Studies, ACT, March 1989. [Tweed Heads Historical Society]

Cultural heritage; Far north coast beaches and ocean

Cane was c ommissioned by the developers Ocean Blue Resorts, who had selecte d Fingal Head as a potential site for a hotel and related tourist developme nts, to carry out an anthropological report in accordance with requirements for their Rezoning and Development Applicati on. The report utilizes a large amount of transcript material from Cane’s interviews with the Aboriginal and Islander community. I was interest ed to read what I could about Tweed Heads a nd hence F ingal as b eing a famous meeting place for Aboriginal group s from the north around Beaudesert as well a s Bundjalung from the south beca use of the rich fishing and other marine foods available. However the sections of interviews reproduced in the report either don’t differentiate the gender s or give th e impressio n that women didn’t fish, and that it was a male leisure activity. Men worked in t he fishing in dustry. Women’s fishin g practices are either implicit or they remain invisible in this text.

Cane does not refer to any of his informants by name, but rather as ‘Elderly man’ or ‘Elderly woman’, etc. p.22. Transcript 6: Elderly Man: ‘S: [Scott] And your dad was working all the time – fishing? A: [ Aboriginal] Fish ing. My father wasn’t fish ing all the t ime. He was in the marine

business in building wharfs and things like tha t … He use d to fish in the spare time, but mostly he was employed at the harbour.

S: And what about your mum, what sort of stuff did she do? A: Just a domestic in the house.’

This excerpt provides a me mory of a time o f less official restrictio ns and therefore suggests possibilities for people to make some money: p.23. Transcript 4: Elderly Woman: ‘S: What sort of work w ere people doing when they were living there [ Fingal, known

as ‘The Caves’]. A: Fishing and oystering. S: The oystering, what was that? Going along the rocks and collecting them? People

talk about leases? A: Some of them used to just go. Well those days they weren’t fussy, you could go

on the stone wall and open oysters and sell them and no one would be any the wiser. Fishing mostly, they dug pipis, and mussels but mostly seafoods …’

p.31: Refering to life at the Ekerebah Island Aboriginal Re serve (across the Tweed River from Fingal) in th e 1920s an d 1930s: ‘… Added to this [Europe an rations] t he Reserve pe ople supple mented their rationed diet with nearby natural resources o f fish, oysters, mud-crabs, ukeres (pippis) and hunting … Men, wherever possible, obtained work which mainly consisted of farm labour … and also commercial fishing.’

Cho, George, Arthur Georges and Ros Stoutjesdik (eds). Jervis Bay: a place of cultural, scientific and educational value, Australian Nature Conservation Agency, Canberra, 1995.

Academic; South coast beaches/ocean

This edited text refers to Jervis Bay and th e Jerrinja people of the Beecroft Peninsular ‘considered the spiritual birth place of 13 Aboriginal tribes of the south


coast’ (p.7). This publications offers an understanding of pre-contact women’s fishing practices in a place which became a significant site of Abor iginal commercial fishing in the twentieth century. Further contextual ma terial on the south coast Aboriginal fishing communities is as follows from E Egloff with Wreck Bay and Jerrinja Aboriginal Communities’ chapter ‘Aboriginal landscapes and seascapes’ pp.9–16: p.13: Aboriginal men were involved in the whaling industry from the 1870s. Th e Aboriginal reserves: Ro seby Park was suited to the purpo se of keeping Aboriginal people off the arable land and ‘was ideally situ ated for a fishing community so long as it didn’t compete with Europeans …’ Fishin g was enco uraged by the authorities with the Protector of Aborigines providing boats and fishing gear. Roseby Park is now called Jerrinja. p.14: ‘Europeans … saw their livelihood under threat as most Roseby Park Aboriginals were also fishermen …’ p.14: Long Beach Reserve: Just before the turn of the century, the NSW government set about to establish a number of Aboriginal re serves along the coast. Few remain. There was one at Long Beach. ‘In t his same area Aboriginal people had established a fishing lo okout and on the northern point of Long Be ach they are said to have camped. T he location was ne ver permanent as people continued to reside at Currambene Creek but it was used for fishing a nd camping and only a few families came to stay there in a semi-permanent fashion.’

Wreck Bay: The isolat ion appeale d to people at Mary’s Bay. ‘Aboriginal fishing families moved there shortly after the turn of the twe ntieth century … Women cooked over open fires and hauled and washed in kero tins … The goo d times and fish go to gether in th e memories of Aboriginal people … Although fishing was promoted by the State Government as a suitable activity fo r Aboriginal people and they were e ncouraged t o sell their catches on the local market, it was difficu lt fo r them to bring the loca l catch to market [ referred to in more detail in Egloff et al . reference above]. Transport from the isolated beaches to the markets relied upon motor or horse drawn vehicles. However, fishing remained the most important source of self-generated income for the community at Wreck Bay.’ p.15: ‘Unde r the provisions of the Fish Protection Ordinance 1929–1949 (NSW) Aboriginal residents of the Territory of Jervis Bay did not have to pay licence fees. In 1965 the provisions of the Capital Territory Fish Protection Regulation (ACT) referring to Aboriginal people was revoked.’ ( see Hawkins and Wilkinson in this annotated reference list for ongoing issues around traditional fishing and collecting rights and government policy).

Despite the inclusive terminology of ‘Aboriginal community’ and ‘people’, the only names that are no ted in this account are men. On the one hand, it is vital to include women and c hildren in di scussing th e marginal viability of the industry at Wreck Bay, etc., and that is acknowledged in the use of the term ‘Aboriginal families’. However, beyond that women disappear from the text as the fishers w ere men an d the part women played in the Aboriginal fishing industry remains invisible.

Cohen, Patsy and Margaret Somerville. Ingelba and the five black matriarchs, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1990.


Ingelba was once a thriving Aboriginal commu nity 80 km south of Armidale. Patsy Cohen traces her famil y history related to Ingelba with University of New Englan d author, Margaret Some rville’s assistance. Ingel ba was on the MacDon ald River and Patsy went to live there as a nine year old in the late 1940s.


Ch.4 Relationship to place: p.58: ‘a strategic place … A sense of Ingelba as a place rich in natural resources and offering a secure camp site was evident from all the people we spoke to. Ingelba was known for it s fish ing an d the variety of animals that could be hunted and for th e secure camp site on the banks of the river.’ pp.64–5: ‘using the resources of the land … Lola, Patsy’s young aunty who helped her adjust to Ingelba described fishing and catching rabbits as the very basis of th eir life: Leah: Did you used to fish, Lola? Lola: Yeah, oh yeah. Patsy: That’s what they mainly did, fishin’ through the day. Lola: Fishin’ and chasin’ rabbits was our life.’ p.66: ‘Knowledge about the river was central to their knowledge of the land a t Ingelba. Patsy, Maisie and Lola all spoke about this:… Lola: Wonder if there’s any fish in there? Patsy: There’s fish there. Lola: Down there wher e we used to catch th e little bla ck fish, over there in th e willows. Pasty: And ‘ere too, but there’s trout in ‘ere, rainbow trout – Bim caught ’em that big. Lola: That’s what we should have bought – a line too.’

‘Maisie’s mother’s memories also centred on the river: “My mother must have loved Ingleba, she’d tell us about th e river. They’d go fishin , they’d fish for perch or red fish – what do you call those little red ones, they do it down in Walcha too. Oh, we used to go there at Walcha and they used to get red fish and we used to always get those mussels too, t hey were like they were pippies fro m the beach, cook tho se on the coals too they used to. Turt le’s eggs too, they used to eat a lot of turtle’s egg. When we c ome home from school, go on the ri verbank there, the crick. And dig th e anthill where you always get the tur tle’s egg. Boil ’em or co ok ’em in th e ashes. You never cooked egg in the ashes?”’

Crawford, Evelyn as told to Chris Walsh. Over my tracks: a remarkable life, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1993.


Evelyn talk s of her childhood at the ‘back of Bourke’, Yantabulla, near the Queensland border, where she remembers catching crayfish as a child. pp.31–2. ‘W e got crayfish – boogoli – out of t he holes in the hard m ud along th e creek bank. You’d put your hand o r foot in one hole a nd sort of pump it, like when you unblock a sink. You’d see where the water came up in other places, so th at’s where the c rayfish would come out. They always come out backwards, so someone would stand over that hole while you pumped a t the first hole. In the waterholes we’d catch crays and shrimp s with a lump of meat on a string, and we’d scoop ’em out with a wire net. Our liveliest time was when we were finding mussels – thilli. We’d go into the shallow water, walk around on the mud and we’d fe el the mussels, hard and lumpy. They travel in a line, five or six one behind the other. We’d dive down, pull ’em out and chuck ’em on the bank. The smallest kids heape d them up ready to take home.’


Cruse Beryl, Liddy Stewart and Sue Norman. Mutton fish: the surviving culture of Aboriginal people and abalone on the south coast of New South Wales, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2005.

South coast beaches

The three authors wanted to write this book about the south coast Aboriginal people’s relationship with the coast becau se they can see that the camping and fishing traditions w hich they knew as children and younger adults are gett ing harder t o access for the younger generation. This is in part because t he increasing popularity of the coast, with rampant housing development as well as closing of public areas to unrestricted camping, has increa singly excluded and narrowed t heir previous camping access to the coast. The other issue i s the dwindling of fish stocks throug h pollution of breeding estuaries and over-fishing.

In the early section of t he book on pre and ea rly contact times the authors briefly descr ibe the wo men and children comin g to the be ach to fish with lines a nd shell hooks – the women finding t heir favourite spots on the rocks o r beach, or collecting th e shellfish. Once the book turns t o the colle ction of mutton fish, an d particularly the last chapter on the abalone industry once t he ‘muttonfish’ become s increasingly sought after from the 1 960s, the st ories predominantly turn to the me n who were/are part of the commercial industry or who procured the shells for families. No further mention of adult or contemporary women’s fishing is made. pp.3–6: Cruse, Stewart and Norma n describe a typical da y in the life of Aborigin al people on the south coast of New South W ales pre-white contact. Women a nd children spent the day gathering vegetables and shellfish, and fishing. Women fished at high tide with fishing lines and hooks. At lo w tide they gathered walkun (mutton fish or abalone). pp.4–5: ‘Walkun are a big broad shellfish, a type of snail, which live in deep crevice s and have to be prised off the rocks, which is w hat the wo men did with their digg ing sticks. At times they would feel for the walkun with their feet and then dive down a nd prise them off the rocks, but most times they were so ple ntiful they could just wa lk around at low tide and get large walkun. Even the children could get them in this way. They only ever took what they needed to eat for the evening meal.’ p.9: Archaeologists, such as Bowdler, have speculated that on the NSW south coast ‘the development of fish hook technology seems to have a llowed women to become fishers where previously only men used the fish spear. Women who spent more time fishing had less time for gathering shellfish and there is evidence of certain species of shellfish become rare in the middens at this time. Divisions of labour between men and women are described throughout Aboriginal societies everywhere, but the role of children is a lso important. Women look after the young children while gathering food and the children learnt from them how to get basic foods to ensure their survival. This means that all adults a nd most child ren had the skills to gat her these fo ods. On the south coast walkun was gathered as a survival f ood by all a nd it was probably dive d for by the men.’ pp.9–10: Cruse, Stewart and Norman point out that cultura l practices r elating to th e traditional use of wal kun have continued into modern times. F or exa mple, immediately removing the meat of the shellfish from the shell and leaving the shell on the shore line; sharing mutton fish with others in the community. p.27: ‘Pre-contact methods of fishing and gathering have been handed down fo r generations through stories and songs, ensur ing a contin uing connection with the environment.’ In the 19 60s, Janet Mathews re corded some of these songs: ‘Percy


Davis grew up in the Tu ross River a rea on land preserved by the senior men in the 1870s. He was in his eighties wh en Janet re corded him singing the song of th e westerly wind. The song calls on Gurrugumar, the westerly wind to blow and flatte n the seas so the fish ca n be caught. At about the same time Janet recorded Jimmy Little senior singing a song about gathering oysters, taught to him by his mother from Wallaga Lake.’ pp.27–8: ‘Fishing and shellfish gath ering contin ued to be a n important part of the south coast livelihood well into the twentieth century.’ pp.29–30: During the gold rush of the 1850s, Chinese people arrived in Twofold Bay because of its proximity to the Victorian gold fields; many of these people stayed o n after the gold rush and established market gardens and fishing businesse s. Aboriginal people traded with the Chinese and collected mutton fish for export t o Sydney and China. p.30: Ossie Cruse describes how the Aboriginal community, including his father and uncles, gathered mutton fish to trade with the Chinese in the early 1900s. ‘They used to take the meat out of its shell an d while they were doing this it would really be a family gathering, where men would be diving, g athering the mutton fish, bringing it to share and women and kids would be lighting the fires. And they’d have these big drums to put the mutton fish in. The y’d boil it for about three or four minutes and this would take all the impurities off the outside of the mutton fish, and they would come out of the boiling water looking a nice golden brown. Then the mutton f ish would be laid out on t he rocks in the sun to dry.’ The drying process took two to three days, then the dried mutton fish were placed in cor n bags and sold to the Chinese fo r export. p.31: ‘Some families made a living entirely from fishing and lived in permanent camps at good fishing spots, su ch as the Br ierlys at the mouth of the Moruya River and the Nyes at Barling’s Beach near Toma kin.’ Other families spe nt part of the year fishing and the other part in seasonal fruit and vegetable picking jobs. pp.35–6: ‘Jean Squires, now in her sixties, worked all her life fishing. At a young age she lived with her grandparents, the Brierlys, and learnt from them. They continued a tradition of commercial fishing learnt from their family’s first contact with white culture in the 1840s at the whaling station in Twofold Bay. They were based on the Moruya River at Garland Town near the Moruya airport and Jean h auled nets f rom a youn g age. Later she raised her own family while continuing to fish for a living.’ p.36: Jean Squires – She used to take her children to the beach with her. ‘When the y were babies I’d dig a little hole in the sand, put the blanket in it and lay them in there. And many a time I drag ged a big cane pram with two of th e babies in it along the Bingie there , just fishing in the n ight-time for salmon. Hand-lining. When it was too rough to fish, I always had the han d-line, I had a kid on my back, another one in my arms, going along the b each … We used to go to Moruya. I ’d pack the kids up at 2 o’clock in th e morning, put them in the car, bla nkets and e verything and take the m out to the beach for mullet; I had six or seven of them the n. Weekends we’d go out and camp out there save getting the kids out of bed so early, that was our life. That’s all we did.’


p.38: Jean Squires – ‘My grandmother used to do a lot of fishing. I think that’s wh ere I got it from; they used to think sh e was a man. Used to be out at night hauling in the rivers and t hat with po or old Pardi. She used to be always fish ing they used to ju st think she was another man. I was that way in the finish, I was just classed as another man.’ p.62: Whol e families worked together to ga ther abalon e for sale. David Squires recounts how he and hi s brother went diving for abalone while his mother sat in the boat taking the abalone from them and shuck a nd clean them. At the same time his father would sit on a hill keeping look out for sharks.


D

Dargin, Peter. Aboriginal fisheries of the Darling-Barwon Rivers, Brewarrina Historical Society, Dubbo, 1976.

Heritage; Inland rivers

There is a lot in this little book abo ut fishing, but little of it refers specifically to either women or men – instead referring to Aborigines as groups. While so me of it do es refer to the whole group, often there is the pre sumption that they are t alking about men. The few exceptions which refer specifically to women are noted below. p.16: The explorer Mitc hell said of the many ‘tribes’ on the Darling ‘…Their roads appeared in all directions, and their gins were fishing in the river at a distance.’ p.23: Referring to the small olive la nd crab which rarely exceeds three inches: ‘Many of these small aquatic animals were also caught in the d illy bags and small funnel nets used by the women for catching small fish.’ pp.25–6: ‘Nets were valued possessions an d charms were sung over them to increase their yields … Twine manufacture from the inner bark of the kurrajongs tree, reeds, grasses and fibrous roots, fur and hair, was the provi nce of the older men and women who chewed th e material until it was pliable, then r ubbed it int o strands o n their thighs. Two strands were then fed, with a twist, from one han d to the thigh where it was rolled, twisted and tightened into a single cord. Either thigh was used, a change being made as one grew tired or irrita ted: while the teeth, from years of constant chewing, were worn to the gums. Twine was made in various thicknesses, according to its u se. Mitchell not iced large qua ntities of “native flax” and bundles of twine in the huts a long the river. Th e twine was wound ont o a bone awl which wa s used as a meshing needle to execute an evenly meshed net … Nets were not confined to the capture of fish [used to trap various types of birds].’

In the chapter called ‘Brewarrina fisheries’ ther e is very little gender specific material on fishing, although men are shown as the builders and managers of the fish traps in the illustrations. Again it is assumed that men were the fishers. Women were only mentioned in the following instances: pp.39–40: RH Mathews 1901: ‘The Aboriginal fishers, men and women, were on the look out, and as soon as a sufficient number of the … tribe had entered the labyrinth of traps, openings were closed up by means of large stones which had been placed alongside r eady for us e. If the op ening was too wide, to be thus blocked up b y stones, a number of natives posted themselves across it to prevent the egress of the fish. The natives next e ntered the pens and splashed the water with t heir hands or feet, thus fr ightening th e fish into t he smaller enclosures, where the y were more easily caught.’ p.49: Whereas Dargin assumes that it is the me n who caught the fish by diving and grabbing them by the gills, Doreen Wright’s recollection indicates that both men and women fished that way: ‘The old pe ople wouldn’t have to spear the fish. They could


just walk int o the water and catch them under the gills an d fill their b uggadu, their dilly bags, up with them.’

Davis-Hurst, Patricia. Sunrise Station, SunBird Publications, Taree, 1996.

Autobiographical; North coast rivers

Sunrise Station was lat er known a s Purfleet Mission where Patricia grew up ju st outside of T aree on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Saltwater is the area on the coast where local Aborigin al people set up their annual Christmas Camp where they holidayed for five to six weeks each summer, escaping the scrutiny of the reserve system. p.156: ‘Saltwater (Sacred Place of the Dreaming)’. Saltwater has always been a place were Aboriginal p eople came for ceremo nies and rit uals – held at Saltwate r lagoon. An important meeting place – for different tribes.

Dennis, Pauline and Fields, Ted. From Walgett to Narran Lake with Aunty Pauline and Uncle Ted, Catholic Education, Armidale, no date. [Australian Museum]

Inland rivers

This small educative book is full of stories of how to act properly in the land aimed at Aboriginal and other school children. Like a number of reminiscences from the inland river country there is a sense of loss of the rivers with pollu tion and over-use of the water – and the loss of the Murray cod and invasion of the European carp.

Last page ( no page nu mbers): ‘Once the Barwon River used to be a mighty river with mighty big fish. During floods is st ill rises high. But most is now wasted for crops. There are only a few cod in the river now.’

Department of Environment and Climate Change (DECC) NSW. Aboriginal women’s heritage: Nepean, DECC NSW, Sydney, May 2007.

Oral history; Western Sydney rivers

p.9: Oral testimony by Glenda Chalker (born 1950, Camden) – ‘My grandfather would take my brother and me fishin g, rabbiting and foxing all around Camden Park. There was never an issue as far as a ccess to land and fishing on the Nepean River wa s concerned in those days. We went anywhere from the Me nangle area right up to Douglas Park.’ p.9: ‘Grandfather was able to sit th ere all day, crouched do wn on his haunches, ju st sitting there fishing for black fish. That was his favourite fish. When we were up there, fishing on the Nepean River, it was mullet, perch or catfish we’d catch. Unfortunately, I haven’t been fishing like that for a long time.’ p.10: Around 1973, Camden Park was sold an d access to the land was restricted . ‘Access to t he river wasn’t available any more either … S o now, I do n’t think my father’s been fishing on the Nepean River for the past thirty years.’


Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) NSW. Aboriginal women’s heritage: Wagga Wagga, DEC NSW, Sydney, June 2006.

Oral history; Inland rivers

p.8: Oral testimony by Pat Dacey (born 1940) – ‘We used to catch a lot of fish an d spear them there in the big channels that ra n along the outskirts o f town. The channels u sed to go do wn really low, so you could see th e fish swimming along! We’d catch some good size fish to o, just with nets right th ere in the channel. We used to cook them up and have a good feed. We’d get lots of yabbies too. We’d use nets that we made ourselves.’ p.22: Oral testimony by Joyce Hampton (born 1933) – gives an account of fishing in the Darling River. ‘We mainly caught yellow-belly and catfish. We used a cord type of line. You had to buy it. I t wasn’t like today’s fish ing line. We used old car bolts and things like t hat for sinkers. And we’d get the corks off wine bottles t o use as our floats. We used a hand line and we’d whirl it around and throw it in. We mostly use d yabbies for our bait. We’d catch the yabbies by tying a bit of meat to the end of a line and dangling it over the muddy ri verbank until a yabby gra bbed it. The n we’d pull it really careful. Sometimes we pumped them out of their hole with our fe et. Then you really picked them up carefully.’

Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) NSW. Aboriginal women’s heritage: Walgett and Collarenebri, DEC NSW, Sydney, April 2006.


p.32: Oral testimony by Eileen Peters (born 1918) – ‘I do remember ho w we did a l ot of fishing in those days. We fished with cord line and hooks. Our sinkers were either made of mu d or were old bolts th at we found around the place. Our sp ecial place was the “old bub” at Angledool and t he “Cato” at Brewarrina and then do wn from my home near the camp at Collarenebri.’ p.50: Oral testimony by Florence Kennedy (born 1925 in Angledool) – ‘I remember how Jim and Ted used to carry the clothes down to the river for washing. I remember how our gra nny would take her f ishing line down and we’d stay down t here in th e bush until t he washing was done … Granny would fish a nd we’d swim. She’d fish with a hand line.’ p.57: Oral testimony by Gladys Walford (born 1926 in Walgett) – ‘The boys used t o go off hunting. We often ate the e mu. The girls would go fishing. We’d fish afte r school. The re was an old lady, Mrs Sharpley, she would collect the kids and take them down fishing … When we went fishing we just used lines and little hooks. And if we didn’t have any hooks we used to make them out of a safety pin. We’d just get the safety pins and twist them round t o make the hook. We used to use squid, some shrimp, grubs, feathers and some meat or eve n frogs for our bait. We’d always use feathers because you see, when the fish see t he feathers moving they snap at the bait.’ p.64: Oral testimony by Hazel Winters (born 1931 in Walgett) – ‘I reme mber how we loved fishing and I had my own spe cial line. I u sed to catch yellowbellies and I think they were tastier back th en. We didn’t have this carp ruining the river as we do now. We used to fish just stra ight down from home and I remember I had a purple cork on my line.’


p.69: Oral testimony by Jenny Wright (born 1946 at Lightning Ridge) – ‘There was a big dam out there at Lightning Ridge and that’s where we used to go yabbying, and we always caught yabbies in there. There was enough for everybody. You just didn’t get greedy and take it all, not back then. You only took what you needed for a feed.’ p.74: Oral testimony by Josie Thorne (born 1920 at Dunglebill Station then moved to Angledool) – ‘When we did go fishing we’d go down and u se a hand line. We’d get bait and fish down at the water. We’d use car bolts as sinkers.’ p.86: Oral testimony by Lola Dennis – ‘There was a story about a Water Dog. And the story goes that if you didn’t get yourself home before sundown, then you would see this dog near the water. It was some sort of spirit it was. They would tell us about it, warn us and so we never ever stayed out after sundown.’ p.92: Oral testimony by Lola Murray (born 1951 in Walgett) – ‘I still go fishing now . Sometimes my sister Mavis will pick me up or me and Au nty Mavis will walk dow n here. Or sometimes we walk down to the weir. Sometimes my eldest son Mark takes us, or we jump in the car with my other son Jason, and go out to Yellowbelly Point. We just set up there and we try to be really quie t and wait for the fish to bite. My son will come and check on us every so often and drive us to another place i f the fishing isn’t any good. We just sit and wait for the line to start bobbing or for the cork to star t moving around.’ p.93: Lola Murray – ‘My grandfath er taught me how to co ok fish … he put the fish in gum leaves, then he put it on the coals in the fir e and he co vered it up with ashes. Another time he covered the fish in mud then put that in the ashes. It bakes it you see. The mud goes hard and when you pull the mud off, t he scales a nd all come away and you’re just left with the flesh.’ p.107: Oral testimony by Noreen Kennedy (born 1938, Walgett) – ‘You know my father would take us out fishing and crayfishing every weekend. That’s when we’d put the red ribbon on our hook, and we’d always catch fish . Plus we’d get buckets and buckets of crayfish, we’d just put them in a big pot and boil them up.’ p.113: Oral testimony by Rose Fernando (born in Collarenebri) – ‘Now when we used to go fish ing the first thing we’d do, if we didn’t have fishin g lines … (in those days the lines were made out of cord not nylon) we’d go fishing for crayfish instead – you’d pull the logs out of the river and the crayfish would fall out. And with th e fish, if there were backwater washes and the holes were full of water, we’d get in the re and we’d hunt all the f ish up to one end, and you might g et three or four fish out of it … and of course you cooked them then and there. You’d roll them up in mud and stick them in the fire.’ pp.113–14: Rose Fernando – ‘A special fishin g place we had was up near the cemetery, a nd today – it’s f enced off – but it was a pla ce where all the people seemed to go. Right u p that riv er there from where the white rocks go, we’d all go fishing. That was our place, but a s I say, today it’s all fenced off and we can’t get in there. We don’t have a fishing place today.’


Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) NSW, Aboriginal women’s heritage: Bourke, DEC NSW, Sydney, January 2005.


Oral testimony by Dot Martin (born 1945, Bourke):

p.12: ‘my grandfather, mum’s dad, he used to take us fishing. In tho se days we’d have to play up one end of the river and grandfather would go fishing down the other end.’ p.14: ‘One of my best memories, was just be ing down th ere at the r iver with the family. You know, just fishing and having a good time.’ Oral testimony by Alma Jean Sullivan (born 1949, Bourke):

p.26: ‘Every weekend th e family wo uld go down fishing a t the Bourke weir. Both my parents fished. They were darn go od at it too. The weir was only abo ut three mil es down from the reserve where we lived. We’d walk there. We kids played and fished. I have good memories o f those years. And so that’s how I started fish ing and I’ve never stopped since.’ p.26: ‘There was no carp in the Darling River ba ck then and we could always catch a feed of catfish, cod, bla ck bream or yellow belly at the wei r. And I should tell you about how we fished in the old d ays, my fa mily could never afford sinkers, so I remember we’d hunt a round and p ick up old nuts and bolts and we’d use them a s sinkers. And I learnt to fish using barbed wire hooks too. We’d get a pair of pliers and bend the wire to make the hooks.’ p.26: Alma Jean Sullivan takes her grandchildren fishing. ‘One of my good memorie s was back in 1997 wh en I came second in Bourke’s annual Fishing Challenge competition. It’s been held for about the last ten years now and people come from al l over the place to compe te. Well in 1997 I landed a four pound yellow belly and there must have been about 600 people out there fishing, along the banks of the Darling on that day.’ pp.26–7: ‘The river can be dangerous, let me tell you. I can remember I was about ten years ol d this one time and we were coming home fro m the Bourke weir after a day’s fishing with my mum and dad. The sun had just gone down and there was a full moon. That’s when we saw it, sitt ing on this riverbank, just looking at us from across the river. W e call it Moodagutta and we say th at it lives in what we call the river’s living hole. I t looks a bit like a seal but it hasn’t got a tail. When the river’s high you shouldn’t go swimming there because it will pull you down with the current.’ p.27: ‘Today I so metimes come down to the ri ver with the young one s and I try t o pass on the things I’ve learnt and the things I know. I want them to und erstand that they have to love the river and they have to give it respect. They have to do that first, and then they will grow to understand how dan gerous it can be and how bad things can become if we continue to take under size fish or if we continue t o pollute th e river.’ Oral testimony by Mary Matilda Sullivan (born 1935, Weilmoringle Station, north of Brewarrina close to the Queensland border):

p.33: ‘I th ink I’ve fished all along th e river here. I used to f ind a good fishing spot where I could sit down under a sha dy tree and I loved it. I used a han d line, we all used hand lines. But if you caught a cod, they put up such a fight you need a couple of people there to help you pull it in.’


p.33: ‘And we used to go yabbying too. You rake the yabbies out from the mud dy banks there along the side, so it’s no good looking where the water’s clear.’ Oral testimony by June Smith (born 1948, Enngonia 100 km north of Bourke):

p.37: ‘Well my old mother she used to get the gum leaves, put them on the coals and put the gridiron over the top of the m, then wh atever she’s cooking we nt on top of that, even fish.’ p.38: ‘I love it here, esp ecially this end of town, because it’s nice and quiet.’ ‘I never want to move from here. I’m not far from the fishing down the back.’ p.38: ‘When we were n ear the Warrego River we’d go and fish all the time, we’d g o diving for mussels and cook them right there on the river bank. All the family was camped right by that river.’

Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) NSW. Aboriginal Women’s Heritage: Port Stephens, DEC NSW, Sydney, August 2004.

Oral history; Lower north coast rivers and beaches

pp.2–3: Oral testimony by Viola Brown – ‘A lot of the time when we went out fish ing we’d set up by putting bottles down on the water’s edge with dough in th em, to catch the little mullet.

The mullet would go in after the dough and get trapped, then we’d use them for bait. Or we’d go out digging for worms for b ait and that was hard work … if yo u got any extra you sold them to the bait shop and that was a bit of ext ra money fo r food, for the family.’ p.8: Oral testimony by Viola Brown about new restrictio ns on fishing in the Port Stephens a rea. ‘Aboriginal people have always looked aft er the fish stock - they would never have gone out and deliberately kill ed little fish. They knew that the little fish were th e next year’s fish stock. They just didn’t do it. I can und erstand where they’re coming from with these fishing restrictions, because I’ve seen people take the little fish.’ Oral testimony by Val Merrick (born 1943) p.21: ‘My dad’s name was Stanley Lilley. My dad was a f isherman and so was his father Herb Lilley. They would supply the mission with plenty of fish. And fish was the main source of food at Karuah. We always had seafood to e at and there was always sharing in this community – we always shared what we had – I think tha t was just a blackfellows way. But people really relied on that sharing.’ p.22: ‘My d ad used to have a smo ke hut – to smoke the fish, mainly mullet. And it was lovely too. My brothers and everyone helped with the smoking. We had to cle an the fish and hang it up f or so many days, then salt it down. That got us through the winter.’ p.22: ‘We used to go and get o ysters. O ur m um would do c urried oysters and flathead, which isn’t bad food. I still have that today with my kids and we still spend a lot of time o ut at Stockton Bight fishing. Nowadays we take our grand kids out there, and they have a wonde rful time, there in the sand hills, fishing and ge tting a few pippis. So they still carry on our traditions.’


p.25: Val Merrick tells how fishing restriction s affect Aboriginal people: ‘We used to dig for mud worms. We’d use them for bait. It didn’t cost u s anything. But now that’s been taken away from us, we can’t get our ow n any more. And fishing , now you’re only allowed to catch so many fish. (Our mai n fish used to be flath ead, brim and whiting.) And one of the main things that hurts is not being allowed to collect the pippis. We all loved getting our pippis off the beach, but now we are o nly allowed to get a certain amount.’ p.27: Val Merrick on the effect of restriction s on Aboriginal culture and traditions: ‘… now we can’t do what we used to do – like getting bait and fishing. We can’t run a net out to get enough food for our families any more.’ Oral testimony by Colleen Perry (born 1932)

p.30: ‘We used to do a lot of fishing … We’d take our lunch and spend the day down there, fishing all day off the rocks and especially on the big rocks out on the Point. We would catch some nice squire th ere (that’s young snapper). Nice big bream an d flathead, and occasionally we’d catch some blue swimmer crabs.’ p.31: Colleen Perry – ‘I used to always take my children crabbing. I had a knack, I used to be able to know how to put my hand d own and grab the crab fr om behind … Other times we’d take a mattock and a piece of wire with a hook on one end to poke into the cra b hole and hook it arou nd the crab and pull it out.’ Now her daughter teaches her son how to catch crabs. p.33: Colleen Perry on the impact of over-fishing – ‘It wasn’t that long ago when you could go down to the river bank at high tide and catch three or four nice bream. (You can really only fish off the river bank at high tid e; it’s all mu d flat when the tide goes out.) You can’t do that now, beca use the fish are definitely diminishing. I think it’s been overfished.’ p.33: Colleen Perry – ‘I am a keen f isher woman and there are not ma ny places in Australia where I haven’t fished. I like going inland to Wilca nnia and to Menindee to fish in the Darling River when the fish are bit ing. I like the big rough she ll crays you get out of the Murrumbidgee. I’ve also been outside on the ocean fishing – it’s great.’ Oral testimony from Carol Ridgeway Bissett (born 1946)

pp.35-6: ‘Sometimes we’d go out and catch bait fish between Oakey Isl and and One Tree Island; that’s the best spot for little baitfish. We used little bits of dough as bait. We’d mix the flour up with water and put that on our line – when we caught as many as we needed, we’d go fishing with them. Anot her thing we used to do was to put a bit of bread in a milk bot tle and put t hat on the edge of the tide; when the fish came along they’d swim in after it.’ p.36: Carol Ridgeway Bissett – ‘I ca n remember when we were kids we’d make our own traps, we’d put them out around there (at Soldiers Point) and the next mornin g when we went back we’d have a feed of leather jackets. Y ou know wh en we went crabbing we ’d take a ro und trap an d put thin gs like fish heads on it. We’d lower it down on a rope, to attract the crabs, and when they nibbled we’d make sure we had a scoop net there ready to scoop them up. At night, we’d go prawning with a throw net, lantern and bucket. We’d bring our own prawns home to cook in a big boiler on the stove.’


p.38: Carol Ridgeway Bissett – ‘I ca n remember my father d rying fish over the open fire. Smoking it so that we could have fish at Easter time and all throu gh the winter. Coming from a big family, we had to supplement our diet.’ p.40: Carol Ridgeway Bissett – ‘The thing is – we can’t fish like we did when we were kids because for a start there are so many rest rictions. Aboriginal people can’t use things like they used to. Like fish poisons. That was just the sap from different trees, used to stun the fish in water holes and even i n salt water. We can’t use traps now. Not that we had a lot of traps, but we had a couple, and traditional nets.

Things like oysters – we’d get the m off the rocks – they were just th e best – but now, I think it would be a bit unsafe to get them in this harbour.’ Oral testimony by Gwen Russell (born 1933)

p.44: ‘All the communit y people fished. And when you got a big catch of fish, you shared it. Sharing was a big part of life. They still do that sort of thing now. You know, if someone went out and got a feed of fish, an d if it were more than t hey needed, they’d share it with everyone in the community. The fish was there to have. It was the same with the prawns; same with whatever we’d get.’ p.46: Gwen Russell – ‘It’s the mullet that you smoke. You just open them up and take out all the g ut. Salt the m down wit h that stron g salt, that rock salt, a nd let it sit for awhile. After awhile you hang them up and let all the salt drip off, then you hang them in the open fireplace for smoking.

And that would see the family through the winte r. We had more than enough fish for winter and it would never go off because smoking protects it. My grandmother loved the mullet and the taylor [sic]; she used to do it like that, (smoking it).’ p.46: Gwen Russell – ‘Worimi peo ple are supposed to own Stockton Bight, all along there, but I’m a Worimi person and I still can’t go out there, to get worms or pippis. At times I feel like going out and getting a feed and getting caught and just seeing what would happen.’ p.47: Gwen Russell – ‘You know if people cou ld take thre e or four dozen pippis, they’d have their feed … I would need, say, a bucket full, to feed th is family. Bu t that’s it. That would do . But the to urists take too many and that’s what has to stop. Traditional society balanced their food resources. If one area had enough gone, they moved on up to another area.’ p.48: Gwen Russell – ‘F ishing is just part of the lifestyle here . Especially around this area. One of the aunts still goes ou t fishing with her son, she’s really crook now and she can’t go anywhere much anymore. But she used to love fishing especially out there amongst the whiting.’

Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) NSW. Aboriginal women’s heritage: Wollongong, DEC NSW, Sydney, June 2004.

Oral history; Illawarra rivers and beaches

Oral testimony by Muriel Davis (born 1937, Sydney):

p.2: ‘We never went hungry. Our weekends would always consist of at least one walk to the beach and to the rocks to ga ther pipis and muttonfish, which is also known a s abalone. We gather conks, periwin kles, crab s and any oth er small shellfish which could be used for bait.’


p.2: ‘Sometimes I would take a sheet of tin down to the beach when digging for pipis and I would light a fire on the beach, put the tin on the fire and cook the pipis straight on the sand.’ pp.2–3: ‘The older men would often dive for lobsters and t hey would walk or get a ride for many miles to p revent the conti nuous d iving into on e area which interferes with breeding and jeopardises future food gathering.’ p.3: ‘Dad and my oldest brother would go and fish for groper or whateve r they could get. And we used to go and get the pipis from Port Kembla Beach. Mum used to give me a sugar bag and I’d take my sister Alma with me and a few of the o ther kids that lived on the camps.’ Oral testimony by Alma Maskell-Bell:

p.7: ‘Mum used to te ll us to go up the sandhills, down to th e beach and get a feed of pippis. We just had to get home before dark.’ Oral testimony by Louise Davis:

p.21: ‘My fa ther, Jim Davis, taught me to dive. I was about the age of eleven when Dad taught me how to get the abalo ne from around the rocks, out aroun d Hill 60. He taught me to use a mask and snorkel.’ p.21: ‘We u sed to get our pipis an d mutton fish (abalone) from out at Hill 60 too. There’s hardly any mutton fish around here at all now. Now you have to go right out to sea. We also collected conks and periwinkles from around the shoreline. From the age of five years I was harvesting the shellfish and I collected pipis, mussels, and oysters too.’ p.21: ‘I can remember we’d go out in the b oat towards Koonawarra to get th e bimblers. They’re really big down th ere. You get heaps of b imblers along the shore. You can feel for them with your feet among the weeds. We had a lot of good times.’ p.23: ‘You have to go further away now to get a good feed and to get to your special harvesting spot. And th ere are also restrict ions. You’re only allowed thir ty pipis per person per day. When we were young we’d only ever take as much as we needed for that night’s feed or a s a feed for t he nex t day. My eldest two kids ar e really goo d divers now days. So I’ve passed that knowledge on to them.’ Oral testimony by Thelma Brown-Henry (born 1937, Sydney):

p.33: ‘They used to walk all the way there to W indang Island. That was a long walk: walk it there and walk it back. There was a tree there we called ‘One Tree’ and that’s where we used to get pipis. That’s where there was a con crete pyramid with barbed wire right through it and we used to call it the Tank Trap. We still call it the Tank Trap today. Go down the Tank Trap and get a feed of pipis.’ Oral testimony by Rita Timbery-Bennett (born 1937)

pp.41–2: ‘My father was a fisherman and use d to spot the fish from the top of Hill 60 with Uncle Dennie Bell. Great grandfather George ‘Trimmer’ Ti mbery ro wed a government boat from Sydney to Port Kembla in seven hours with William Saddler in 1876, they had a commercial fishing operation and supplied both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities with fish. Late r they were supplied with more government boats. Our family was in the fishing business until the 19 40s when we were moved off Hill 60.’


p.43: ‘Our fathers used to dive for lobsters, oysters, groper, mullet and leather jacket. I remember how our par ents made fires around t he middens. And we can remember how we swam in the Nun’s Hole a nd Honeycomb (at the b ack of Hill 60). Aboriginal parents were very clever because they sent their kids o ut to work (harvesting seafood). You got oysters when the tide was right out there from Hill 60.’ p.43: ‘We used iron file s to remove the mutton fish which we could get up on the rocks; (but we) never took the young ones. We were poor people then and we even ate the perriwinkle which you can’t find now. Sometimes we’d make damper on the beach out of flour and water.’ p.45: ‘But t here was p lenty of se afood. Heaps of b ig conks (shellf ish Anadara trapezia). Periwinkles (Bembicium sp.) and conks were harvested at Windang Island, Shellharbour and Bass Point. We’d boil the conks or put them in the hot ashes. We’d wriggle out the opening with a pin and eat the lot. Sometimes the pip is would just roll down the beach. We used to have the pipis curried too.’ p.45: ‘Big gropers were cut up in to huge ste aks and sh ared around to all the households. The cunje voi was cut with a big knife and t hat was the bait for th e groper. We cleaned the muttonfish down on the rocks. So metimes we’d bash the m, then wrap them up in a cloth. Mum used to slice them and fry them up with onions or cook vegetables. Sometimes she sliced up onio n and tomato with potat o and made soup. Some times she minced them (through an old-fashioned mea t mincer) a nd made little rissole s. We (Aboriginal people) were the only o nes who ever ate them, because th ey were too tough for t he rest of t he community. It wasn’t until Asian people came to Australia and showed people h ow to cook abalone that they became popular resulting in the price of abalone going sky high.’ p.45: ‘We used to get bimblers too. They are very good for people with diabetes. We used to jar t hem up ourselves. People mainly buy them for bait. You get bimblers in the lakes. We get a fe w now and then. We d on’t take t hem all away. We only e ver took what we needed. We never over-fished. We just took enough to eat for that day.’

Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) NSW, Aboriginal women’s heritage: Brungle and Tumut, DEC NSW, Sydney, April 2004.


Oral testimony by Winnie Marlowe (born 1934, Gundagai):

p.21: ‘The r iver was pretty important to peop le because that’s wher e we swam. That’s where we got ou r water. We’d colle ct it with a horse and cart. T hey’d get the drums, fill them up with water and take them up to the house. We were never allowed to go to the river by ourselves, especially when we were young. But we fished in that river too. The Tumut River has some pretty good fishing places.’ Oral testimony by Mary Williams (born 1952, Gundagai):

p.45: ‘The river is very i mportant to me. We we nt down there fishing, b ut we couldn’t go down there on our own. You see, dad used to frighten us with the Bunyip and he’d always say, “If you’re at the river before sundown you’d be OK”. He ne ver took us to the place w here the Bunyip hole was, but he showed us t hat it was t here between two poplar trees. We weren’t allowed to go there.’


p.46: ‘We weren’t even allowed to fish t here. Like, even today when the sun’s going down, and my husband and I are fi shing, we get out of the re before sundown. Dad would take us fishing on a Sunday, that was our day.’

Department of Environment and Conservation DEC NSW, Aboriginal women’s heritage: Nowra, DEC NSW, Sydney, January 2004.

Oral history; South coast rivers and beaches

Oral testimony by Cheryl Carpenter (born 1949, Berry):

pp.8–9: ‘Dad made his living doing seasonal work and by fishing. He was a good fisherman. That was t he main ba sis o f our diet. He ha d lobster pots down at Crookhaven Heads just there where the lighthouse is today. He’d catch plenty o f lobster and mutton fish.’ p.9: ‘When we were at home at Roseby Park, the kids would go down to collec t oysters and pippies, Mum would t ake us down to the fro nt of the mission. She’d stand up the top there and watch us, from the top of the hill, while we went down there collecting. That was one of our chores, collecting the oysters and pippies.’ Oral testimony by Grace Coombs (born 1931, Wallaga Lake):

p.14: ‘We’d go fishing, we’d get a feed of fish. Mu m woul d go out fishing for eels, fresh water eels. She’d bring them home, clean them and cook them u p; they were like fish, white fish.’ Oral testimony by Lynette Simms (born 1947, Berry):

p.28: ‘There was lots of seafood. We were taught how to fish from a really young age. We were always fishing. We’d go down after school f or the oysters. But Dad wouldn’t let us go near the rocks, he did the rock fishing. H e didn’t want us ne ar the rough sea, so we could only fish down in front with a handline.’ p.28: ‘But w e learnt ho w to dig for nippers an d we knew what bait to use. Nippe rs look like little prawn and you have to dig t hem out of the sand, where it’s weedy. I f they bite you, they can cause a lot of pain so you have to be careful and wear shoes. You can get them easy if you know where th ey are. The y make this little cracking noise and that tells you the spo t to dig. It ’s worth it be cause they make really go od bait. We’d mix up dough for blackfish.’ p.28: ‘We didn’t know what it was like to have meat and baked dinner s, as a regu lar thing, not b ack then. We lived o n fish and seafood. W e’d get rations and I can remember our going to get them, but they mustn’t have be en very mu ch. It was fish we lived on. Dad had lobster pots too. And he made the pots himself . I was only young but I can remember him gett ing this wire from somewhere and making lobster pots. He’d sell them.’ p.31: ‘We still go out there (to Myola) sometimes to get the oysters.’


E

Egloff, Brian. ‘“Sea long stretched between”: perspectives of Aboriginal fishing on the south coast of New South Wales in the light of Mason v Tritton’, Aboriginal History, vol. 24, 2000, 200–11.

Academic; South coast beaches

p.200: ‘Today, Aboriginal families a re fighting to both regai n and retain their access to maritime resources. The complexity of regulation governing coastal fishing and the merging of traditional an d customary rights to fish with commercial pursuits threaten their livelihood and cultural heritage.’ p.200: In 1992, three archaeologists drafted reports to help in the defen ce of seven Aboriginal men charged with ‘“shu cking abalone” in the w aters of the south coast of New South Wales and with possessing an excessive number of abalone contrary to the Fisheries and Oyster Farms (Ge neral) Regulations 1989 (N.S.W.).’ The defence consisted of a claim tha t the Aboriginal men ‘exercised a tr aditional and customary right to fish.’ p.204: ‘During the 1870 s and 1880s, fishing boats were provided by the government to Aborigin al families on the sou th coast a nd fishin g seems to have been a widespread activity.’ p.206: The Brierly family of Moruya began commercial fishing in the ninetee nth century. In the 1940s and 1950s the Brierlys caught fish and took it to Sydney to sell. ‘Women worked with the nets and would help “shoot” (laun ch) the boats. The fishing camp ate whatever fish they ha d at the time and liked them all. Changes to technology were few, with nylon nets coming in during the 1950s. The Brierly crew regularly fished from Durras to Bermagui, down to th e Victorian border an d occasionally up to Jervis Bay.’ p.208: ‘The historical p icture that emerges is o ne of British colonists attempting to push out an d marginalise coastal A boriginal people as the y appropriate Indigenou s lands. Then, as the new settlers moved inland, Aboriginal pe ople re-established their hold over the coastal margins that were perceived by the settlers as wastelands.’ p.208: ‘Thro ughout the first half of the twentiet h century, Aboriginal b each fish ing enterprises contributed significantly to the e conomic position of Aboriginal people. Fishermen are known to have op erated at L a Perouse, Port Ke mbla, Ulladulla , Batemans Bay, Moruya and Bermagui as well as at fishing camps be tween these major centres.’ p.208: ‘As t he costs a ssociated wit h beach or long-shore fishing in creased ove r the last few decades, particularly licensing, fa mily businesses which had thrive d for many years – but which had a lim ited economic and managerial horizon – were forced out of ope ration. Grad ually pursuits which once formed t he basis of Aboriginal economies, particularly agricultural work, timb ering and fishing, have


been remo ved without replacement, thus worsening th e financial position o f Aboriginal communities.’

Egloff, Brian in Association with members of the Wreck Bay Community. Wreck Bay: an Aboriginal fishing community, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1990.

History; South coast beaches and ocean

This book firstly outline s a history of fishing pr actices of men and wo men along t he south coast in pre-colo nial times, as documented through archaeolo gical eviden ce and early ethnographic evidence. p.11: notes the gender differences in fish ing practices where the men exclusively speared fish and the women use d nets and fishing lines. With regard to men a nd their spears - ‘Fishing in the bay or in the shallow waters over the reefs was spectacular. Flexible, h ardwood prongs were set into a M ingo or Gra ss Tree stalk: tipped with small bone points, it was a very efficient instru ment for reaping the riches of the sea. Hurled by a spearthrower, its force was increased many times … Women, carrying net bags, fished with hook and line in the shallows. The line was made of the inner bark o f certain trees and the hooks were ground out of the whorl of the turba n shell.’ The book goes on to describe the arrival of Aboriginal fishermen, coming south from La Perouse and north from sout hern ports, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to Wreck Bay. Th ere they de veloped their fishing ind ustry. It is a male indust ry – and fishing is on ly discusse d in th is context as a male pursuit . Descriptions of the t ype of fishing, fish caught, shipment, names of some of th e fishermen, permits, boats, crews, belief that t hey had exclusive fishin g rights at o ne time.

The only mention of women in any of these fishing st ories (predominantly pp.26–46) i s on pp.46– 7: ‘Fish for home use were cooked when fresh, or filleted , smoked and stored in the chimney until needed. Wooden bowls ma de from loc al trees were often used when gathering tucker from the bus h’ – etc. on collecting food plants. p.49: Women made items from shells.

EP Elkin’s papers (located at the University of Sydney library)

Archival

Reports by M Rea y 1 March 1 922: Reay reports on his obse rvations and conversations with Aboriginal people at Walgett, New Sout h Wales – ‘Her mothe r tells her of the life women led in the old days; of the old women taking the young girls at puberty to a special camp in the bush; of the young women seeing the goowahs in the graveya rd, in the branches of a tree; whilst an old wo man corrob orees, of the ceremony during which the young girls formal ly indicated the men wh o were to be their husbands, and other details of the old life. She also shows her how to cook wild meat, and t ells her she must cook much of this when she is married, to keep her children healthy. When the younger children are sleeping, she listen s to her mother singing the old songs over them as lullabies. Her mother teaches her t o save the fat of the goanna and the wild pig and use it for curing cuts, bruises and skin


complaints … She takes her fishing and on her way through the scrub teaches her to observe tracks and other indications that there are game or wild bees nearby, so that they can co me and gather the wild honey, or t ell the menfolk where t o hunt. She teaches her to hunt too, in order that her family need not go without. Thus girls gro w up in a tradition which is richer.’

Elkin, Box 11 Nambucca Heads

Elkin’s observations at Nambucca Heads (c.1930s): ‘Fish were caught by means of nets. Nothing like hooks and lines were known to the ‘qubaigquera’, nor did they build traps as some Queensland tribes d o. The nets used were made from opossum hair, or more usu ally bark string. These nets were used by indep endent fishermen or b y several working together, driving the fish into a shallow part of the wat er where they could be captured with greater ease. Spearing was anoth er method, the fisherman standing motionless for long periods in some favourable position. For this purpose a multi-pronged spear was used.’

English, Anthony. The sea and the rock gives us a feed: mapping and managing Gumbaingirr wild resource use places, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney, 2002.

Cultural heritage; North coast beaches, estuaries and rivers

p.1: In the introduction, Anthony English asks ‘Can fishing or collecting plant foods be considered a “cultural” activity? Is there a relationship betw een environmental health and people’s heritage? These ar e important questions and this research h as explored them in detail. The fact that they are being asked represents a shift in the NPWS approach to managing Aboriginal heritage …’

Anthony English’s research with th e Garby Eld ers of Corin di Beach ta ps into and extends the wealth of research that has been undertaken with the m over nearly two decades. Although the intervi ewees were almost all men and th ere were n o fishing stor ies, English makes ma ny significa nt points a bout the lin ks of place , culture, well being and cultural cont inuity which relate directly to the importance of Aboriginal women’s fishing. It also endorses t he necessit y to seek o ut Aborigina l women and specif ically direct que stions about such things as fish ing practices and meaning to women, if women’s perspectives are to be included in such cultural heritage exploration. With regard to well being it is noted that: p.3: ‘The existence of “heritage” places representing the practice of wild resource use can have an important influence o n the well being and identity of individuals and groups.’ p.4: ‘Heritage values are linked to the concepts of communit y health and well being. As an example, the capacity to find and ut ilize wild foo ds has bee n described by informants during this pr oject as being integral t o their sense of identity, morale and cohesion as family or la rger groups. This might include fishing, hunting, plant food collecting, camping, wal king along p athways and seemingly innocuous activities like swimming or sitting rou nd a camp fire. It is t hrough these activitie s that people express and “activate” their associations with place …’


English, Anthony and Louise Gay. Living land living culture: Aboriginal heritage and salinity, Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) NSW, Sydney, 2005.

Cultural heritage; Inland rivers

This DEC p roject on sa linity and Aboriginal he ritage values utilises a case study of the central western town of Welling ton on the Macquarie River (the Bell River and Curra Creek), traditional Country of the Wiradjuri. Women’s stories are told alongside men’s stories and provide a rich diversity of experience and memory of their rivers. p.7: Evelyn Powell, a Wiradjuri elder, was born i n 1933 at Brewarrina o n the Barwon River from where she spent much of her early life ‘tracing a web of watercourses throughout Central West NSW. With her par ents she tr avelled between towns, Aboriginal r eserves and pastoral stations as t hey looked for work or visited family. Setting up camp next to a creek, cray fishing at billabongs, washing in a river hole or catching yellow-belly for a meal were everyday experiences … The rivers of Centra l West NSW are entwined with many of the signif icant stages of Evelyn’s life, both the hard and good times. As is the case for many (p.8) Aboriginal people in NSW, rivers are associated with the survival of cultural ident ity in the face of assimilation policie s of the pre- and post war era. They connect people and country across broad areas. For Evelyn, the mouth of the Murray [i.e. on the Coorong/Goolwa] is a symbolic place in this web. From this point she can see all of the rivers of her people merged as one, and can look back and appreciate the many and varied experiences of her life.’

Reflecting o n Evelyn’s experience of the Coorong, the ch apter goes on to discuss the holistic approach to environmental management which the authors argue for. The loss of fish sto ck and dest ruction to th e river syst ems through salinity is a central theme of the oral interviews. Ch.3 ‘The Wellington case-study’ The Wiradjuri participants were balanced between both genders. The a uthor’s note (p.47) that using the la nd and rivers has been an important part of many Wiradjuri people’s ex perience an d cultural identity. Hi storical evide nce of wo men’s fishin g includes: p.47: 1832–35 journal of the missionary, JCS Handt: 25 August 1835: ‘Two of th e Aboriginal women had been fishin g today an d returned with a large supply, and seemed very proud of their success.’ p.49: Violet Carr gives o ne of man y examples of the me mories of abundance in the rivers and creeks – specif ically attached to place s which ar e named and remembered: ‘We caught yabbies sometimes if we had a bit of rabbit on . We’d go to Peak Hill by horse and sulky and there’s a place just this side of Peak Hill – they call it “the ten mile hole” … We’d take a load of crayfish with us, take us no time to get a couple of buckets full.’ p.50: Joanie Willie’s memories are of her dad – ‘always the hunter’ – and that they ate plenty of fish and yabbies. p.51: Evelyn Powell discussing the changes to the river – low levels of water, and her memories of fishing and abundance: ‘I’d been so used to seeing it full [water level] , you know, chockablo ck full … plenty of fish … The rivers were full of fish, chockablock full. The tur tles, long-necked and sh ort-necked turtles, we’d cook them up and eat them … They’re gone – turtles and mussels. And big mussels, the bigger ones. ’Cause when I was kid, we used to d ive for them. You know t hey lived right down in the river. We u sed to dive right down in the middle of the riv er to get th e


great big m ussels … T he rivers ar e terrible n ow. It is nothing like when we used t o live on the banks of the rivers in Dubbo, the Macquarie. My mother-in-law and myself would have got fish for breakfast. You’d go down there, f ish with a line, be down there for about fifteen minutes, up you’d come with a couple of yellow-bellies, cod or catfish. It was so simple.’

Vivienne Gri ffin relates the type of fish stock an d invasion of European carp with her dad’s life and death. ‘When Dad was alive we was right. We were pretty self-sufficient … But we lived off the river because you had a vari ety of fish then. We had the yellow-belly, catfish and cod the n, and they’re big fishe s and would last a lon g time. But after Dad died it was around about that time that they introduced carp and it wiped out a lot.’


F

Flick, Isabel and Heather Goodall. Isabel Flick: the many lives of an extraordinary Aboriginal woman, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, 2004.

Autobiography/biography; Inland rivers

There is much in this book that suggests fishing was a central activity in the lives o f Aboriginal girls and women living near the big inland rivers like the Darling, Barwon, Macintyre, Gwydir and Namoi.

Isabel Flick was born in 1928 and spent her first ten years with her fa mily in the Aboriginal Camp at Collaren ebri near t he banks o f the Barwon River. She remembers: p.13: ‘I enjoyed wash days at the river. On Mondays was when all the women went to the river to wash, swim, fish, cook and I guess enjoy their kids. We sometimes went at sunrise a nd came h ome at sun down. Everyone used t o help ea ch other carry things like pots and pans, billycans … I remember lots of women and children helping to carry the wood and water, then make the fires. These tasks all seemed to b e fun …

The river always seemed to be clear and the beach was really sandy and clean, you could see the bottom then … [ There was one section where the kids swam.] This was always a very safe place. You could swim right along some parts of the bank, or fish, whatever you wanted to do. And the grown-ups never interfered with the kid’s part of the “swimming pool” as they called it.’ p.14: ‘But on one side of the rocks was what we called the “dipping place”. This place was not to b e just for anything, it was only for ta king water up home, for our cooking and drinkin g. You couldn’t do no thing else th ere. We we re not to swim there. In trouble if we dared … Not even fish there. A bit past there was where we fish – and if someone was fishing there, then don’t make a noise … [emphasis original]

We were all encouraged to have a go at catching a fish, bait a hoo k with worms and shrimps. One part of fishing none of us really liked however: if we caught a fish we ha d to learn h ow to gut and clean it , that was one part we did n’t quite take to. However to “big-not e” ourselves and cook our cat ch was something else . Th at was the first time I big-n oted myself. I don’t know if I embarrassed my mum or not, because I r emember she kept saying: “All right . Anyone ca n catch a fish. Pull your dress down. Sit down and eat your fish!”’

When Isabel was ten in 1938, family circumstances meant that she and he r brother Jo e went to live on Toomelah Mission ne ar Boggabilla on the NSW/Queensland border with Granny Jane. p.32: Isabe l describ es how the white authorit ies often worked to keep their fa ther, Mick Flick, away from visiting them on the Reserve telling him that ‘… he couldn’t see us or they’d tell him that we were fishing or something.’ p.33: Despite it being a hard place to live in so many wa ys ‘… being at Toomela h was a good learning for us. Joe must’ve learnt a lot about hunting; becau se I learnt a lot about getting baits for fishing, the best way to put a worm on the hook, what were


the best ber ries and fru it to eat, wh at was dan gerous. And Granny used to take us down one side of the river, around the bend, to go fishing. And it was real fun times …

The boys were allowed to go hunt ing more often than gir ls were allowed into the bush, the older people there in that community made the rules … And then, some of the older women would take us fishing for miles. Sometimes we’d walk all those miles for nothing – they wouldn’t catch a fish. Of course then it wasn’t a real good trip back …

People used to fish wit h mainly cord lines and make their own lines out of anything – especially the set lines, whatever t hey could find they’d fix up and make their own h ooks out of wire. They seldom use d nets, but some of the older women got into the streams and actually caught fish in their dresses. Our Granny did that, and Old Granny Kate – t hey’d do those kind of things, you know. And we used to go and get craybobs in buckets and sometime we’d walk miles to get there – that was … oh, anywhere we went, like, even Toomelah or Colle [Collarenebri] that was a rea l treat to go o ut for craybobbing. Sometimes we ’d make our own little n ets, and other times just sit there and fish them out one by one with our hands or with cotton lines or rag-lines or whatever we could find. We’d e nd up having a big meal out of it. We used to mainly put the m in the ashes and o f course, a lot of peop le like to just put them in the big billy and boil them up and put plenty of salt on them …’ pp.33–4: A special f ishing yarn: ‘I suppose in our commu nities we always had a joker, like we always had an org aniser [ and this was Widdy McGrady, old Auntie Carrie’s son]. And this day, he dre w a fish and cut it out from the thi n, flat tin the y used to line a fireplace. My old Granny and a couple of the old women would always go fishing in this one spot, and they’d have their lines set. So he went and he hooked it to on e of the old g irl’s lines. Whe n she went down, she started pulling the line i n and she’s saying. “Oh look out! I got a big fish!” And eve ryone’s running up an d saying “Oh, somebody’s gotta help her!” and she’s pullin’ t his line in a nd the fish is swaying in the water, but it’s really this tin! W ell! When th ey got it ou t, they didn’ t know what to do … the y just sat th ere lookin’ at this t in fish! Then someone said: “ I know who did this!” So they got really cranky the n. Old Aunty Carrie was a Christian and everybody’s sayin “You can’t go and tell her!” But the old girls said, “We’re gonna tell her all right! It don’t matter how she takes it, we’re still gonna tell her!” And I thin k the lad was getting a bit uneasy too because the word wa s getting around! Well Aunty Carrie went mad and called Widdy home and went really crook on him. And then after a while, the old girls was saying: “I kn ew the next thing he’d do would be something silly like this!” And then they all started laughing! So that be came a very special fish yarn!’ p.99: Isabel’s niece Bar bara Flick remembered an important older woman in her life: Sylvia Walf ord, where fishing is central to her me mories of her grandmother. ‘Nanny. Syl via Walford. My special protector. She would wake me la te at night to feed the possums Sao biscuits and w ater. She taught me to fish. She too k me to the circus. She kept my sc hool work. She wrappe d me in a c ocoon and talked to me about the magic of the river.’

In the later parts of t he book the combination of Heat her’s and Isabel’s narrative helps explain a n increasing dislocation, particularly of the women, from the land. At the 1983 Aboriginal blocka de of Mutawintiji Natio nal Park outside Broke n Hill, Isabel commented on how good it was to be camping and learning from the ol d people. Heather commented: p.197: ‘… as a bush meeting it drew on the confide nce of the far western communities to hunt and occupy their land, to live on it and from it with an assurance which had become harder for the Murris from further east [ such as around Colle,


Toomelah etc.] where p astoral lea ses had locked their gat es so much earlier, an d where women, in particular, had been separated from real contact with their country except on the riverbanks close to camps and towns …’ p.198: Isabel was keen to support the Western Women’s Council which would focus just on women. ‘A key g oal was to bring women together outside of towns, to have their own bush meetings so they could get ba ck in tou ch with country and to get to know each other outsid e the white town context. As pastoral jobs for women had been cut back, many had become confined to t he townships and so th eir knowledge of and confidence in the bush was ebbing away. The pro mises of land rights meant little for these women if t hey weren’t able to get back to the bush and feel competent and at home enough to make it their own again.’

Flick, William. A dying race: authentic stories of Aborigines, Beacon Printery, Ballina, 1935. [Richmond River Historical Society]


William Flick was a p ioneer on the Richmond River. This i s a typical example of thi s genre of writing about a ‘dead’ cultu re. His reminiscence s of Bundjalung people ar e of the nine teenth cent ury, with no comment ary on the twentieth century. His discussions about fishing practice s, like the vast majorit y of the archival sources reviewed at the RRHS are exclusively about men.


G

Gerritsen, Rupert. ‘Aboriginal fish hooks in southern Australia: evidence, arguments and implications’, Australian Archaeology, vol. 52, 2001, pp. 18–28.

Academic

p.24: ‘Both Bowdler (1976) and Walters (1988) have proposed that as line and hoo k fishing was introduced, or became economically more imp ortant, a shift in gender hegemony t ook pla ce and men either took over this p ractice from women, or appropriated their catch. Observe d gender differences in line fishing between th e northern Australian distr ibution, where it was mainly a mal e preserve, and coastal New South Wales, do minated by women, lie at the heart of this argument … it appears, although the evidence is not extensive or conclusive, that in Gippsland, as in New Sout h Wales, women were line fishers … in other parts of Australia wome n took up fishing following the introduction of European hooks.’

Goodall, Heather. ‘The river runs backwards’ in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (eds), Words for Country: landscape and language in Australia, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 2002.

Academic, Inland rivers

This is an important article in supporting the a rgument that while there are similar ways of thinking and coming together between Aboriginal a nd non-Aboriginal people in understanding and acting about rivers and fishing, there are also dif ferences on the basis of indigeneity.

Goodall, Heather. ‘Gender, race and rivers: women and water in northwestern NSW’, University of Technology, Sydney, paper delivered to the Fluid Bonds symposium, National Institute for the Environment, Australian National University, 13 October, 2003.

Academic; Inland rivers

This paper emerges out of Heather Goodall’s research si nce the late 1990s with Aboriginal a nd non-Aboriginal people, and in particular wit h women, o n water use and their relationship s with rivers in the flood plain countr y of the Da rling River in north west New South Wales. Her interviews have indicated that women have different relationships to water and rivers than men, and that between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women there are also many differences ‘shaped by their differing cultures and histories, despite living so close t ogether on the same rivers.’ One of those differ ences is th e ways older Aborigin al women have maint ained fish ing practices for many reasons – as a significant food source, teaching children, cultural continuity, time out – whereas white females rarely fish in their adult years.

Much of this paper is no t directly about fishing; however it is all about women and rivers. It provides an historical context for the different uses and understanding of the river b etween Ab original and non-Aboriginal populat ions, and in particular


between women; for an understanding of the re asons for the increasing pollution and dwindling water supply in the riv ers; and fo r an under standing of the ongoing significance of fishing to Aboriginal women’s lives. p.7: ‘Like harvesting, teaching ch ildren was a traditional activity for Aboriginal women, particularly for young children. This to o has continued, and can be see n regularly as women take young children along t he river to fish or just fo r a day out. Fishing is a n opportunity to teach children abo ut the life of the river, not only abou t the fish but about the birds, craybobs, mussels, worms and turtles which you might notice as you sit for hours waiting for a bite. But these are also opportunities to teach them the st ories of the river, the co mplex web of mythology about cre ation and th e continued enlivening of the landscape through which the creative ancestors travelled. In this floo dplain coun try, many o f t he ancestors’ creative struggles carved out riverbeds, forced deep holes in the river beds and shaped bends and lakes. While they were travelling or struggling with each other, the ancestors sometimes left their footprints o r other bo dy i mprints on the ra re rocky o utcrops near rivers a nd waterholes. And because waterholes were such common sites for massacres and conflicts bet ween Aborigines and invaders, there are also stories to be passed on about those early conflicts: where they happened, what started th em and wh o survived to tell about them.’

Goodall also points o ut that colonisation, e mployment and then lack of employment has impacted Aboriginal men and women diff erently, often leaving the older Aboriginal Grannies the one s who have carried on the teaching of childr en along the river banks, often as part of fishing practices (as above). Loss of access to many parts of their Country, especially sin ce the de cline of pastoralism and Aboriginal labour since the 1940s, has meant that the river banks have been one of the few places remaining where Aboriginal pe ople can freely go. The article also discusses the impact of pollution on the rivers and fishing practices.

Goodall, Heather. ‘Contesting changes on the Paroo and its sister rivers’ in RT Kingsford (ed.), A free-flowing river: the ecology of the Paroo River, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney, 1999, pp.179–200.


p.187: ‘Racial segregat ion in town housing meant that Aboriginal people we re invariably directly dependent on the river for all water needs from drinking to washing to recreatio n. This wa s at the same time as non-Aboriginal town speople we re beginning t o benefit fr om “town” water supply, sewerage and swimming pools. Riverbanks offered safe ty and respite from the surveillance of town police and were convenient camping sit es where water carryi ng could b e minimised. Aboriginal poverty als o enforced greater dependence on the river as a so urce of foo d, increasing t he degree t o which pe ople chose to fish for p leasure and as a so lace from the stresses of township living.’ p.187: ‘Aboriginal fishin g styles foster special observation. Their use of the river seldom entailed car s or powerboats, so Aborigin al men, women and children ofte n would walk for long distances and sit for many hours on a carefully chosen bend, waiting for a bite and wa tching the river and its life. The run of the river, the freshes, the fish being caught t hat day, are frequent to pics of conversation in most western Aboriginal h ouseholds t oday, an indication of t heir clo se o bservation of and dee p concern for the minutiae of the river.’


p.187: ‘Economic dependence on the river continues to be very high, and has in fact increased as employment has declined in western areas.’ p.190: ‘These days, most Europeans fish by boat, with a power engine, while Aboriginal people walk t o a fishing spot and sit still under t he shade of the trees fo r hours, waiting for a bite.’

Goodall, Heather and Cadzow, Allison. Rivers and resilience: Aboriginal people on Sydney’s Georges River, 1788 to 2008, University of NSW Press, 2010.

Academic; Urban rivers

This book t races the history of Aboriginal peo ple’s atta chment to, and use of th e Georges River in Sydney’s south in the period since 1788. It doesn’t focus on fishing particularly, but contains storie s which highlight the role of fishin g for Aborigin al people livin g near the Georges River across t his whole t ime period, including th e contemporary period. It discusses the role fishing played in helping Aboriginal people to survive off Country a nd enter the cash econo my, and pa ys particular attention to women’s contribution to fishing in this area.

Godwin, Luke and Creamer, Howard. ‘Ethnography and archaeology on the north coast of New South Wales’, in Queensland Archaeological Research, vol. 1, 1984, pp.103–16.

Academic/cultural heritage; North coast beaches

This paper argued that contrary to assertions that NSW Aboriginal pe ople had no ongoing cultural traditio ns, there was much evidence of knowledge of ‘site s of significance’ and cultura l continuity am ongst parts of New South Wales. The pape r concentrates on the area around Yamba on the far north coast. The main consultants for the project were Al an Laurie from Pippi Beach Aboriginal Rese rve and hi s brother’s daughter Patricia Laurie. While there are no gender differentiations made in descriptions of food gathering, the paper adds to the overa ll evidence of both men ’s and wome n’s ongoin g knowledge and de sire to utilise tradition al foods for sustenance through cultural continuity with their special places. Of most relevance to this project were the informants’ inf ormation about ‘good f ood places’ and related food gathering information to ‘recent camping places.’ p.104: The authors w ere ‘impressed by how much local Aborigine s knew ab out locally-available “traditional” foods. These can be defined as being those components of their diet they hunted, fished and collected before the major alteration of diet that took place through the introduction of tea, sugar and flour after white settlement in the area. The following is a list of the main f oods mentioned (there are probab ly others): Aquatic: mullet, bream, flathead, flounder, whiting, jewfish , tailor, swa llow tail,

cobra worms, pipis, oysters, crabs, swans eggs and beach worms (for bait). Terrestrial: kangaroos and wallabies, etc.

Good food places refer to the spots from whic h good supplies of fish, yams, birds eggs etc. can be obtained …’


Goulding, Megan. Ukereback Island Aboriginal Place nomination: a background report, Goulding Heritage Consulting, prepared for the Northern Aboriginal Heritage Unit, 2005 [Tweed Heads Historical Society].

Cultural heritage; Far north coast beaches, estuaries and rivers

Ukereback Island, in the estuarine reaches of the Tweed River, was the home of a substantial Aboriginal and Islander population in the 1920s and into th e 1940s with only a few r emaining by the 1970 s. The reserve was esta blished by the Aborigines Protection Board in 1927. With regard to the importance of the fishin g industry to Aboriginal communities in the Tweed, a Boar d censu s ta ken in 188 2 recorded a population of 109 Aboriginal people. At the time commercial fishing was not reporte d amongst the work that Aboriginal people were getting o n cane, sto ck, dairy an d banana far ms and in t he timber in dustry. By the early twentieth cent ury fishing is included in the list of work that Aboriginal ‘people’, presumably men, are gaining.

Grace, Jenny. ‘Murray River woman’, in A. Pring (ed.), Women of the Centre, Pascoe Publishing, Apollo Bay, 1990.


p.158: Jenny Grace, wh o grew up o n the Murra y River, recounts: ‘My f ather was a fisherman during the o pen season on Murray cod, and t he rest of t he year we’d spend travel ling by boat between Renmark and Wellington trapping water rats for a living.’ p.160: Jenn y Grace remembers the paddle b oats comin g past, and they would ‘sometimes buy fish from my fathe r. They ’d start tooting when they were way u p around the bend and we would be starting to clean the fish ready. It was probably cod and callop. He used to catch all sorts of fish like callop, bream and catfish.’

Grafton Regional Gallery. The John William Lindt collection, Grafton Regional Gallery, Grafton, 2004. [viewed Grafton Regional Gallery August 2006]

Photographic; North coast

This book d ocuments the collect ion of John Lin dt portraits of Aboriginal people held at the Grafton Regional Gallery. Alongside the Thomas Dick photos o f Aboriginal people from the Port Macquarie re gion, John Lindt’s studio portraits of Aborigina l people are f amous for evoking some sense of stylised representation o f Aboriginal life in the late nineteenth century. He photograph ed his Gumbaingirr and Bundjalung subjects in his studio between 1873 and ’74. These photos provide a clear sense o f the predominant view of Aboriginal men as the fishers, and women as the carers of children. There are a n umber of photos of men with nets a nd spears, all related to fishing – bu t no such images or even hints of such relate d objects a nd activities appear with any of the photos of the women. Even in th ese staged and frozen photographs, the men with their fishing equip ment, spears, and dead animals are portrayed as the active ones and the women are passive.


H

Harney, WE. ‘Australian Aboriginal cooking methods’, Mankind, vol. 4, no 6, May 1951.

Anthropology

p.244: ‘Fish, sharks, stingrays, oysters, cockles, toredo worms and such sea foods are treated in various ways. Crabs and fish are cooked on, or in, the coals. Those that live on mud are gutted, whilst t hose which live on flesh foods are cooked whole. The fresh-water cod is gutted through the mouth, the fat be ing put into the air sack, tied up, and put back again inside. It is then cooked under the ashes.’ p.244: ‘The stingray is first cut open to get at the large creamy liver, an d, if this is brown looking, the fish is thrown a way. If, how ever, it is a s it should be, the liver is placed aside and the flesh cooked over an open fire. When cooked, the flesh is well shredded and washed in fresh wat er which be comes milky coloured f rom the oil in the fish. Aft er two washings the white cotton-like flesh is made into balls, a ball for each person present. T he liver is e qually divided and, in the raw stat e, is p laced on top of each ball of f lesh, handed a round and without any further coo king is eate n. Some natives prefer to pass a heat ed fire-stick over the liver to warm it up, but in the past it was eaten raw.’ p.245: ‘Small gummy sharks are also cooked by this method. Shellfish are cooked lip down on th e coals of t he fire, an d when cooked are soa ked in fre sh water before eating. Toredo worms are often treated in the same manner.’

Hawkins, Scott. Caught, hook line and sinker: incorporating Aboriginal fishing rights into the Fisheries Management Act, Aboriginal Justice Advisory Council, Sydney, 2003.

Policy discussion; Beaches, ocean

This NSW report looks into the fishing pract ices of pred ominantly coastal area s where traditional indige nous rights have not be en incorpor ated into NSW fisherie s legislation, resulting in legal action against Aboriginal people claiming to be carryin g out traditional practices. It is presumed these cases have be en brought against men, although this is never stated. While acknowle dging fishin g and colle cting in both ocean and rivers, the main focus is on coastal a reas where the clash of commercial fishing, legislation and traditional practices has been most intense. This also includes exclusion from traditional fishing grounds now in Marine Parks.

A case study of the south coast was undertake n. The report never ref ers to either ‘men’ or ‘wome n’ amongst the info rmants and o nly refers either to th e Aboriginal community or a ‘person’. However du e to the focus on sea fishing and the south coast, with its lon g history of commercialisation of Ab original fishing since the late nineteenth century which men undertook, it is assume d that most of the peop le consulted were referring to the fishing and colle cting practices of men. This can’t be confirmed from reading the report as informants aren’t named. However the focus on


the abalone industry, where the collection of mutton fish since the late nineteenth century is generally represented as a male activity, would bear this out.

Aboriginal women on th e south coast have bee n and are d eeply involved in the concern over traditional fishing rights and the impact on their communities (see Cruse et al. 2005). However, no t withstanding the serious community issue s examined in the report regarding the traditional rights of Aboriginal fish ers, the report is also an example of the perpetua tion of the inclusive use of the wor ds ‘Aboriginal people’ whe n predominantly they are referrin g to men. This has th e potential to continue th e invisibility of Aborigin al women in the broad er Indigeno us polit ic a nd specifically in women’s fishing and collecting practices.

Helling, Richard. Reminiscences of Mr. Oliver Richard Helling: memories of Riley’s Hill (edited by Louise Daley 1962). [Richmond River Historical Society]


Within this r eminiscence of ‘pioneering days’ around the lat e nineteenth century on the Lower Richmond River (near Broadwater) there are some quit e sympathetic accounts of relationships with Aboriginal peo ple. In the one mention of fishing , although Helling doesn’t refer spe cifically to anything about women, it is clear he i s referring to both men and women as fishing in groups. [c.1896 Lower Richmond River] ‘The Aborigine s, or blacks as they were called in those days were very plentiful. Groups of twenty or thirty wa ndered up and down the river catching fish and getting long white grubs from the logs in the r iver … We had our own family of blacks, Micky Mooney and his wife Charlotte with their six children.’

Heron, Ronald. Aboriginal perspectives: an ethnohistory of six Aboriginal communities in the Clarence Valley, Bachelor of Letters in Prehistory thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1991.

Cultural heritage; North coast rivers/beaches

Ron is from Yaegl (Yaygir) and Bundjalung ancestry. His thesis was ‘intended to help other Aboriginal people who are thinking abo ut writing o n subject s such as b ush foods, bush medicines, Dreamtime stories of local Aboriginal communities and their histories’ (p.6). His descriptions of sea and river foods come from ‘Yaygir, Bundjalung and Gumba yngir’ peoples of the Clarence Valley, northern New South Wales. His informants were predominantly men.

In Chapter 3 Ron name s all the various types of sea, estuar y and river f oods collected from the sea and estuaries around Yamba, and back up th e Clarence to freshwater reaches. He refers spe cifically to men’s pract ices of spearing fish a nd calling in t he dolphins, and then generally to ‘Aboriginal people’ in describin g catching the fish in the Angourie fish trap. He says men speared the fish in the ro ck holes at night, and speared the fish in the fish trap – while ‘people’ could also ca tch the fish in the traps by hand. He refers to line fishing in the river – but not to who was doing that.


Heron, Ronald. My Aboriginal people and our culture: aspects of Aboriginal cultural heritage of the Lower Clarence Valley, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and Australian Nature Conservation Agency, 1993.

Cultural heritage; North coast rivers

In parts of this report Ron recalls his own childh ood and teenage memories of fishing between Yamba and so uth of Ango urie. On the whole his t ext indicates a gend ered divide between the men as the fishers (in particular the ones who spear the fish) and the women who collect the bush foods such as ya ms and do the cooking. His own stories about fishing generally revolve around males. At times he refers to Aborigina l people generally; however, he also does make specific ref erence to women fishing off the bea ch as note d below. He also note s that Christmas time was a time of unemployment – so fishing was b oth a good time to be out together , but also a n important food item when unemployed. Unemployment also meant you had the tim e to fish and socialise. p.23: In referring to the Prehistoric Site, Angourie, Ron says: ‘When we were young, whenever we wanted to go out, we weren’t allowed to go out towards Angourie unless we had an older person with us, say an Uncle or Aunt … These were people who belonged to the area … [They] would ke ep an eye on us and keep us from getting up t o mischief, but later as I got older, say in my mid teens, we would go fishing out there.’ p.24: ‘You could get a feed of pippies anywhere along those beaches until th e mineral san d miners came in the 70s and d amaged all that. So th at is why no Aboriginal p eople of to day’s modern times will camp ther e because that was a traditional camping place … The people usually came back to that place if the mullet were travelling …’ pp.25–6: Ron describe s Aboriginal people coming to Green Point wh en the mull et were travelling – and that it was a very good meeting point for people from all across the region – even as f ar afield as Baryulgil. ‘… it would be nearly l ike the main Christmas week … th ey’d have p arties of me n out getting kangaroos. You’d have another party just concentrating on fishing, you’d have a group of women gettin g yams etc.’ p.27: ‘When we were very little, the Aboriginal people then used to have their camp set up where the Story House is [ Yamba Historical Society building]. … This was in the 1950s … we’d all go (especially in the summertime during the Christmas period), up to Flat Rock. The women would take sauce pans and frying pans, potatoes an d onions, probably curry powder. They’d also take flour and cook dry d ampers on t he pan up there. And while the women were doing this you would see the men on each side of Flat Rock, on the beaches, catching sea worms and some of the other women and men would be fishing. In those days there seemed to be fish everywhere. People would be catching brea m, trevally and whiting.’ They’d cook and eat on Flat Rock – and this would happen probably twice a week if the weather was good.

Ron said it was mostly ‘us young fellas and young children’ who collected the pippies – also periwinkles and they’d go sea worming. p.28: [Re Flat Rocks above] ‘… a t that time of year there wasn’t much employme nt around. The cane se ason had stopped an d everyone was on unemployme nt benefits, and so the people would go up there and spend the day fishing … a da y outing I suppose … they’d use it pr obably every summer. There were no restrictio ns on public use of this area.’


p.40: Men and boys gathering pip pies: ‘I rem ember, long before the look-out was built [at Dirrigan Look-Out], that so me of us yo ung boys used to go t here worming with Uncle Billo, Uncle Allan, Uncle Jacky and Uncle Raymond (my mother’s brothers of the Yaygir tribe) and also to get pippies.’

Hinkson, Melinda. Aboriginal Sydney: a guide to important places of the past and present, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2001.

Heritage; Sydney coast

p.38: ‘Aboriginal women of the Sydney coastal areas were observed by the British to have part o f the little finger of their left hand missing. This was remo ved during infancy by tying the hair or ligat ure around the joint t ight enough to stop th e circulation of blood; subsequently, after a few d ays the tip of the finger would fall off. British obse rvers did not understa nd why this operation was performed but finally deduced that the shorter finger aided women’s fishing techniq ues. This ritual practice was called Malgun.’


J

Johnson, Dianne. Aunty Joan Cooper through the front door: A Darug and Gundungurra story, SNAP Printing, Penrith, 2003.

Biographical; Coastal rivers

This story of Joan Coo per’s life is placed in context with Darug prehistory, family histories, colonial history and so on. In talkin g about life through the Depression, th e family moved back to the Aboriginal Reserve of Sackville on the Hawk esbury River which families had fought to retain in the late 1800s. During the late 1930s when Joan and her family lived at Sackville where he r father had grown up, she notes th at much of th eir food wa s procured from the la nd. She do es talk abo ut fish ing a nd prawning, but it seems that in her family at least, this was an exclusively ma le occupation by this stage. pp.63–4: ‘When we lived at Sackville we lived al most entirely off the land. We would eat rabbits, possums, fruit, fish, vegetables, dampers, Johnnie cakes and frie d scones … Dad used t o fish. He w ould go out in the boat s on the Ha wkesbury and bring home big fish. He would bone them and prepare them and then Mum used to fry them in her big black frying pan.

We caught and ate ple nty of prawns when we lived at Sackville. My brother-in-law and my brothers used to go down to the river and do the prawning.’

Joan remembered that her mum would collect medicine plants from the bush and some little vegetable plants. Later the famil y moved ba ck to Parramatta to be close to her mother’s relatives. They’d ‘go down to the Parramatta Ri ver and have fish and prawns caugh t fresh from the Ri ver from a fish and chips shop nearby.’ (p.67)


K

Karskens, Grace. The colony: a history of early Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2009.

Academic; Sydney region

Karskens writes: ‘this book includes an accoun t of the importance of E ora women’s fishing and the associated skills. It argues that their fishing was contin uous before and after 1788, and probably up to the 1820s, and that as the main fishers and canoeists, they were st rongly associated with t he waters of the harbours, rivers and coastlines of the Sydney region. Broader implications for gender roles and women’s self-identification in Eora society and after 1788 are also explored.’

Keats, NC. Wollumbin: the creation and early habitation of the Tweed, Brunswick and Richmond Rivers of NSW, N Keats, Point Clare NSW, 1990.

Heritage, Northern rivers

p.34: ‘Fish were caught with lines made fro m inner bark fibres of Kurrajong tree and hooks mad e from shell and/or bo ne. A common metho d of cat ching fish, bot h estuarine and inland (saltwater and freshwater) was by scoop nets and/or spearing. These scoop nets were in the shape of a bow, about 300 cm in length. They were used in shallow water. Some me mbers of th e fishing party, usually wo men a nd children, would string out across the wide end of the fishing hole and then smack the water with sticks or branches. This created n oise and disturbance a nd by mo ving gradually towards the shallow end t hey would frighten the f ish towards the men, who were waiting there with scoop nets or spears. The same method of scoop netting was used in the estuaries in tidal holes, which occurred when the tides were on the ebb . Spears were also used on occasions depending on the circumstances.’ p.35: ‘Canoes made fro m sheets of stringy bar k, which we re curved a nd secured at each end, were also used for fishin g in creeks, rivers and t he estuaries. They were frail little craft. The hunter could stand up in them and spear fish … These small craft were prevalent on the Richmond, Brunswick and Tweed.’

Kneale, Kay E. A Mee Mee’s memories, Regional Printers, Inverell, 1984.


These are stories and resources from Aboriginal Elder ‘Gra nny’ Ivy Green about the Walgett area, written down by Kay Kneale who was a Wa lgett school teacher at t he time of collating the book. Mrs Gre en doesn’t relate any stories in the book about fishing. The recorded stories are around vegetable foods and medicine plants.


Kneale’s in troductory chapter ‘The Traditional Lifestyle’ fits firmly into old ethnographic/anthropological stereotypes which suggested that women were the gatherers o f food, rat her than h unters. Men were the ‘fishermen’. It can b e speculated that this anthropological reading of the gender divide in Aboriginal socie ty highly influenced Kneale’s understanding of Mrs Green’s st ories rather than allowing a more open method of listening. Although we have no way of knowing from this text, on the basis of other e vidence about women’s fi shing practices of those who lived in the vicinity of the big in land rivers, one can spe culate that Granny Green did indeed fish but that such activity didn’t fit the story Kneale was expecting to hear.

Kneale’s int roductory chapter example: p.9. ‘Men were essentially hunters and fishermen … Women were the main food collectors, providing a large part of the daily needs, as well a s providing drinking water and firewood … Although the contribution of fish an d meat to the diet by the men was more highly valued everywhere than the v egetable fo ods collect ed by the women, ve getable foo ds formed the basis and staples of th e diet, beca use being fixed they were easy to find … The women also manufactured string bags, mats and fishing and other nets.’

Kohen, James. The Darug and their neighbours: the traditional Aboriginal owners of the Sydney region, Darug Link in association with Blacktown and District Historical Society, Blacktown, 1993.

Academic ethnography; Coastal rivers/beaches/oceans

James Kohen, an archaeologist, has written extensively on the ethnographic evidence of Aboriginal people’s fishing practices at the time of colonisation. Th e following re ferences re fer to ninet eenth centu ry and earlier Aborigin al women’s fishing pra ctices in the Sydney re gion. There is evidence of a strong tradition of coastal Aboriginal women’s fishing practices in pre and early contact times. This is undermined and shifted in the early colonial period into the twentieth century a s Aboriginal men of the coastal p opulations are encouraged by the colo nial authorities to take up commercial fishing p.6: Aboriginal people around Sydney used canoes ‘from which the men fished with multipronged fishing sp ears and th e women fished with hooks and line s, the hooks being made from turba n shells an d the lines being mad e from the bark of th e kurrajongs tree … the Sydney women called th eir fishing lines kurrajong. Nets wer e used for catching lobsters and crabs, and fish traps were sometimes built on exposed rock platforms.’ p.23: ‘Both men and women fished from canoe s which were simply sh eets of bark tied at both ends with a stick across the middle to maintain the shape. Although these canoes see m crude b y modern st andards, they were highly suitable for the st ill waters of the harbour.’ p.29: ‘A pr egnant woman could not eat sch ooling fish, but could eat rock-co d, flathead, leatherjacket, but not schnapper [sic], grouper [sic] and bream. If a pregnant woman broke these tab oos, the fish would be frightened away. The unborn spirit of the baby would leave the woman, and frighten the fish. If it was a girl, it would hold a yam stick and if a boy, a spear.’


Kohen, James. Aborigines in the west: prehistory to present, Western Sydney Project, Armidale NSW, 1985. (unpaginated)

Academic; Coastal rivers

In this book Kohen discusses the inland people of the western Cumberland Plains. ‘Freshwater fish were available at certain times of year, and mullet were both speared by men and netted by the women. Th e remains of fish traps can still be found in the Nepean River at Castlereagh. In the Autumn months – “they resort at certain seasons of the year to the lagoons where they subsist on eels which the y procure by l aying hollow pieces of timber into the water into which the eels creep, and are easily taken.”’

Kohen, JL and Ronald Lampert. ‘Hunters and fishers in the Sydney region’, in DJ Mulvaney and J Peter White, Australians to 1788, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Broadway NSW, 1987, pp.343–365.

Academic; Beaches/coastal rivers

p.347: Painting by Lois-Claude Freycinet of a family with the women carrying a coil of fishing line. p.351: ‘Bennelong cre mated his wife’s body on a pyre of dry wood, and a “basket with the fishing apparatus and other small furniture of the deceased was placed b y her side.”’ p.352: Discussion of th e different t echniques for fishing b etween men and wome n – men with spears and women with hook and line. pp.352–4: References to Go vernor Phillip’s comments on women’s use of turban shells for hooks. Use of canoes, gathering of shellfish. p.355: Surgeon GB Wo rgan noted that ‘When t hey have c aught enough [fish] for a Meal, and f eel hungry, The Men call the Wome n on shore, and haul up Canoes for them, They then gather up a few d ry Sticks, l ight a Fire un der a shelvi ng Rock, (if there is one near), or a Wigwam …’


L

Langford, Ruby. Don’t take your love to town, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1988.

Autobiography; Inland rivers and north coast rivers

This is Ruby Langford’s first book where the relevant sections are about growing up around the north coast (born at Box Ridge, Coraki) and living in va rious parts o f inland New South Wales in her early adulthood. Despite the poverty tha t she ofte n found herself in, fending for her growing bunch of children as yet another man left her and ‘disapp eared’, fishing is not as much a part of her story as for some othe r Aboriginal women in rural New Sou th Wales. H owever she does mention fishing in the following sections: p.5: [early school years on the Richmond River near Casino] ‘Uncle Ernie Ord had made a thre e-pronged spear for catching mullet. “Come on” he said one afternoon. “I’ll show you how to cat ch fish. See this piece of string?” he reached into his pocket and laid so me string on the table. He tied a bent pin to it. “Now you try”. Then we made dough for bait an d went to the fishing ho le. Uncle Ernie threw so me dough on the water and we could see schools of garfish and mullet rising. We came home with about six mullet, “a good feed”, Uncle Ernie said.’ However, rather than being a story about Ruby’s love of fishing, the narrative had another purpose: ‘A few nights later he almost use d his three -prong spe ar on our neighbour …’ It tran spired that t he neighbour and her mother where up to no good. p.38: The fo llowing story connects to Della Walker’s st ory of her joy ea ch Christmas holidays when the Casi no mob turned up at Yamba for the holiday period. Still at Casino in h er school d ays, Ruby describes p acking up f or the trucks and bu ses which took ‘the whole Aboriginal p opulation of Casino away at Christ mas time to Yamba.’ pp.38–9: ‘E very morning you could hear a wo man further up the bea ch sing ing in lingo. [the b oys would get up and go fishing] … Early one morning I was walkin g along the beach and again I hear d the woman singing, chanting on high notes , calling out. It was someone from the Maclean mob at Yamba, they said. In a while I could see h er, quite an old woman , very black, standing on top of t he cliff … A fisherman who’d come from the mis sion near our camp walked past me and I aske d him what the woman was doing. He said she was calling the porpoises in, she d id it every day d uring the holidays. The porpoises circled the beach all day while t he people were swimming, and headed out to sea when everyone was gone. He told me there’d never been a shark attack on that beach.’ [This is interesting as she is said to be calling in the porpoise to protect the swimmers rather than catch the fish – an d one could assume in particular the children – but it still pr ovides evid ence of both women and men calling the porpoise/dolphin in a role that has often been claimed only for men]. p.95: The middle sect ion of Ruby’s book is about her tough, poor life living in remote and rural New South Wales with a growing bunch of kids and a growing list of fathers


who left. Life was very hard. Her fe w references to fishing are about sustenance with no sense of joy of those fishing memories:

Ruby has just relayed how all the kids nearly drowned when the car ploughed into the river and a group of white people just watched. She tried to explain what had happened to her partner George but he was ‘sozzled’ so she got on ‘with the business of living. I didn’t have any bait to fish with, so I lifted up some wet logs near the water a nd found a cricket with wings on it. I stu ck the hook through it and cast out. Everything was quiet for a while, then I pulled in a cod fish weighing ten pounds and we fea sted well that night … We pitched our tent near Mac and I went fishing again, this time with a ground line f or yellowbelly perch.’ – that story relates to how her son David nearly drowned. p.96: ‘I felt like I was living tribal but with no tribe around me, no close-knit family. The food-gathering, the laws and songs were broken up, and my generation at this tim e wandered around as if we were tribal but in fact living worse than the poorest of poor whites, and in the case of women living hard because it seemed like the men love d you for a while and then more kids came along a nd the men drank and gambled and disappeared.’

Langford Ginibi, Ruby. My Bundjalung people, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia QLD, 1994.

Cultural heritage; Northern rivers

This is the second of Ruby’s books, following o n from Don’t take your love to town, where she returns to Box Ridge/Coraki where she was born and spent her very early childhood. I was interested to see if there was much mention of fishing (on the Richmond River or in the swamps). Grace Robert’s book spends quite a bit of time talking abo ut fish ing a s an ad ult after returning to the a rea where she had be en stolen. Te in McDonald, who runs a voluntary club for children at Box Ridge, say s some of the teenage girls still head out fishing for the whole day in small groups as a way of ‘getting away’. However, in amongst a ll the yarnin g about fa mily, friends, politics, etc. in people’s houses, there didn’t appear to be any mention in this book of any bush-related activities including fishing.

La Perouse: the place, the people and the sea: a collection of writing by members of the Aboriginal community, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1988.

Biographical; Beaches/coastal rivers

The stories in this book are predominantly written by a group of Aboriginal wome n remembering their childhoods growing up on the reserve at La Perouse on Botany Bay. While their storie s are full of living near the beach a nd the sea, their specif ic stories abo ut fishing a re mostly connected with stories of men fishing – both commercially, in particular the beach hauling in dustry, and in leisure time for a da y out with the family. The women collected sh ells for their art work, and there are a couple of explicit and more implicit suggestions of women fishing with their children. pp.23–4: ‘Children playing on the reserve’ by Gloria Ardler.


p.24: ‘One o f the nicest things was going on a ferry ride to K urnell and back or we’d walk about at Kurnell, then get another ferry back. That would be done when we went to gather shells or go fishing.’ p.31: ‘Remembering old folk’ by Gloria Ardler. Mrs Cunningham made shellwork … she used to make shell necklaces. p.37: Great Granny Toliman – ‘Gre at Granny lo ved to go fishing, ta king the children to the river’ [perhaps referring here to the south coast]. p.39: ‘My g randmother and her family’: ‘… Mum started to do the shellwork. We travelled with our parents to Kurnell on the ferry and on foot across the sandhills to Cronulla to gather shells. We’d stay the night and come home the next day. We’d fish and gather pippies and get mutton fish over there. My dad and mum and aunty had a little business going with their shellwork and b oomerangs. They sold t hem to David Jones and sent work to Melbourne and even overseas.’ p.61: ‘When we were children’ by Gloria Ardler. ‘We also went to the beach and for walks over to Pussycat, over past th e golf links. My father came along t hen also. He would go fishing and co ok the fish on the coals. My mother would make a damper to take and she’d take the billy can for tea and we would take some other children. Our neighbour d id the same. We would go with her on outings to Congie, fishing and getting mutton fish and pennywinkles. We’d cook them on the rocks and have fun fishing.’ Men’s fishing stories: ‘Interview with Leslie Davison’ pp.59–60: on fishing which are all men’s fishing. ‘The Sea’ – pp.71–83: These are all men’s fishing stories, mostly about commercial fishing, mullet hauling, making nets, using spears, etc. Many of the stories are told by the wo men – but are only about the men. p.80: ‘Shellwork’ by Beryl Beller. ‘When we were young our mothers would take us to the beach t o collect shells. We wo uld walk alo ng the shor e line after the tide we nt down to collect she lls that were not broken a nd shell grit . The women would sit around in a circle and sort the shells into sizes and colours. The different shells they used were muttonfish, starries, be achies, butt onies, courie, pearl, fan conk, small cockle and small pippies. They would then cut o ut cardboard shapes like the Sydne y Harbour Bri dge, hearts and babies shoes. They would glue them into t heir shapes and cover them with th e shells we collected … The wo men also made brooch es. They would cut the muttonfish (abalone) shells into shapes of Australia a nd boomerangs. These she lls were polished until th ey shone and then a pin was glued on the back to finish the brooch.’ p.81: ‘Sharing’ by Beryl Beller. ‘I re member when I was small, going down to the beach and helping my dad and grandfather haul for fish. We would sit on the sandhill, which was called the lookout, and watch for fish to swim past, then r un down and push the boat in the water. We would then watch the boat going out with the f ish net falling off the back to circle the fish, so we could haul the nets in. When the nets were on the beach we would put the fish into wooden boxes. The men then took them and they were sold. We too k crabs home to be shar ed with the other families. Sharing i s what I re member most. We all went to collect o ysters together and dig for pippies. Digging for pippies was great fun. You would wait for the waves to run back into the sea, then lo ok for air holes in the wet sand. We would dig our heels in where these holes were until we felt the pippi with our feet. We would then cook them over the hot


coals or our mums woul d make soup, curry or rissole s. We loved going around the rocks. My uncle would set lobster t raps, then dive in the deep water and throw them up on the rocks for the women to boil, unt il they turned red. We al so watched th e men get muttonfish off the rocks. They were hard to get off. You have to hav e something strong to get under them, to lift t hem off the rocks because th ey stick like a suction cap. These were cooked in butter or made into rissoles but they were much better on the barbeque.’

Lee, Emma with John Lennis. Aboriginal people at Homebush Bay: a report on the flora and fauna, and the activities of men, women and children, Olympic Co-ordination Authority Ecology Programs Section, Sydney, February 2000.

Academic; Western Sydney rivers

p.14: ‘Women provided the bulk of foods to feed their families. Plant foods, fish an d shellfish were the staple foods, which women and children would collect when tides were low, while plant fo ods could b e collected in between tides. The ra nge of plant foods availa ble meant t hat a die tary variety was always had, no ma tter what the season.’ p.14: ‘Fishing hooks were made b y women, as were dilly bags … Fish hooks were made from oyster shell, but the talo ns of hawks and sea ea gles have been recorded as being used. Bradley recorded that women made fish ho oks by rubbing it on rocks until it was sharp, and t hen using a nother oyster shell t o cut it into a cir cular shape. Stone fish hook files h ave been found from e xcavated shell middens, which were used to rub and shape t he inside of the shell. T he fishing lines have been noted as being made from the bark of trees, which “after being beaten between two stones for some time … this they spin and twist into two strands: in fact I never s aw a line wi th more than t wo”. The ku rrajong tree was a favou rite for maki ng twine an d the seeds were also eaten.’ p.14: ‘Women fished mainly from canoes. A fir e was lit in the base o f the canoe , using a cla y bowl and small eucalypt twigs, which would keep the woman, a nd sometimes child, warm. Bradley recorded some of the variety of fish that were caught by women as being jew fish, snapper, mullet, mackerel, whiting, dory, rock cod and leather jackets, although sharks and stingrays were always thrown back.’ p.16: ‘It is unfortunate that many of the women’s activities ha ve not been documented through the early part of the European occup ation. Many of the men’ s tasks were, and this may be due to either the women keeping away from the European occupiers, or that as it w as men who kept journ als of o bservations, they only detailed men’s activities.’


M

Mathews, Janet. ‘Lorna Dixson’ in Isobel White et al. (eds) Fighters and singers: the lives of some Australian Aboriginal women, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985.

Biographical; Rivers

Lorna Dixson, in the middle of her memories of the horror that she a nd the othe r Tibooburra people went through during their fir st few mont hs at Brewarrina Missio n (p.99), says ‘Lots of the Mission people caught fish in the river … ’.

Mathews, Janet. Totem and taboo: Aboriginal life and craft, Collins, Sydney, 1979.

Academic; Coasts

p.46: ‘In a number of coastal tribes the pregnant woman could not eat school fish and was threatened by a dreadful punishment if she broke this taboo. It was believed tha t the unborn baby would leave her b ody to fr ighten the fish and chase them all away. The baby g irl carried a little yamstick and the boy was a rmed with a tiny fishing spear. Although these escaped babies were invisible, the old men always knew when they had been in act ion. The behaviour of the fish made it quite clear that the taboo had been broken. The babies stood at the entrance to fish traps, inlets and rivers and turned the fish back towards the open sea. The fish were more afraid of the baby bo y because they did not like his spear.’ p.46: ‘On the coast, where fish were the chief item of food, the pregnant women were very limited in their choice. They could not eat schnapper [sic], bream or groper an d could only eat rock-cod, flathead and leather jacket.’ p.46: ‘Scho ol fish must have been considered important because bo ys and girls could neither catch nor eat them. T heir bones had to be burnt and neve r given to the dogs. If this was neglected, the crowd of fish swam away forever.’

Mathews, Robert (RH) Ethnological notes on the Aboriginal tribes of New South Wales and Victoria, FW White General Printer, Sydney, 1905.

Ethnography (historical)

pp.50–1: ‘When the natives observe a whale, “murirra”, near the coast , pursued b y “killers”, mananna, one of the old men goes a nd lights fir es at some little distance apart along the shore , to attract th e attention of the “killer s”. He then walks along from one fire to another , pretending to be lame and helpless, leaning u pon a stick in each hand. This is supposed to excite the compassion of the “killer s” and in duce them to chase the whale towards that part of t he shore in order to give the poor o ld man some food. He o ccasionally calls out in a loud voice, ga-ai! g a-ai! ga-ai!


Dyundya waggarangga yerrimaran hurdyen, meaning “Heigh-ho! That fish upon t he shore throw ye to me!”’ p.51: ‘If the whale becomes helpless from the a ttack of the “killers” and is washed up on the shore by the wa ves, some other men, who have been hidden behind scrub o r rocks, make their appearance and run down and attack the ani mal with their weapons. A messenger is also despatched to all their friends and fellow-tribesmen in the neighbourhood, inviting them to come and participate in the feast … The natives cut through the blubber and eat th e animal’s flesh. After the intestine s have bee n removed, any persons suffering fro m rheumatism or similar pains, go and sit withi n the whale’s body and a noint themselves with t he fat, believing that the y get relief by doing so.’ p.51: ‘Catch ing pens or fish-traps, ngullaungang, are mad e across na rrow, shallow inlets on th e sea coast or along t he course of rivers. These are made by tyin g together bundles of tea-tree, and laying them close toget her like a wall across a creek or narrow shallow arm of the sea. These walls or barricades are slightly above the surface of the water . A gap or gateway is le ft in mid stream so that the fish can pass through, and when a sufficient number are enclosed, the gateway is blocked up by other bundles of tea-tree, which have been p repared beforehand for this purpose. If the poo l is large, one or more smaller portions of it are portioned off in a similar manner, into which the fish are driven by splashing the wat er, and are t hereby more easily caught by their pursuers.’ p.58: ‘When a woman is enceinte she cannot eat fish which come in “schools”. If she did so, it wo uld cause them to turn away to an other place. This ban a pplies to little girls and un initiated boys, and lasts for some weeks after “schools” commence t o arrive. The bones of fish during this period must not be given to dogs, but must b e burned, otherwise “sch ools” of fish would go elsewhere. A pregnant woman is allowed to eat rock-cod, flathead and leatherjacket, but not schnapper [sic], groper or bream.’ p.58: ‘If a woman who i s enceinte were to eat forbidden fish at such a time, the spirit of the unborn babe would go out of i ts mother’s body and fri ghten the fish away. If a male infant, it would have a fishing spear – if a f emale a yamstick – and stand on the water at the entrance to a fishing pe n, or in front of a net, and turn the fish back. Th e fish are more afraid of a male infant, on acco unt of its ca rrying a spear, than of a female. Although these spirit childre n are invisible to human eyes, the ol d men know they are present by the move ments of the fish, a nd at once suspect som e woman of having broken the food rules.’ p.143: ‘Gu-ru-ngaty is t he name of an aquatic monster among the Thurrawal and Gundungurra tribes. He resides in deep waterholes, an d would drown and eat strange blacks, but would not harm his own people. He usually climbed a tree nea r the water, fr om which h e kept a look out. I f he saw a stran ger approaching, he slid down and dived into the water, without making a splash, or leaving any ripples on the surface. As soon as the individual began to drink, he was caught by Gurungaty.’ pp.143–4: ‘The Wongaibon natives believe that a spirit or wicked person named Gurugula hovers about in the clouds and in the air overhe ad. If he smells the fat of any animal, especially fish, being b urnt in the fire at night, he gets ve ry angry. In order not to provoke Gurugula, all cooking is done in the day time; and even then the people are careful not t o let any fat burn during the process … The Thurrawal and Thoorga people have a similar story.’


McKenzie, Janet. Fingal tiger: the story of my life, New Creation Publications, Blackwood, 1992.

Autobiography; North coast rivers/beach/ocean

Janet’s story is told fr om birth and childhoo d to adulth ood. While only in th e Aboriginal camp near the beach at Fingal on the far north c oast for a short period as a baby, she lived aroun d the Twee d Valley thr oughout her childhood and much o f adult life. On the whole there is a sense that f ishing was such an ordinary event that it didn’t need a lot of discussion. Unlike the stories of Della Walker and others there is no mention of fishing once Janet has finished telling her stories of childhood. p.1. Fingal – ‘a community of happy Aborig inal people who made their living from the sea … Everyone helped everyone el se out. Even the white f ishermen would make a haul of sea mullet on th e beach an d fill their b oat, with all the Aborigines helping to pull in the net. Then they would put the net into the sea again and leave the rest of the fish; those who had helped could take what they needed. Now it is a great holiday resort, with brick homes where humpies used to be.’

‘When I was born I was very small . I was told my Dad used to put me in his big overcoat pocket, with only my little black head poking over the top, and go fishing along the beautiful beach or river.’ p.23. Ch. 7: The moigoi. ‘The house we lived in was set on a hill with a creek running all round it, which meant we could go fishing or swimming any time. If we wanted fish for dinner we would stretch a piece of wire-netting across fr om one ban k to another with about two inches showing above the water. Then all of us kids would get into the deep water and fish would try to ge t away by swimming upstream until they came t o the wire. Some would try to ju mp over and b e caught; others would try and swi m through and get caught just the same. The only trouble then was that we would have to find ou t where they were caught . The easie st way for t his was to take the wh ole net up onto the bank and pull out the fish.

One very bright moonlight night my brother and I wanted to go fishing fo r eels or catfish. Mother said “No” … [eventually Mother changed her mind] – we could set our lines. As we got ou r fishing rods and were just on the bank of the hill leading t o the deep water, we saw something we’d never seen bef ore in our lives. It was all white, about the size of a sheep, and was on the back of the creek where we wanted to go. Naturally we stopped and looked, but it didn’t move.

Then Mother and the two men came and Mother said, “Go on. You want to go fishing but there’s a ‘moigoi’ down there.” “Moigoi” is Aboriginal for “ghost”. Of course I didn’t want to go but Bill said “Com on Al”. That’s old Tommy [our horse].’ The story goes on that it was their Aunt playi ng a trick with a white sheet – a great story told over and over in the family – and Janet never saw another ghost. Ja net became a strong Christian in her adult life, and this story would seem to have been told to shun the idea of her belief in Aboriginal ghost stories.

Meehan, Betty. Shell bed to shell midden, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1982.

Anthropological; Northern Territory beaches

In this book the anthropologist Betty Meehan provides a fascinating study on shellfish gathering. p.ix: Betty Meehan begins: ‘Given that there has been so much interest o ver the past century in p rehistoric midden deposits and th at comparative ethnograp hic parallel s


have been cited in most cases, it seems strange that the role of shellfish in the diet of contemporary coastal hunters, or even shell gathering in any cultural context whatsoever, has not be en the subject of detailed anthropo logical field investigation.’ Meehan attempted to remedy the situation by carrying out her field work with the Anbarra people of Arn hem Land. She comments on some of the rea sons she se es as the lack of research on shellfish. p.7: ‘The ve ry characteristic of shellfish gathering itself may ha ve e xacerbated the apparent la ck of intere st. For the unmotivate d observer it is an u nspectacular, unobtrusive and humdrum activity, which tends to go unnoticed in the wider fabric of the hunting life. For most anthropologists in the past, who have been social anthropologists and male, the collection of molluscs by women would have been an insignificant event compared with th e exploits of the active male hunter of the sam e society … And, even i f they wanted to, male anthropologists would have foun d it difficult to investigate such female occupations. The recent increase in the number of professional female anthropologists has, not surprisingly coincided with an increa se in the amount of information now available (though often not yet published) on those aspects of h unting societies that are managed by women. Shellfish gathering is but one of these.’ pp.125–9: Men and women and children collected she llfish, but women and girls collected about 85%. Amongst the women and girls there were some who were much more serious and much better at collecting t he shellfish. Boys sometimes gathered but were more likely to head off wi th spears and try and c atch fish an d stingrays at the waters edge – although not ve ry successfully. Girls, once they married and had children – as early as t heir early te ens, were meant to ge t serious about collecting the shellfish – although males weren’t expected to contribute much u ntil they we re married – perhaps into t heir early 20s. Some girls didn’t wan t to have anything muc h to do with gathering and they weren’t forced to but they w ere grumbled and ta lked about. Some women only collected shellfish alone in a small family group while most went in larg er groups o f women and children, and an occasional male. One of t he best male hunters was also a n e nergetic co llector of sh ellfish on o ccasion – h e showed no embarrassment. p.135: ‘Shell-gathering performan ces of individuals are ordered b y the major parameters of sex, age, family responsibilities and natural ability.’

Mitchell, TL. Journal of an expedition into the interior of tropical Australia, in search of a route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1848.

Anthropological (historical); Inland rivers

p.113: ‘On arriving at t he “Cawan” we saw two natives fishing in a po nd with hoo p nets, and Yuranigh went to ask the m about the “Culgoa”. He returned accompanied by a tall athletic man; th e other was this man’s gin, who had been fishing with him. There he had left her to take care of his nets.’


Morgan, Monica, Lisa Strelein and Jessica Weir. Indigenous rights to water in the Murray Darling Basin: in support of the Indigenous final report to the Living Murray Initiative, Research Discussion Paper No 14, AIATSIS, Canberra, 2004.

Policy discussion; Inland rivers

p.36: ‘The changed water regime of the Murray River system has affected the fishing economy, as one Indigenous respondent described, “Fish tr aps are being destroyed due to constant high levels of water, and [we are] not being able to mai ntain the fish traps as we used to do.”’

Morris, Barry. Domesticating resistance: the Dhan-Gadi Aborigines and the Australian State, Berg, Oxford, 1988.

Anthropological; North coast rivers

Chapter 2 discusses t he economic incorporat ion of Dhan -gadi into the European labour economy around the Maclea y Valley in t he late nineteenth and the twentieth century to t he late 19 30s. He talks about how the particular type of economic incorporation of predo minantly Aboriginal me n (pastoral and bush work) into the capitalist e conomy ‘neither substan tially penetr ated nor de stroyed the patterns o f sociality of the Dhan-gadi’ (p.50). pp.50–1. ‘… the local economy relied on th e Dhan-gadi to provision themselves independently for a substantial period of the year, especially in the spring/summer when their labour was not required … The general diet of t he Dhan-gadi throughout this period retained a la rge amount of tradition al foodstuff s.’ [He notes a variety of ‘wild meat’ foods eaten at Bellbrook and Lower Creek reserves.] ‘The other staple source of protein was from the river: mullet (mani), perch (gubirr) and catfish (wiland) were regularly eaten along with ee l ( barruwa) and tortoise ( dhawarra). These f ood items, gain ed by spontaneous a ppropriation from the immediate environment , provided the basis of the Dhan-gadi economy. The relations of ex change that predominated within the Dhan-gadi economy were associate d with the p roduction of use values, and these largely r emained an unmediated process of dire ct appropriation from the environment.’ Although Morris doesn ’t discuss gender roles in this proce ss, women’s fishing pract ices (along side their oth er food-gath ering roles) would have made their participatio n central to the subsist ence of these Aborigin al families. p.52: ‘The social re lations of dist ribution re mained dominated by kinship a nd personalized relationships.’ Chapter 4 discusses the increasing segregation onto the unsupervised reserves such as Bellbroo k and Lower Creek from the late 1930s and early 1940s where ma ny customary forms of cultural organisation and behaviour were perpetuated because of their iso lation. The famil ies st ill had temporary seasonal e mployment and ‘lived o ff the land’ (p.74). p.74: ‘The perpetuation of particular cultural f orms by th e Dhan-gadi were partl y assertions of cultural autonomy and partly acts of resistance to encapsulation within the dominant culture. I t was on th e reserve that the Dhan-gadi maintained so me degree of autonomy which was expressed in the spatial ordering of their social world and the cultural priorities and expectations of their social interactions.’


Chapter 4 l ooks at the everyday t hrough issu es such as sleeping arrangements, cooking and eating practices, to see where cultural formations could be maintained in the face of European demand; whe re ‘dirty black fella food ’ was compared to ‘bush tucker’, etc. p.84: ‘As in other area s of mundane culture, t he changes that were wrought took place as a p rocess of creative bricolage. This was evident in the introd uction of new cooking implements and materials. For example, mullet, p erch, catfish and eel were traditionally cooked eith er “in the as hes” or on a baral. The latter consisted of three forked sticks placed in a triangle around the fire onto which “a lot of little sticks [were] put in a grill-like fashion across [the top] when the fire was made”. The fish was then placed on top of this structure and toasted. Changes introduced here were minor and involved the materials rather than the method. People start ed using what they call grid iron; wi re which was bent to fo rm a griller to be place d on sticks, and in late r years it was the shelves of “fridges” [discarded refrigerators]. The involvement of men in fencing meant that bent wire was commonly availa ble and fashioned into a griller …’

Morris, Barry. ‘The Gumbaingirr peoples of Corindi Beach; part two: anthropology study’, enclosed in Dallas, Mary and Morris, Barry, Archaeological and anthropological study of an option of the Corindi Beach Sewerage Scheme, report to NSW Public Works Department, Coffs Harbour, Parts 1 and 2, 1994 [Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation library].

Cultural heritage; North coast beaches and rivers

The pollution of Corindi Lake, around which Gumbaingirr and Yaegl people had lived since the t urn of the century, escalated in t he 1970s d ue to septic runoff fro m encroaching white settlement. As a conseque nce the cou ncil forced t he Aboriginal camps to move away from their precious lake. Pollution killed most of t he previously thriving marine life which had sustained the Aboriginal po pulation. Barry Morris’s anthropological report was one of a number of studies done in the early 1990s on the need for sewerage works in the area.

Following on from Cane in 1988, Morris carried out interviews with key Elders. It is interesting to compare stories on who were the expert sea wormers. Despite the women who caught beach worms, men are often the ones remembered to be the sea wormers such as the following description from Red Rock by Mrs Wilson of Corindi: p.15: ‘… We always camped at Red Rock. We always went there to camp each year. And my grandfather used to go wo rming, catching beach worms on the other side o f the river, Station Creek … He always went up t here and ca ught sea wo rms and he used to sell them … o ver the Christmas period.’ [see also Marie Edwards’ and Vi Wilson’s memories of collecting sea worms along that beach in Yarrawarra Place Stories below]. Morris provides usefu l contextual information about Corindi and the ongoing significance of fishing: p.17: ‘The relative remoteness, th e long and continuous association with the are a, appear to be compelling factors in terms of c ultural conti nuity of the Gu mbaingirr people of Corindi Beach expressed through the maintenance of subsistence patterns and stories and events associated with specific palaces and sites in the landscape.’


p.18: ‘The remoteness also has meant that f ish and a varie ty of sea fo ods has been the main source of subsistence. The lake was a significant food source for fish, prawns and crabs and birdlife foun d … in abundance until recently … Even toda y, fishing remains an important activity for people in the community, but from the beach and the hea dlands rath er than the lake which is widely reg arded as a ll but barren through run off pollution.’ p.19: Reference is made to ongoing beliefs about Aboriginal law and as Mrs Wilson put it, ‘sacr ed places’ in the landscape that you can’t go to. Morris says: ‘Beliefs about powerful forces t hat could b e unleashed through the non-observance of such practices a lso remains as a cultur al imperative, despite t he fact that none of th e younger men and women appear to have been involved in ceremonial life in the area. There are a number of examples, from Mrs Edwards … fur ther north, Green Hill and Mrs Wilson, Jewfish Point, and a lake at Pillar Valley where Bruce and Bing were told by their father they would get sick if they fished there.’


N,O

Nayutah, Jolanda and Gail Finlay. Minjungbal: the Aborigines and islanders of the Tweed Valley, North Coast Institute for Aboriginal Community Education, Lismore, 1988.

General; North coast beaches

p.8: Women ‘knew the t ime of the year by changes in pla nts. For ex ample, when certain plan ts were in flower, they knew the crabs would be fat or that the mullet would be running.’

NSW Fisheries. Indigenous fishing strategy and implementation plan, NSW Fisheries, 2002.

Government policy; Beaches, oceans and rivers

www.fisheries.nsw.gov.au

The NSW Government’s Indigenous fishing strategy acknowledges that: ‘Fishing has been an integral part of the cultural and economic life of coastal and inland Aboriginal communities since they have been in this land. Fishing has been an important source of food, a basis for trade and an important part of cultural and ceremonial life.

Traditionally, Aboriginal fishers ha d responsib ility for providing not j ust for themselves but for fami ly and community. These cultural expectations continue in Aboriginal communities today. The strategy seeks to p rotect and enhance th e traditional cultural fishing activities of Aboriginal communities, and ensure Aboriginal involvement in the stewardship of fisheries resources.

This strategy acknowledges the con cerns and in terests of other stakeholders in the fisheries of NSW, all of whom want to enjoy the resource, benefit f rom it, and ensure its long term sustainability.’

There is no indication in the strategy document of the understanding of ‘Aboriginal tradition and culture’ in r espect to th e great diversity of Aboriginal fishin g practices and meaning, or the different gender roles.

NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), Aboriginal women’s heritage: Nambucca, NSW NPWS, Sydney, May 2003.

Oral history; North coast beaches and rivers

Oral testimony by Valerie Smith Cohen (born 1936, Stuart Island):

p.1: ‘In the early days I’d go out fishing with Dad. We had a launch. Dad was catching mullets in those days and I would help him pull in the nets. Rosie and I would sit u p the top of the Headlands. We’d sig nal like mad when we s aw the fish coming in the waves. When they got our signal, they’d go out in the boat, drop their nets and catch them.’


p.3: ‘If you wanted to catch bait properly and if t here was too much of a tide, you had to wait until the afternoon, there were just certain times when you could catch worms on South Beach. We could catch about two o r three thou sand worms a day. Mu m and Dad did all the packing when we had the bait shop her e; they’d sell them by th e dozen in these little plastic bags.’ p.6: ‘The local Aboriginal people here won’t fish on this island (Stuart Island) in the night. You wouldn’t catch them over here. Even on the South Beach, from the Vee Wall to Scott’s Head. They’re all spooky areas.’ Oral testimony by Ann Flanders-Edwards (born 1945, Bowraville):

p.13: ‘Whe n I was young, we lived along the riverbank. We we re champion swimmers. If we saw a turtle we’d just dive in an d get it, if it was lunchtime and if we were hungry, we’d just cook it up, right there by the river.’ p.14: ‘I can remember going out to Valla a s a kid, we went out there fishin g and getting oysters and pippies.’ Oral testimony by Amy Marshall Jarrett (born 1943, Bellingen):

p.21: ‘My bi ggest thrill was when I was twelve . I would stay with my Auntie Brya n here and she’d take me out worming. She taught me how to catch sea worms. I wa s frightened a t first but w hen I ca ught my first one, it was wow! After I went out a couple of times, I cau ght hundred. It was a mazing. We’d go over to McQuire s Crossing and everywhere. The Goughs owned t he bait shop then. Old Gough would come and pick her up about four o’clock in the morning to go worming.’ p.21: ‘Uncle Benji was the first Goorie around here to have a fishing licence. Old Keithie Davis got it for him. We’d go out fishin g with him up the creek. As soon as we’d catch a feed, he’d make a fire, shove a stick through the mullet’s mouth and shove it over the coals. He’d just put it on leaves or bark and just skin it.’ Oral testimony by Vilma Whaddy Moylan (born Stuart Island):

p.24: ‘We ate eels and catfish from this river but that was be fore; the river was good then but no w, today it’s just so sad. I could ne arly cry whe n I think ab out it, it’s n ot even as full as it used to be. I can re member our Auntie Mooney would catch catfish here and take them home to cook them up; they were lovely.’ Oral testimony by Jessie Williams (born 1924, Stuart Island):

p.30: ‘We ate eels and catfish from this river but that was before. The river isn’t good any more and that’s so sad.’

NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). Nimula, Tingha, Bullawangen Aboriginal people and their land, Barbara Le Maistre with contributions from MR Hardie, NSW NPWS, Sydney, 1996.

Cultural heritage: Inland waterways

This is a re port on the Stony Creek area/ Nimula, an area which Aboriginal peop le left in the 1920s when many of them settled in Tingha. p.5: ‘The Waterways’. ‘Stony Creek domi nates the st ories of lo cal Aboriginal people … Stony Creek was on the through route between what is mod ern Bundarra and Tingha … (p.6). Th e value of t he creeks for Aboriginal food supplie s was known


to the Kelly and Broun families [owners of stations]. Sto ny Creek o nce provided abundant fish for summer food. That importance is re presented at a site on Bassendean above the creek which is recor ded in the NPWS Aboriginal Sites Register. Axe-grinding grooves and an associated art site were known well into the twentieth century.’ p.7: ‘Tingha’. ‘A natural pool in the watercourse and the ro cks that form it at T ingha are known as the Tingha stone woman. The i dentifying story e xplains her physic al appearance as a headless woman. She lost her head wh en she lent down to dri nk and it was snapped off by a tortoise.

Terrapins were important local Ab original foo d items. Ga thering their eggs was women’s work. The Munro fami ly of Keera kept alive a n account o f a woman’s skill in finding them:

“On anothe r occasion, when on the Namo i River, young Ross Munro observed a gin walking over a claypan. She stopped suddenly in obvious excitement. ‘Turtle’ she stated. The white man made a close observation of the area. He could note no tracks, nothing untoward to indicate a break in the level of the ground. The gin did not t hink; she knew. She dug with her stick, unearth ed a freshw ater turtle’s nest, pla ced those eg gs in her moonga (bag ) and went on to her camp with the knowledge of a tasty c ourse to relieve the monotony of h er menu.” [ref: Henry G Lamond, From Tariaro to Ross Roy, 20.2.50 – 20.2.43 [sic]. Privately printed, n.d ., pp.22–3]’


P

Parker, K Langloh. The Euahlayi tribe: a study of Aboriginal life in Australia, Archibald Constable and Co. Ltd, London, 1905.

Observational; Inland rivers

Katie Langloh Parker’s careful description s of the Aboriginal people she grew to know as an adult on her husband’s station in north west New South Wales at the turn of the century offer a number of insights into fishing practices around the rivers of the Darling system. She describes the large fishing nets and g roup methods of drivin g the fish in to the nets. She discu sses the Br ewarrina fish traps and methods of collecting crayfish and mussels by digging them out of their holes in the mud. p.109: ‘Their mode of catching shrimps was very … primitive. Quite nude, the women sit down in the water, let the shrimps bite them; as they nip they seize them.’ p.113: ‘Nimmaylee was a wonderf ul little fish erwoman; s he delighted in a fishing expedition with me. Of f we used t o go with o ur lines, wo rms or frogs for bait, o r perhaps shrimps or mus sels if we w ere after cod. If we were successful, Nimma ylee would string the fish on a stick in a most professional manner, and carry them with an air of pride to the cook. She attributes her fishin g successes to a charm having been sung over her to that end as a baby.’ p.116: Parker describes how possums, ducks a nd other birds, iguana and fish were put in little h oles made beside the fire and cove red over with ash. ‘The iguanas an d fish are taken out [of t he ashes] a ll in one p iece. Each fish carries in its inside a representation of its Minggah – spirit tree by drying the inside and pressing it you can plainly see the imprint of the tree.

When we go bathing, the blacks t ell me that the holes in the creek (p.117) filled with gum leaves are codfish n ests. They say, too, that when they beat the riv er to drive the fish out towards the net waiting for them, that t hey hear the startled cod singing out.

Mussels and crayfish are cooked in the as hes. The seagulls, w hich occasionally we used to see inland, are said to have broug ht the first mussels to the back creeks.’

Perkins, Tony. Past and present public lands uses by Gumbaingirr knowledgeholders, Corindi Beach, Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation, Corindi, 1997.

Cultural heritage; North coast beaches, estuary and rivers

Ch. 2: ‘Seafood and Freshwater Foods’ pp.9– 16. These pages detail the types of seafood and freshwater foods which were, and still are, gathered around the area o f Corindi Beach. The Eld ers interviewed were all men, except for Marie Edwards, and the stories about fishin g were about men. However the final para graph of the sections notes:


p.16: ‘Life to Gu mbaingirr descen dants living at Corindi will always follow Elders before them. Methods u sed and knowledge of what water f oods to eat and ways of bait co llection and pla ces to ob tain these foods are very much as pa ssed on by mothers an d fathers of those interviewed. The spirit of living this lifest yle is strong and shows how important public land and wa terway use is to th e su rvival of this traditional lifestyle being followed in the Corindi area.’ p.41: ‘Messages of danger, death or visitors ca n be brought by Warlee, a death bir d, or swans, cattle, children crying … when fishing or when trees fall.’

Pettit, Lucy. ‘Growing with our sister Kath/Oodgeroo’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 16, issue 4, 1994.

Biographical; Beaches/ocean

Kath Walker, Oodgeroo grew up o n Stradbroke Island, so uthern Queensland, an d according to her sister’s tales in this article was an adventurous, mischievous person often getting herself and her sisters into trouble.

‘All of us three sisters were fond of fishing and Dad decided he would fix up three leaky dinghies an d we could have one e ach as we had our own fishing spots, but we had to take care of the boats, mend and paint them. Mine was white with blue inside. Vivian's was white with red. Dad made oars for us to row our bo ats when he said, “Kath, what colour are you g oing to paint your boat? ”. She sat thinking for a while then said, “Have you got an old paint tin?”. Dad said, “There is plenty of paint”, and she said, “I'm going to see Uncle Fred”, so off she trots and comes back with a tin full of tar. “I'm not go ing to paint all of mine. I'll paint the bottom and Uncle Fred said, the tar will last a long time”. So Kath had a black boat that did last a long time . Kath said, “I am going back to see Uncle Fred, he is throwing some nets away which we could wind around some rope and we can drag it up on the beach and cat ch some whiting and mullet.” So all three of us went to see Uncle Fred – we soon had all the children wanting to help. We shared all we caught.

Whenever we wanted to fish in th e blue hole we used to collect o ctopus to use for bait. Especially when the parrot fish were biting. We used to get up at dawn and go looking for mud crabs when the tide was right. When we returned home it was my place to work the e ngine; Kath's job was t o jump aboard the ding hy which was anchored in the channel. Dad said, “Now face the way we are going and when your sister slows the motor near the dinghy – ju mp!” Kath did t hat but being left-handed she would turn around and always miss the dinghy and h ave to swi m. She cou ld swim like a fish.’

Phillip, Arthur (Captain). The voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, London, 1789.

Observational; Sydney area

pp.79–80: ‘It was now first observed by the Governor that the women in general had lost two joints from th e little finge r of the left hand. As t hese appea red to be all married women, he at first conje ctured this p rivation to be part of t he marriag e ceremony; but going afterwards into a hut where were seve ral women and children, he saw a girl of five or six years of age whose left hand was thus mutilated; and at the same time an old woman, and another who appeared to have had children, o n both of wh om all the fingers we re perfect. Several instances were afterwards


observed of women with child, and of others that were e vidently wives, who had not lost the two joints, and of children f rom whom they had be en cut. Whatever be the occasion of this mutilat ion, it is pe rformed on females only; and co nsidering th e imperfection of their instruments, must be a very painful operation. Nothing has been seen in the possession of these people that is at all calculated for performing such an amputation, except a shell fixed to a short stick, and used generally for pointing their spears, or for separating the oysters from the rocks. More f ingers than one are never cut; and in every instance it is the same finger that has suffered.’ p.82: ‘One of their modes of fish ing was now observed: their hooks are made of the inside of a shell resembling mother of pearl. Wh en a fish wh ich has taken the bait is supposed to be too strong to be landed with the line, the canoe is paddled to shore, and while one man gen tly draws th e fish along, another stands prepared to strike it with a spear: in this attempt they seldom fail.’

Pierce, Russell. ‘The evidence of J Ainsworth on the diet and economy of the Ballina horde’ in Isabel McBryde (ed.) Records of times past: ethnohistorical essays on the culture and ecology of the New England tribes, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1978.

Academic; North coast rivers and beaches

pp.116–17: description by John Ainsworth (recounting his o bservations of Aboriginal people in t he Ballina area in mid-late ninete enth centur y, written in 1922) – ‘ In catching fish they used what they called a “to w-row” – th at is a finely meshed n et attached to a stick of bamboo bent in the shape of a bo w about eig ht feet across between the two ends. This gave a bag effect to the net an d with a tow -row in each hand the blacks could surround the fish schoo ls in narrow and shallow waters and catch them by the hundreds.’ p.117: Ainsworth – ‘the blacks i n the month of September each year flocked to th e beaches for salmon fish ing … They came in hu ge shoals in side the surf, where the blacks could spear them in any number; then they would disappear from the coast as suddenly as they came.’ p.120: ‘Fro m about April to as late as Sep tember, the sea mullet migrates in enormous shoals northward along the beaches. It would have been easily obtained in great quantities by both netting and spearing.’

Poiner, Gretchen and Lesley Maynard. The Aborigines of New South Wales: coastal people, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney, n.d.

p.2: ‘… wo men might gather shellf ish from estuaries whilst men spear ed fish in t he river or sea.’

Povah, Frank. You kids count your shadows: hairymen and other Aboriginal folklore in New South Wales, F Povah, Wollah NSW, 1990.

p.18: ‘The Bunyip has many names. It occurs all over the continent in river bends and deep waterholes. Many stories about Bunyip a re sacred and therefore secret, and many people do not like to be pressed on the subject.’


p.18: ‘Aboriginal people believe very strongly in the bunyip. Down the Murray River they won’t go swimmin g just on su ndown. There’s one swimming plac e over there they call the Bunyip hole.’ pp.18–19: ‘My husband was talking to one of his cousins at Swan Hill and he told him the story about the waawii. Said he was fishin and the line kept going upstream, against the current. He reckoned th at was the bunyip tellin him to kno ck off fishin in that hole and go home. Reckoned it was waawii talkin to him.’


R

Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, place and Aboriginal ownership, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

Academic: Inland rivers

Ch.7: Peter Read interviews historian Heather Goodall about the relationsh ip between ‘herself, her own country and the Abo riginal lands of the far n orth coast of NSW’. She has worked with Eualayi and Barkindji people for nearly thirty years. p.174: ‘Land becomes actor. In the 1980s her Eualayi friend Noelene Walford die d suddenly and unexpectedly. The f uneral was moving and terrible. Afterwards th e mourners went down to the Darling River to fish : a way of coping, Heather explains, with the tragic and pain ful event. The enormou s dusty banks sweepin g down to the low water level, the exp osed roots of the big river gums, t he barbecue, the taste of proper river fish, the quiet sunlit afternoon, subdued talking, silence.’ p.175: ‘“It was quite a complicated event, but it wa s about g etting something, it was a bout drawing something from the land, from the places which people knew, it was a way of relating to each other which used the land in a really p roductive way to soften the blow a nd allow them to relate to each other and restore a sense of ca lmness. There’s a sense of the land being an active participant in what you’re doing.”’

Reed, AW. An illustrated encyclopaedia of Aboriginal life, AH and AW Reed, Sydney, 1969.

General; Rivers and beaches

This is a ver y typical example of earlier texts w hich stereotyped and generalised t he gender roles of Aboriginal people. Of all the 27 colour images only one shows women. One of the women is cooking fish. All t he other images show Aboriginal men hunting, spearing fish, dancing, fighting, and painting. pp.66–7. It was noted that: ‘From an early age girls as well as boys who lived near lakes, rivers or the seashore were e ncouraged to recognise the different varieties o f fish and to study their habits to prepare the m for later life when th ey would be required to feed themselves and their families.’ However despite this mention of girls, the majority of the ensuing discu ssion over the two pages on ‘fish ing’ focused on men’s techniques includ ing spearing, male grou ps driving fish into shor e and men’ s use of dolphins to drive the fish into their nets near the shore. Reading this one would think that women had no part in any of these activities and merely cooked the fish for their men at the end of the day.


Rose, Debra Bird et al. Country of the heart: an Indigenous Australian homeland, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2002.

Anthropological/ethnography; Northern Territory rivers

This is a book of ima ges and stories from t he Mak Mak people, predominantly women, of f loodplains country near Daly Ri ver NT. While this is a lon g way awa y from New South Wales, I thought I’d see whet her they gave any hints to the different meanings that Aboriginal people, in particular women, give/gave to fishing. According to Rose’s account, the differences lie in the connection to their Country, although she says that d oesn’t mean that non- Aboriginal people can’t learn con nection and respect. p.70: ‘The food that people get when they go hunting is consumed, and the remains are handled with respect. When Na ncy goes fishing, she cooks the fish on the coals, and then she burns the bones. The reasons? … Nancy: “Because it come from tha t country, so we leave ’im there, burn ’im up.”’ p.71: ‘Action and connection are two sides of the same coin. People remain in connection with country by being t here, and are there responsibly when they are engaged actively with country.’ p.83: ‘The joy in huntin g is set within the nexus of the cou ntry and care. People are brought into being by c ountry, and thus are born into relationships of mutuality. As April explained: ‘… you don’t look a fter count ry, country won’t look aft er you.’ Care and Country are mutual.

Debra, however, thinks that the connection to Country isn’t something that non-Aboriginal people cannot shar e in. At the recent Landscapes of Exile: Once perilous no w safe con ference (July 2006 Byron Bay), Debra sugge sted that w e should shift our language away from ‘place’ t o ‘country’ because it is so much more encompassing and holistic (pers. comm. 28/7/06).

Roughley, TC. Fish and fisheries of Australia, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1951.

Academic

p.318: ‘A common and effective method also practised in the north of Australia is that of poisoning the water by means of the stems, roots, leaves or berries of certain plants, of which Roth records tw enty-two species. The method mo st frequently employed is to disintegrate the plant by pounding it and to place it in the water, where the pounding is cont inued, or to fill small nets with the ground material and stir the m in the water of small la goons. The poison becomes active on absorption by the fish through the gills. The fish sicken more or less rapidly when they rise to the surface i n a stupefied state or dying condition and are easily taken by hand or spear.’ p.318: ‘The effectiveness of these p oisons is du e to the active principle s associated with ether-soluble resin s, as in Derris and Tephrosia; sap otoxin, as in Careya and Cupania; al kaloids, a s i n Barringtonia speciosa and Stephania hernandiae-folia; or tannic acid, as in various acacias and eucalypts … The wholesomeness of the fish as food appears to be unaffected by these poisons.’ p.322: ‘Various methods of damming rivers to trap fish were in vogue in various parts of Australia. They are frequently used at the present time in the north. A splendid example of such a fish trap was for a long time to be see n at Brewarrina, on t he


Darling River. This trap was of c onsiderable antiquity a nd very ela borately an d cunningly constructed. It was so contrived that the fish were caught as the flood waters receded … Several tribes h ad the right of fishing in this dam, though each tribe was strictly forbidden to take fish from any portion not allotted to it. The principal fish caught were Murray cod, callo p, silver per ch and freshwater catfish. They were recovered from the traps either by hand, net or spear, and during times of flood they were dived for.’ p.326: ‘In New South Wales the women did most of the fishing with hook and line seated usually in a canoe, in which also was a small fire kindled on sand, stone or seaweed; on this fire the fish were cooked when hunger prompted.’

Ryan, JS. The land of Ulitarra: early records of the Aborigines of the mid-north coast of New South Wales, University of New England, Grafton, 1964.

Academic; North coast rivers and beaches

p.139: ‘McDougall repor ted in 1901 ( Science of Man, for April 22, p. 46) on the methods of fresh-water fishing as f ollows: “Fishing: The p ractice of catching f ish in fresh water by poisoning it, is met with among the Coombangree tribe. A weed called Bumbil Bumbil is co llected and tied into small bundles. Wit h a small bunch in each hand they dived under water and rubbed them together. T his was quickly repeate d. The poison from the weed so affected the fish by making their eyes smart so much that they co uld hardly see, and the y would shortly after flo at to the top of the wate r, where the aborigines would spear and catch them.”’ p.139: ‘There is also a lather produced from a t ree called “Cutiga” used for stupifying fish. The le aves of this tree are gathered and beaten tog ether with a stick u ntil a lather something like that made from soap has been formed; this is used in the water very much in the same way as the Bumbil Bumbil weed, and has a somewhat similar effect on the fish.’


S

Sams, DEJ. Reconstruction of the Indigenous culture of the Tumut Valley: an assessment of ethnographic and material evidence, NSW Department of Education, Wagga Wagga, 1988.


p.19: ‘Fish and fishing of water re sources in general was an import ant aspect of Aboriginal economy on the coast and on inland river systems … the Tu mut river was rich in reso urces and favourite camp sites were at times located near good fishin g areas.’

Scott, William. The Port Stephen’s blacks: recollections of William Scott (prepared by Gordon Bennett), Chronicle, Dungog NSW, 1929 [available online at http://nla.gov.au/nla.aus-f1693].

Observational; Lower north coast beaches and rivers

pp.7–8: ‘An aboriginal woman, Fa nny, who wa s a servan t of our fa mily for ma ny years, was in her girlho od days dedicated to t he art of fishing. When quite young, a ligature was tied about the first joint of her little finger very tightly, and being left there for a considerable time, the top portion mortified and, in time, fell off. This w as carefully secured, taken out into the bay, and, w ith great solemnity, committed to the deep. The b elief was that the fish would eat t his part of the girl’s fing er, and wou ld ever, therea fter, be attracted to the rest of the hand from which it had come. Thus Fanny would always have success at fishing because o f the pecu liar lure in h er fingers. She was indeed a wonderfully lucky fisher.’ p.8: ‘One woman of ea ch small tribe was usually dedicated this way, a nd to her was entrusted the task of fashioning the f ishing lines, the virtues accruing from her innate powers over fish being of course communicated to the lines she made.’ p.18: ‘The business of fishing was perhaps the most important of all to the natives. In the pisca torial art they were highly proficient, using both lines and spears. Fish ing lines were cleverly made from the inner bark of young kurrajong trees, the finished article being of extraordi nary strength and capable of landing the heaviest of edible fish. I verily believe that they would have held a shark.’ p.18: ‘it was the function of select ed women specially dedicated to the fishing, to prepare the lines. The bark would b e stripped carefully from the tree and soaked in water until the outer portions could be readily scraped off with a shell. This left a white, flax-like fibre, ve ry tough and strong. T he women twisted this fibre to th e required thickness and length by rolling it on the front part of the thigh with the hands. Where the line was rolle d the skin of the operat ive was hardened by the application of hot ashe s, and in time became callou sed, smooth, and as hard as dried leather. These fibre strings wer e also used to make dilly-bags in which picca ninnies wer e carried as well as articles of food and puppies.’

http://nla.gov.au/nla.aus-f1693�


p.18: ‘The fishing line was called “yirra-warn” and the hook “pirrewuy”.’ p.18: ‘The other method of securing fish was by spearing them. While the women used the lin es, the men mostly fished with the spear, and they were e xtraordinarily skilful.’ Scott describes the process of making a spear in detail. pp.18–19: ‘I t was intere sting to watch the on slaught on th e sea mulle t when they came into the harbour. By some u nerring instinct the bla cks knew to within a da y when the first of the great shoals would appear through the heads. The women would be on the look out for the shining, shimmering mass of fish to come round some wooded headland, and when their shrill outcri es told of the approach of the finny prey, the men would rush to the shore … The fish always travelled from west to east, and close inshore, on the northern side of the harbour, usually making their appearance off Carrington about the time of “wokercoopa”, or high-water. At th e given signal the men would dash into the wat er until up to their midd les and stand motionless, spear poise d on woo merah, ready to launch the fatal dart. The leader, scanning the water with eager eyes, would watch until the shoal came within strikin g distance. “Muh!” (Now!) he would cry. Hissing into the water would hurtle the heavy spears, and next instant excited natives would be tossin g great, gleaming fish to the beach.’ p.19: ‘They were not over-particular about the thoroughness with which the delicacy was cooked. So long as it was well warmed in the fire they would eat it with avidity.’ p.19: ‘They had a cleve r and simpl e method of cleaning any fish they caught, and one that I have not seen practiced elsewhere. They would take a fish, thrust a f inger through the soft flesh just beneath a side fin, and through that small orifice withdra w all the entrails. The fish after being cleaned appeared as though it had just come out of the water. That this method was a good one I can bear strong testimony, for th e natural juices were preserved within the fish, and the flesh tasted better than when treated any other way. Remo ving the scale s was, of course, never thought of. The fire got rid of those.’ p.19: ‘Oysters were to be had for the gatherin g, and the blacks ap preciated the succulent shell-fish mig htily. But ve ry se ldom d id they eat them raw. They would knock them off the rocks, or carry the rocks away, and roast the oysters over a fire.’ p.19: ‘The tribe did not by any means confine their fishing to the vicinity of Carrington, the whole waters of the harbor being their grounds. At fixed seasons t hey would set off to the h eads to cat ch lobster s, and this in deed was a mighty task, when it is considered that they had no equipment for the sport. The lobsters were caught by the gins who, o n the sea fr ont, dived down among the rocks f or them. Their men folk played a somewhat i mportant, if commenda bly cautious, part in the business by throwing stones into the water as the gins dived, the purpose being to scare away the sharks. It was a risky game for the women, but I never heard of one being tackled by the ravenous monsters which were certainly plentiful on that part of the coast.’ pp.19–20: ‘The canoe was an essential part of the f ishing operation s, and these crude but effective craft were greatly in evidence … the crazy vessels enabled many a meal to be obtained by the fisherwomen whe n the great schools of f ish were not in evidence.’ p.20: ‘It was no uncommon sight to see a dozen or so out on the waters of the bay, a little fire, built on a heap of clay, glowing and smoking, and sable fisher s plying their calling for sheer necessity’s sake.’


p.20: ‘There was a marvellous variety of fish i n the harbour in those days, and it might be interesting to record the native names of the different species. Fish, as a general term, was “muckeroo.” Then came th e individual sorts as follows: Porpoise, cooprar; sh ark, toorarcle; turtle, coorahcumarn; snapper, kurrangcu m; jew-fish , turrahwurrah; mullet, peewah; bream, coop ere; stingray, billorn; torpedo-fish, kirrepoontoo; eel, toonang; flathead, tarrahwarng; oysters, nonnung; cray-fish, wirrah; crab, beerah; shrimp, punnoong.’

Sinclair, Paul. The Murray: a river and its people, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2001.

Academic: Inland rivers

Sinclair focuses on th e relationsh ip settler Australians h ave had wit h the Murray River. Furthermore, he focuses predominately on the experience of male fishermen because ‘th e culture of fishing was popularly presented as a male occupation ’, although he acknowledges that women also fished and swam in the river (p.24).

Sinclair documents me mory and a ttachment to the River Murra y, which he says are as much a pa rt of the Murray as fish, irrigation and flood [back cover]. Overall the author relates stories a bout non-Aboriginal male fishermen, more th an women’s attachment to the Murray through fishing. p.18: The biological diversity of the Murray River ‘is thought to have supported one of Australia’s largest Aboriginal populations … The river sustained fish, yabbies, mussels and waterfowl, with a margin of river red gum and black box trees that was habitat for goannas, possums and other small mammals. Ve getable food would have included n ardoo, grass seed and small tuber s … The pr oliferation o f cemeteries, artefacts, middens and scar trees is a continuing reminder of the river’s fundamental importance to generations of Aboriginal people.’ p.142: ‘Early in the twentieth century, Aboriginal fishing camps consisting of a gunyah of boughs, or a tent and lean-to, were a common sight between Tocumwal and Echuca.’

‘Aboriginal families cont inued to catch fish for their own use and for sale to professional fishermen’ (pp.142–3).

Instead of the lone white fisher men who were documented as living along the Murray in their poor hut s, Aboriginal women and families l ived along the river in their camps in the 1940s and ’50s. In the sentences following the above qu ote he relates this story of mission life: p.143: ‘At the Cumeroog unga mission near the Barmah lakes during the late 1920s, Doug Nicholls, who wa s to be come a pastor and governor of Sout h Australia, remembered walking shoeless with his mother on cold mornings throug h frost-brittle grass. He remembered stepping in his mother’s footprints where she had broken the ice ahead of him; she drew a fishing line after her and the fish she caught gave them money necessary to add a few small amenities to their home.’


Smith, Keith. King Bungaree: a Sydney Aborigine meets the great South Pacific explorers, 1790–1830, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst NSW, 1992.

Heritage

p.16: ‘Women sat in canoes, fish ing by hand with lines m ade of twin e from twiste d strands of bark to which they att ached shiny crescent-shaped lures ground from shell. A small stone a cted as a sinker. The net carrying bags slu ng over the ir shoulders were wove n from the same bark twine. Often, two or three ch ildren crowded into the canoe with their mother, who held the youngest securely in her la p between her knees and crossed ankles. The women talked, sang and laughed together as they fished, chewing mussels and cockles which they spat into the wate r as a burley to attract fish.’

Sokoloff, BA. The Worimi: hunter-gatherers at Port Stephens: an ethnohistory, Honours Thesis, University of New England, 1973.

Ethnological; Lower north coast rivers and beaches

p.125: ‘There was a preference for the marine resources of food by t hose hordes who had th e best acce ss to these, especially the Maiangal, the Ga mipingal and the Grewerigal. These hord es derived more from t he fishing a nd gathering of shell-f ish than the hunting of terrestrial animals or the gathering of vegetable foods.’ pp.126–7: Sokoloff suggests that Aboriginal people in the Port Stephens area fishe d more in su mmer than i n winter, an d that their diet was influenced by t he seasonal availability of different foods.

Somerville, Margaret and Tony Perkins. ‘(Re)membering in the contact zone: telling, and listening to, a massacre story’, Altitude, vol. 6, 2005.

Academic; Coastal rivers/beaches

This article is jointly authored by University o f New Engl and academic, Margaret Somerville, and Garb y Elder at Ya rrawarra, T ony Perkins speaking about the Re d Rock/ Corindi Lake of t he mid-north coast of New South Wales. As part of a lo ng collaboration between UNE historians and archaeologist s and Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation many interviews were u ndertaken with Northern Gumbaingirr and Yaegl Elders of the Corindi area. In this e xcerpt Auntie Marie Edwards is ret elling a fishing story to Margaret Somerville.

Margaret’s text: ‘In stories of catching fish, Granny becomes one with the river and the story invites the listener int o the same intimate rel ationship with the place. Marie describes the precise locat ional detail of the place where the weed grows in the river past Jew Point where they used to catch lots of crabs:

“Old Granny, Armi, all day she’d sit down at the creek, Red Rock River. She’d go down there, she’d sit and she’d be pulling in the big bream, fish all round her. Just down the front. Then t hey’d go to Jew Point to fish u p t here all day , they used to catch big jewies up there, or anywhere up that river, or they might go get some crabs. So after you go past Je w Point you see all that weed, you see all the crabs landing where you can see ‘em, spear ‘em, bloody big crabs, used to be beautiful.”’ [also see this quote in Yarrawarra Place Sto ries: Red Rock camping and exch ange, 2000, p.19.]


Steele, JG. Aboriginal pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River, Queensland University Press, St Lucia QLD, 1983.

Academic; Far north coast rivers, beaches

Steele’s book remains the most comprehensive academic text on the far north coast Aboriginal groups ran ging from southern Queensland ( Beaudesert, Gold Coast) through the Tweed and the Richmond Valley – across th e reaches o f Bundjalun g territory in northern New South Wales. Althou gh he doesn’t offer ne w insights into Aboriginal women’s fishing pract ices, it is an important text in providing an anthropological context to the economic, cultural and spiritua l practices of this region in the pre and early colonial period.

Stewart, David (ed.). Burnum Burnum’s Aboriginal Australia, Angus and Robertson, North Ryde, 1988.

General: Rivers and beaches

There are very few i mages of women an ywhere in this book – almost all the photographs, paintings and sketches are of men. p.31. ‘Lifeways’. [a Thomas Dick photo amongst the mangroves of a man spearing fish from a canoe with a seated woman]. ‘Women do most of the collecting and carrying … They collect shellfish, fruit and berries, fish [u sually with a hook and line ] and dig roots during the day …’

‘The men hunt and fish, and have to move fast and far …’ ‘Men and women somet imes work together, and perhaps in fairly big g roups,

for example when catch ing fish with nets, or arranging hunting drives of perhaps a big ceremony.’

Sullivan, Sharon. ‘Aboriginal diet and food gathering methods in the Richmond and Tweed River valleys, as seen in early settler records’, in Isabel McBryde (ed.), Records of times past: ethnohistorical essays on the culture and ecology of the New England tribes, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1978.

Academic; Northern rivers and beaches

p.107: Early settler accounts sugg est that ‘the coastal Aborigines moved inland in winter, living on rain-forest product s, and returned to the coast in the spring, when fish in shoals became plentiful.’ p.107: ‘Fish were caught in scoop nets in narrow or shallow waters on the coast and lower rivers. Further up, when the water was low, fixed nets could be used and th e fish driven into them fro m deep waterholes. They were speared in shallow water, in large numbers with an unbarbed, hardwood spear. No barbed, pronged, or bone or shell tipped spears were used for fishing in this area though they were quite common elsewhere on the east coast. Nor is there a ny mention of fish poisoning, or of Aborigines f ishing from canoes. I n t he upper re aches of th e Richmond, fish were caught on lines in summer.’


T

Taylor, Penny (ed.). After 200 years: photographic essays of Aboriginal and Islander Australia today, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.

Photographic; Australian rivers and beaches

This collection of photo graphs contains several images of women fishing. Indeed, all the images of fishing depict women, with the exception of one image of men catching lobster and shark at Mapoon.

Tench, Watkin. Sydney’s first four years: being a reprint of ‘A narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay’ and ‘A complete account of the settlement at Port Jackson’, Library of Australian History in association with the Royal Australian Historical Society, Sydney, 1979.

Archival; Sydney area

p.48: ‘Fishing, indeed, seems to engross nearly the whole of their time, probably from its forming the chief part of a subsistence.’ pp.285–6: Tench observed that women generally used canoe s ‘to fish with hook and line, this being the provi nce of the women.’ In the canoe ‘the mother tends her child; keeps up her fire, which is laid on a small patch of earth; paddles her boat; broils fish; and provide s in part the subsisten ce for the d ay. Their fa vourite bait for fish is a cockle.’ p.287: ‘The women so metimes use the gig, and always carry one in ea ch canoe, to strike larg e fish which may be hooked, and thereby facilitate the capture. Bu t generally speaking, this instrument is appr opriate to the men, who are never seen fishing with the line, and would indeed con sider it a degradation of their pr e-eminence.’ p.288: ‘They begin by throwing the fish, exactly in the state in which it came fro m the water, on the fire. When it has become a little warmed the y take it off, rub away the scales, and then peel off with their teeth the surface, which they find do ne, and eat. Now and not before, the y gut it; but if the f ish be a mullet, or any other which has a fatty substance about t he intestines, they care fully guard that part, an d esteem it a delicacy. The cooking is now completed, by the remaining part being laid on the fire until it be sufficiently done.’


Tucker, Margaret. If everyone cared, Grosvenor, London, 1977.


Margaret grew up in the Murray River region, at Moonahculla Reserve on the Edward River near Deniliquin before she was taken aw ay to Cootamundra. Sh e refers to t he river as ‘the old river’ (p .11); ‘the beloved Murra y River’ (p.16). She remembers with joy some swimming stories as a child, but say s that in dro ught times were very h ard as the river dried up and there were no fish. They spent time at Cume roogunga near Moira Lakes, an overflo w from the Murray River (p.25) ‘I can reme mber being poled by them [au nty and uncle] in a cano e … Our pe ople often camped round the Moira Lakes as th ere was a plentiful supply of fish in the seaso n, and swa n and duc k eggs … As far as I can remember, the women could hunt game as well as the men.’ p.26: It was a better life at Cumeroogunga. Margaret’s mother worked as a domestic at a farm when her husband was away shearing. ‘My mother always had a following of young friends of her own age. On this day, t hey all gave a hand with the cleanin g and the washing, so we finished early and oh joy! We took h ome-made crayfish nets and little pie ces of meat saved for the occasion and all of us, Mother, Aunt, two or three eighteen year old girls, and we children, climbed through fences round the dam that supplied drinking water for the stock. It was in the Mission paddock, about a mile away from the Cumeroogunga Mission … The cr ays (we called them crawfish) were plentiful in that dam. We had learn ed to catch them the right way, and it was grea t fun.’ This story was told because it’s about a snake bite which her younger sister got on their way home from the dam, but it also shows that such expeditions were communal, and possib ly a special event that was hard to organise b ecause of the domestic chores that her mother had to complete first. p.28: Marga ret laments the changes to their wa y of life. ‘Su ch a lot has happened since those childhood days. Since my mother’ s childhood days. The traditions and customs have gone since our great tribes were brought to live together and eventually marry. Even our beloved ri ver the Murray, the Edwards, the Murrumbidgee, their waters flow on, never to return.’ pp.34–5: A story about fishing in the hard drought times when the season was closed to fishing provides a de mand for traditional fishing rights in an era wh en this would have been scoffed at. The crux of the story is that one day Margaret’ s mother took the children to the river to fish, and they didn’t n otice two po licemen approach them until too late. The children hurriedly pulled in their lines – but not Margaret’s mother.

The senior officer gave a little cough, but Mum kept her eyes on her line. … ‘Do you know you can be fined heavily for fishing? It is closed season. Without looking at the p oliceman she replied: ‘Yes, I know, but fish has been

my people’s food all through the ages, and it is my food too, and I am hungry.’ The officers scratched their heads, looked at each other, and walked on. The next story is about an old man bringing in a large goanna, in this t ime of

hunger, and cooking it. Many of the parents we re disgusted – dirty food – and the kids hadn’t eaten it and had to be coaxed to ea t it. Her mother said it was very goo d food and her people were ‘forgetting all these good foods’ (p.36). p.41: Marg aret reme mbers her aunt and uncle making a canoe on one of their walkabouts, then describing the cla y which was placed in the bottom o ver which you could boil the billy and cook the fish.


Turbet, Peter. The Aborigines of the Sydney district before 1788, Kangaroo Press, East Roseville NSW, 2001.

Historical; Sydney area

pp.11–12: ‘The women of the area were missing most of the little fin ger of the left hand. Infant girls had a ligature tied around the proximal joint of the finger and, after several days, the deadened part b eyond it dropped off. The operation was known as mal-gun at Port Jackson and the few women who had not undergone the amputation were looked upon contemptuously. Various reasons for mal-gun have bee n suggested but it seems likely that it was connected with women’s fishing activities.’ pp.13–15: ‘On the coast, the main occupation was fishing. Women spent many hours sitting in canoes with hook and line, whereas men speared fish from the shore, from canoes, or as they waded through the shallows.’ p.42: ‘Fishin g spears, also with sha fts made fr om grasstree spike s, w ere about 3 metres long. The shaft was punctured with many s mall holes – a characteristic probably co nnected wit h the spear ’s frequent immersion. Four hardwood prongs, about 60 ce ntimetres long, were inserted into t he end and secured with bark and resin … Th e ends of t he prongs were hardened in the f ire and coat ed with molten resin and a small bone point was attached to each … At Port Jackson the fishin g spear was known as mooting.’ p.48: ‘Married women had to carr y a lot of e quipment with them as they move d around the country. Articles such a s kangaroo-bone chisels, shells used to sharpen spears, balls of red ochre and white clay, lumps of grasstree resin and fishing tackle were kept in a net bag, or juguma, which was slung around a woman’s neck or hea d so that it hung down her back.’ p.49: ‘Fish hooks were crescent-shaped pieces of shell, not barbed, but with a notch at one end to assist in tying on the l ine. To make a hook, a disc was cut from a large turban shell (Turbo torquata) and a hole was made in its centre by abrasion. The ring so formed was then filed away on one side to give the hook its cre scent shape … Women were very skilful at this task and it was finished quickly.’ p.49: ‘The fibrous bark of the kurrajong, native guava ( Eupomatia laurina), cabbage–tree palm (Livistona australis), and certain wattles, are all reported to have been used as raw materials in the manufacture of fish ing lines. The ba rk was stripped vertically from the trunk and strengthened by saturating it in a solution obtained by soaking the bark of the golden geebung ( Persoonia laurina) in water. It was pounded between rocks, and two strands of fibre were rolled tightly together along the insides of the thighs. The line was t hen soaked in the sap of the red bloodwood ( Corymbia gummifera) to prevent fraying. The finished product was a bout as f ine as raw silk. Unworked stones tied to the line served as sinkers.’ p.49: ‘The Jervis Bay Aborigines bu ilt lobster traps with the vines of white supplejack (Ripogonum album). Hoop nets used to catch lobsters were also observed near Sydney.’ p.54: ‘… th e coastal Aborigines w ere a fish ing people wit h men and women havi ng their own distinct fishing methods.’ pp.54–5: ‘During the day, unless a strong wind was blowing, wome n would be i n canoes fishing with hook and line. If a woman was breast feeding, the child would be with her in t he canoe. The fire, burning in the mi ddle of the canoe, was used to heat


the catch. Parts of the catch, along with mussels and cockles, were chewed and s pat into the water to attract more fish.’ p.55: ‘During their hours on the water, women were often heard singing.’ p.55: ‘Both Threlkeld and Collins believed that the mal-gun operation on women was done to avoid the entanglement of the fishing line with the little finger as it was wound around the hand. Threlkeld says that the Awab agals performed the a mputation on the litt le finger of the right hand rath er than the left and o ne right-handed operation was observed at Port Jackson. Among the Gaddhang people of Port Stephens, once the part of t he finger beyond the lig ature had fa llen off, it was thrown into the water. Reportedly, the Gaddhang believed that after fish had eate n the finger they would always be attracted to the hand from which it came.’ p.55: Information on me n’s spear fishing techn iques from la nd, in the shallows, an d from canoes. p.56: Night fishing – ‘One night fro m the deck of the Endeavour, Joseph Banks noticed many moving lights in differ ent parts of Botany Ba y and he co ncluded that the Aborigines were fish ing. The act ivity lasted until the ear ly hours of t he morning. On the New South Wales coast , strips of bar k from stringybark trees were used as torches for night fishing.’ pp.56–7: ‘Analysis of fish bones from several di fferent coastal middens has indicated some of the species ea ten. In middens at Currarong, Durras North and Wattamolla – all sites adjacent to the ocean – bones of snapper and bream were the most common finds. Groper and wrasse were also well represented.’ p.57: ‘To prepare the catch for eating, the fish were thrown onto the fire until warm and the scales were rubbed off. The skin was h eld between the teeth, p eeled away and eaten. After being gutted, the fish was put back on the fire for final heating.’ pp.60–1: ‘On the south coast, when people saw a school of killer whales attackin g another whale, one of the old men started several fires along the shore and, pretending to be crippled, hobbled among the m using wal king sticks. The ruse was intended to arouse the compassion of the killer s so that th ey would drive the whales towards the beach. Sometimes the old man would shout out, “Throw that fish on the shore”. If the whale became stranded some of the men rushed out to kill i t with their spears and a messenger was dispatched to inform the nei ghbouring groups of the forthcoming feast.’ p.61: ‘The p eople of we stern Sydney had access to a variety of aquatic foodstuffs. Buruberongal women caught large mullet in the Hawkesbury Ri ver, and waterholes – such as Baker’s and Pitt Town Lagoons near Windsor – provided them with eels and freshwater molluscs.’ pp.61–2: ‘In autumn, the Aborigine s camped n ear the lago ons and tra pped the ee ls by placing hollow branches in the water. The eels sought sh elter in the branches and were easily captured. Barrallier re ports that very large eels were ca ught in pon ds near the Na ttai River, a nd also mentions that t he Aborigin es collected molluscs in lagoons near Menangle.’ p.62: ‘The leaves of a number of lo cal wattle species (for example, Acacia implexa and A. longifolia) were used by the Aborigines as fish poisons when they fished in billabongs.’


Turnbull, John. A voyage round the world in the years 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1804: in which the author visited the principal islands in the Pacific Ocean, and the English settlements of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, printed for Richard Phillips by T. Gillet, London, 1805.

Observational; Sydney area

p.65: ‘Their principal subsistence is drawn from the sea and rivers … Their substitute of bread is a species of root, something resembling the fern, it is roasted and pounded between two stones, and being thus mi xed with fish, and constitutes the chief part of their food … They have oysters of an extraord inary size, three of the m being sufficient for any ordinary man.’ p.66: ‘There are some of the natives, indeed, who have reaped some benefit from our settlement amongst them, havi ng been in duced by the manifest superiority of these European article s, to adopt our fishin g hooks, a nd other ta ckle for th is purpose.’ p.66: ‘There are some rare instances of the ir settling to a ny of our employment. Indeed, now and then, when the humour takes t hem, they will occa sionally assist i n hauling the fishing seine or pulling the boats up and down the harbour.’ pp.84–5: ‘Whilst the female child is in its infancy , they deprive it of the two first joint s of the little f inger of the right hand; the operation being eff ected by ob structing the circulation by means of a tight ligatu re; the dismembered pa rt is thrown into the sea, that the child may be hereafter fortunate in fishing.’


W

Walker, Della and Tina Coutts. Me and you: the life story of Della Walker as told to Tina Coutts, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1989.

Autobiography; Beaches/north coast rivers

Della, a Ya egl Elder, grew up firstly on the Clarence River at Ulgundahi Island (Maclean) and then at t he coast at Yamba, NSW north coa st. She then went to live inland at T abulam in her early married life. I n later life she returne d to live at Maclean. p.21: [Living at Yamba] ‘When I went to school we used to buy a loaf o f bread in the afternoon and go down to the rocks and have a feed of oysters with the dry bread, just the oysters from the rocks. We didn’t go without a feed.’ p.22: [Describing how the Casino Aboriginal people came down each Christmas, and she’d long to see her ‘mate’ Pat] ‘We’d go to the beach gathering pippies and oysters. We thought tha t it was lovely … I alwa ys think of t he times we used to go playing and hunting. They were good times, us girls had fun.’ p.47: [ John Laurie describing things they did when Della lived at Tabulam] ‘T hey were good old days when we used to work on dairy farms. We’d go f ishing or go out bush walkin g, out to pick lemons and things like that. Tucker was cheap in those days.’ p.48: [Della describing adult life in Tabulam with young kids – often on the Mission at Turtle Point] ‘There were times when we just mixed together … Us mothers would be neck-a-neck with our c hildren playing. I had s ome lovel y friends, my mates up in Tabulam. We’d walk for miles and miles to go fishing, or picking wild fruit – the lemons and oranges an d peaches. We’d sit down on the side of the river bank an d have a feed of the wild fruits while we fished. Dear, we e njoyed ourselves. Might catch about two or thre e catfish. T hen we’d come home, clean them up and coo k them for the kiddie s’ tea. The men, when they went huntin g, used to shoot enoug h kangaroo to go around every home in the mission. We would share with one another the food that was caught in the bush.’

Wells, Kathryn (ed.). Crossing the strait: Tasmania to the south coast, Continental Shift Association, Braddon ACT, 2003.

Photographs; Coastal

This is the catalogue of an exhibition of the sa me name held at the W ollongong City Gallery in 1 999. The art works included installations, craft s such as weaving an d basketry, using materials from the sea such as kelp and shells, and photographs. The intent o f the exhibit ion and catalogue was to demonst rate the on going cu ltural connections across the strait between Tasma nia and the Victorian and southern NSW coastlines through to La Perouse. The works were predominantly by women.


The photographs/descriptions of most relevance to this project are: pp.19–21: ‘A billy and buckets to collect shells’ La Perouse

‘A bull kelp carrier glows a translucent red’ Wreck Bay ‘Wading in water’ – string necklaces/ traditional shell work Modern art weaving – open mesh fish trap 1997.

White, J Peter and James O’Connell. A prehistory of Australia, New Guinea and Sahul, Academic Press, Sydney, 1982.

Archaeological: South coast beaches and ocean

This material relates to the archaeological evidence on the south coast of wome n’s fishing practices, especially relating to shell fish hooks. In this section of their book on Australia, the authors emphasize how specific groups’ subsistence patterns and food sources were to the immediate reg ion – so that groups living only a fe w kilometres inland from a coastal group may have very different season al patterns sourcing quite different foods. p.133: ‘Another aspect of resource variability is the rapidity with which local situations may chang e. Such fact ors as storms, estuary silt ing, rock platform erosion, rainf all variation and pond dryi ng all affect plants and animals. For example, it is known that the quantity of many species of shellfish on a coast can vary enormously from year to year and Meehan [for the NT] has shown that this can resu lt in an almost complete change in t he range of shellfish ga thered by one group of people from one year to the next.’ p.147: ‘Bowdler [for t he NSW sout h coast] ar gues that t he changes in fish and shellfish types can be primarily accounted for in terms of t echnological changes. She relates the changes in fish types to the use of fish-hooks, and artefacts dated by her to within the last millenn ium. Following observations made b y the first w hite settlers, she suggests that women were the sole user s of fish-ho oks, and th at once the y started fishing this decreased their potential to gather the most economical shellfish (in terms of meat-to-shell ratio). The shellfish, which were more common in the Lower Midden [Bass Point], live lower in the littoral zone and the time available for their collection is much more restricted by tidal movements than is the case with mussels.

This ingenious proposition is clearly testable in several ways. For example, in similar open, sea-shore sites similar changes should be observed whe n fish-hooks are found. It should also be demon strable that, in terms of food return per hour of labour, fish were more economical to gather than shellfish, otherwise, why was th e change made? One of Sydney’s First Fleeters, L ieutenant Collins, said that part of all of women’s catches was given to the men, which raise s the whole question, not pursued by Bowdler, of possible changes in male-female relationships.’

There is clear evidence that women had been fishers in the ocean and off the rocks and beaches. It also suggests that some change in gender roles was perhaps apparent at the time of first European settlement.


Wilkinson, John. NSW fishing industry: changes and challenges in the twenty-first century, NSW Parliamentary Library Briefing Paper No 11/04, September 2004.

Government policy; Beaches and oceans

p.47: ‘Indig enous inha bitants of Australia have, for g enerations, assumed an uninhibited right “to gather” fish. NSW Fisheries, in a draft Indigenous fisheries strategy, has acknowledged that “Fishing has been an integral part of the cultural and economic life of coa stal and inla nd Aboriginal communities since th ey have been in this land.”’ p.47: ‘“Whe n the Commonwealth took over administratio n of Jervis Bay, in 1922, there were 25 Aboriginal people li ving in a fishing villag e at Wreck Bay … [T he community conducted] net fishing from small boats for m ullet, blackf ish, jewfish , kingfish, whiting and bream. 200 to 300 cases of fish could be caught at a single shot [of the net] … Fish were carted to the railway at Bombade rry for trans port to the markets … In the 1940 s and 1950 s there were seven to eight crews of Aborigin al fishermen operating at Wreck Bay.” Between the 1960s a nd the 199 0s, however, many Indigenous fishin g people consider t hat t hey have been pressur ed to vacat e areas of fishing that they have previously viewed as their own.’ p.50: ‘In 20 04, the “thr ust of NSW Fisheries” own input, into the Indigenous fishing strategy, is to argue that Indigenous fishing p eople ought to be encouraged from coastal fish ing into aq uaculture … While NS W Fisherie s appears to intend th at Indigenous fishers sho uld move into aquaculture, Aboriginal people themselves perceive this as taking them further away from their own culture.’ Wilkinson’s report (2004) should b e read in conjunction with the NSW Fisheries Indigenous Fishing Strategy (2002) and Hawkins (2003). T ogether they provide th e central published reporting on NSW Indigenous fishing issues in relation to traditional fishing right s, government policy and policing. Wilkinson and the oth er reports into government legislat ion, utilise the i nclusive ter minology of ‘Aboriginal communities’ and ‘Aboriginal fishers’. However, they are referring almost exclusively to Aboriginal men. The reports raise issues affecting coastal Aboriginal communities (especially on the NSW south coast), and restrictions on men’s fishing practices.

Winterbotham, LP. ‘The Gaiarbau story: some native customs and beliefs of the Jinibara tribe as well as those of some of their neighbours in south-east Queensland,’ 1959, in Queensland Ethnohistory Transcripts, vol. 1, no 1, date unknown, Langevad G. (ed.) [Tweed Heads Historical Society].

Ethnographic; Southern Queensland inland rivers

The context for Winterbotham’s ethnographic in formation is not known. On pp.50–2 he provides detailed information ab out river an d estuarine fishing pract ices. He only refers to me n in practice s that wome n were certainly involve d in in other areas and hence can be presumed to have b een active in here (line fishing, poisoning, net fishing, turtle fishing).


Wreck Bay Community and Renwick, Cath. Geebungs and snake whistles: Koori people and plants of Wreck Bay, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2000.

Cultural heritage: South coast beaches

The stories are predominantly of Aboriginal men fishing, especially with regard to commercial fishing (see pp.6–11). They include stories of th e types of fi sh and when they ran, making nets, crewing, early age that the men s tarted fishin g with their fathers, stories of a hard living. Some stories of women’s collecting are also included. p.13. Elaine Sturgeon: ‘There used to be pippis on the bea ch. We’d cook them up, roast them on the fire and share them with the elderly people. We only ever took the big ones – oysters and conch – for everyone to share.’ Vida Brown: ‘People we re wary, though, of eating too much of a good thing. Baby conchs make you have bad dreams.’ Elaine: ‘“Pennywinkles” are good for your system. They would flush you out.’


Y

Yarrawarra Place Stories, Red Rock: camping and exchange, Book four, University of New England printery, Armidale, 2000.

Cultural heritage: North coast beaches, estuaries and rivers

This book is one in a series developed in p artnership b etween the Gumbaingirr (Garby) Eld ers asso ciated with th e Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation at Corind i Beach, NSW north coast, and academics from the Uni versity of New England. The stories refer to the coastal community of Corindi Beach where people h ave utilized the beach, coastal la ke and creeks as a key p art of their subsiste nce and ongoing cultural attachment to the land.

Below I have noted all t he sections in the book which refer either to women telling fishing stories or to women fishing. Each story has come from oral interviewing rather than being stories written by the women themselves, and therefore each story has been edited and selected by someone else. While Marie Edwards talks about her Granny being an avid fisher and her own memories of worming, like other texts about coastal pla ces it is a dult men rather than adult wome n who are more ofte n remembered as the fishers.

In a 1997 interview, Marie Edwards and Vi Wilson remember learning t o worm with their father and grandfather at Red Rock with the influx of non-Aboriginal visitors over summer who were ke en to fish. This is possibly around t he 1930s and the interview is recorded on 1/9/97. p.25: ‘Marie : We went down to Red Rock for holidays at Christmas time when the people came. Like, my father’d say we’ll go down cos we’ll make a bit o f money with the worms. We used to walk right u p to Station Creek! Big bloody tins like that, an d the milk tin we used to only get a shilling off , that was a lot of money i n them days though. Well they used to always come up th e camp and say “ha ve you got an y worms Clarrie?” or “anybody got any worms?” and so on. Vi: We used to follow grandfather when he used to go wormin’. The fa mily learnt t o catch worms. Marie: But we used to stick bur leigh down. See, you’ave a whole fish or any fish ’eads an’ that. Then you just go like that and they’d all come up, and then we used to stick it down then and you used to just go round getting em. Something with a bit of a smell on it, you’d swish it around like that. Vi. The jewfish gut was the best. The oil out of the jewfish gut use to sort of go on top of the sand, used to bring them up. Marie: No, you get a bit of pipi. Pipi’s the best. They sort of stick t heir head out, and spit water first, back you go with th e pipi and then you got ta put your hand down there and when you feel him come up, you just pull ’im out quick, otherwise it’s be if you ain’t ge tting ’im fir st, you won’t get ’im out, no way. Five o’clo ck in the morning we’d be up the beach. All the people that would come down camping soon as they seen you come off the beach, they’d race over there waitin’ for you. They used to have fresh worms all the time.’


As noted in the reference to Scott Cane’s 1988 interviews (above) with Marie an d someone called ‘Val’, in being reint erviewed in 1997 there is much more emphasis on their own stories o f worming. But consisten t with their earlier stories, and oth er stories, it is the men folk who are most often referred to as having taken the children with them on their fishing trips. p.26: Doreen Richards remembers 16/12/97: ‘I can remember going fishing with Dad and Clarrie [Skinner] when I was lit tle, I suppose four or five and when we rowed the boat down t o the mouth we come across that gluggy sand, Clarrie would put me on his back because I was too small to go through that “quicksand”. I would be going to sleep up the beach and I know Cl arrie and Dad’d be worming and I’d be asleep on Clarrie’s back, I’d be clutching. I loved Clarrie.’

…………………………………………………………..


Index A abalone 23–5, 33–5, 36, 37, 50, 59 Aborigines Protection Board 15, 48 Angledool 28 Angourie 18, 50–1 Arrawarra headland 18 Awabakal 86 B Bagundi 1 bait 13, 16, 28, 31, 32, 33, 36, 42, 57, 69, 71, 72, 73 bait, selling 19, 31, 35, 66, 69, 92 Ballina 1, 73 Barkindji 75 Barwon River 26–7, 40, 42 Batemans Bay 7, 37 Bega 8 Bellingen 59 Bermagui 37 Biripi 15–17 boats see fishing equipment Bourke 30–1 Brewarrina 1, 18, 26–7, 28, 30–1 40, 51, 61, 71, 76 Broughton Island 18 Brungle 35-6 Brunswick River 54 Bundjalung 6, 9-10, 20, 44, 48 50, 73, 82 bunyip 35, 73–4 C Camden Park 27 camping 1, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27 31, 39, 43, 46, 51 57, 66, 78, 81, 92 canoes see fishing equipment Casino 5, 57, 88 Clarence River 88 Clarence Valley 50, 51 cobra worms see worms cockles 13, 49, 59, 81, 83, 86 Collarenebri 28–9, 42–3 commercial fishing 8, 10, 15–16, 20 21, 23, 24, 34, 36, 37 48, 49, 55, 58–9, 80, 91 communal fishing 1, 2, 4, 12, 24–5 33, 63, 82 cooking methods 1, 12, 19, 29, 31 32, 33, 35, 43, 49, 51, 56 59–60, 66, 69, 71, 83, 86

Cooks River 3 Coolangatta Estate 7–8 Coraki 5–6, 57, 58 Corindi 19, 39, 66–7, 71–2, 81, 92 Cox’s River 2 crabs 10, 19, 20, 26, 32, 33, 47 49, 55, 59, 67, 68, 72, 80, 81 crayfish 8, 13, 19, 22, 29, 32 40, 71, 84 Creation stories see Dreaming cultural beliefs 6, 38, 46, 55, 61 63, 67, 72, 78, 90 Cumberland Plains 56 Cumeroogunga 80, 84 D Darling River 1, 2, 14, 18, 26, 28 30, 32, 42, 45, 46, 65, 71, 75, 77 Deniliquin 84 Dharawal 62 Dharug 53, 55 Dhungutti 65 dolphin see porpoise Dreaming 5, 27 drying fish 24, 33 E eating fish 35, 49, 66, 86, 91 Eden 7–8 Eora 54 Euahlayi 75 F Fingal Head 10, 20, 63 finger tip removal see Malgun fish, Aboriginal names for 20, 22, 32, 34, 35, 65, 80, 84 fish, species of

Australian salmon 18, 73 blackfish 27, 90 bream 3, 6, 14, 17, 18, 30 32, 47, 48, 51, 55 61, 62, 80, 81, 86, 90 callop 48, 77 carp 14, 28, 30, 41 catfish 1, 27, 28, 30, 41, 48 63, 65–6, 69, 77, 88 cod 1, 27, 30, 41, 48, 49, 55 58, 60, 61, 62, 71, 77 dory 60 eels 2, 13–14, 22, 36, 56

63, 65–6, 69, 80, 86


flathead 14, 17, 31–2, 47 55, 61, 62, 80 flounder 14, 47 groper 34, 35, 55, 61, 62, 86 jewfish 19, 47, 60, 67, 87, 90, 92 kingfish 90 leatherjacket 32, 35, 55, 60 61, 62 mackerel 60 mullet 3, 10, 11, 13–14, 17, 18 24, 27, 31, 33, 35, 47 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63 65, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, 90 Murray cod 1, 27, 48, 77 parrot fish 72 perch 1, 14, 22, 27, 65, 66 rock-cod 55, 60, 61, 62 snapper 14, 32, 55 60, 61, 62, 80, 86 shark 25, 49, 57, 60 78, 79–80, 83 silver perch 77 stingray 49, 60, 64, 80 swallow tail 47 tailor 12, 33, 47 torpedo fish 80 trout 22 whiting 14, 32–3, 47 51, 60, 72, 90 yellow-belly 28, 29 30, 40, 41, 58

fish traps see fishing methods fishing, access to 3, 23, 27, 29, 32 33, 37, 40–1, 46, 65 66–7, 69, 81, 86 fishing equipment

boats 3, 7, 8, 15, 21, 25, 34, 37 38, 46, 47, 48, 53, 59 63, 68, 72, 83, 87, 90, 93 canoes 1, 2–3, 4, 7, 9, 12–13 54, 55, 56, 79, 81, 83–4, 85–6 dilly bags 12, 26-7, 38, 60 hooks 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12 13, 23, 28, 29, 30, 32, 38 39, 42, 43, 45, 49, 54, 55 56, 58, 60, 73, 77, 79, 82 83, 85, 89 lines 2–3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 13, 16, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29 30, 32, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43 45, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 59 60, 63, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85 86, 90

nets 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11 12, 13, 15–17, 19, 22, 24 26, 28, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39 43, 48, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62 63, 64, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75 76, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 90–1 sinkers 28, 29, 30, 49, 81, 85 spears 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 7–8, 9, 10 11, 12, 13, 18, 23, 26, 28 38, 39, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 72 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81 82, 83, 85, 86

fishing, love of 16, 57 fishing knowledge 6, 8, 16, 22, 34 44, 47, 70, 72 fishing methods

calling porpoises to herd fish 5, 12, 14, 17, 50 driving fish 12, 13, 26, 54, 63, 71 fish traps 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10 11–12, 18, 26, 31 32, 33, 34, 39, 50, 55 56, 60, 61, 62, 65, 71 76, 77, 85, 86, 89 poisons 4, 11, 19, 33, 76, 77, 86 using hands/feet 1, 22, 28, 32 34, 43, 50, 59

Forster 15–17 G Georges River 47 Greenwell Point 8 Gumbaingirr 39, 48, 50, 56, 66–7 68–9, 71–2, 81, 92 Gundagai 35 Gundungurra 62 Gwydir River 42 H harvesting / collecting 1, 2–3, 4 10–11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23 24, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 46 Hastings River 9 Hawkesbury River 2, 53, 80 Hill 60 34–5 hooks see fishing equipment Hunter Region 4, 12–13 I Illawarra 33–5 Ingelba 21–2 interstate

Arnhem Land (NT) 11, 64 Daly River (NT) 11, 76


Cape York (Qld) 11 Tasmania 11 Darwin (NT) 11 Moreton Bay (Qld) 11, 72 Dunk Island (Qld) 12 Coorong (SA) 40 south-east Queensland 90

J Jamberoo 8 Jerrinja 20 Jervis Bay 20, 85, 90 L La Perouse 8, 10–11, 37 38, 58–60, 88–9 Lake Illawarra 7 Lightning Ridge 29 lobster 16, 19, 34-5, 36, 55, 60, 79, 85 lookouts 34, 59, 68 M MacDonald River 21–2 Macintyre River 42 Macquarie River 40–1 Macleay River 9, 18–19, 65 Malgun 52, 72–3, 78, 85, 86, 87 Manning River 16 memories of water places 10, 17, 21 22, 30, 40, 43, 50, 51 54, 58, 61, 66, 92 Menindee 14, 32 middens 13, 35, 63–4, 80, 86, 89 Middle Harbour 3 Minjangbal 68 Moruya 24, 37 Murray cod see fish Murray River14, 40, 48, 65, 74, 80, 84 Murrumbidgee 32, 84 mutton fish see abalone N Nambucca 18, 39, 68–9 Namoi River 42, 70 Nepean River 27, 56 nets see fishing equipment Nimula 69–70 nippers 36 north coast of NSW 1, 4, 5, 8, 9–10 12–13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 27, 31 39, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 57, 63 65, 66, 68, 71, 73, 75, 77, 78 81, 82, 88, 92 north-western NSW 45, 71 Nowra 8, 36

NSW Fisheries 7, 49, 68, 90 O octopus 72 oysters 10, 13, 19, 20, 24, 31, 33 34–5, 36, 37, 47, 49, 59, 60 69, 73, 79, 80, 87, 88, 91 P Paroo River 46 Parramatta River 53 periwinkles 33–5, 51 pipis 10, 13, 20, 22, 31–2, 33–5 36, 47, 51–2, 59, 69, 88, 91, 92 Point Plomer 18, 19 policy, government 21, 49, 65, 68, 90 pollution 19, 23, 27, 46, 66, 67 porpoise 5, 12, 14, 17, 57, 80 Port Jackson 3–4, 83, 85–6, 87 Port Kembla 34, 37 Port Stephens 12–13, 18, 31 78, 81, 86 prawns 8, 17, 19, 32–3, 36 53, 67, 71 Purfleet 15–16, 27 R Red Rock 19, 66, 81, 92 Richmond River 1, 5–6, 15, 44, 50 54, 57, 58, 82 Roseby Park 21, 36 S Sackville 53 Saltwater 15–16, 27 seasonal availability of food 8, 89 seasonal markers 6, 68 seasonal work 10, 24, 36, 65 sharing, food 23, 29, 31–3, 34–5 59, 72, 88, 91 shellfish 1, 2–3, 4, 7, 10, 11–12 13, 16, 19, 23–4, 33–5, 49 56, 59, 60, 63–4, 73, 81, 82, 89 shell fish hooks 2, 4, 8, 11, 12, 23 60, 85, 89 shellwork 11, 38, 59, 73 shrimp see prawns smoking fish 31, 33, 79 social activity 7, 51, 65 social aspect of fishing 7, 51 south coast of NSW 2, 7–8, 10, 11 15, 20–1, 23–4, 36 37, 38, 49–50, 59 86, 88–9, 90, 91 spears see fishing equipment


spirits, talking to 6, 11 Stuart Island 68, 69 subsistence 83, 87, 89, 92 Stony Creek 69–70 supplement income/rations 10, 16 19, 20, 24, 33, 36, 46, 65 Sydney region 2–3, 7-8, 10, 11, 12 24, 27, 33–4, 37, 47, 52 54, 55, 56, 58–60, 61, 64 72, 81, 83, 85–6, 87, 89 T taboos see cultural beliefs Tabulam 88 Taree 15 teaching children 16, 23, 30, 32, 34 36, 38, 39, 45–6, 57, 72, 75 Tingha 70 Toomelah 42–4 tortoise 65, 70 tours, fishing 16 trade 2, 3, 8, 24, 68 Tumblegum 10 Tumut 35–6 Tumut River 35, 78 Tuross River 24 turtles 6, 40, 46, 69, 70, 80, 90 turtle eggs 22, 70 Tweed 9–10, 20, 48, 54, 63, 68, 82 Twofold Bay 24 U Ukerebagh Island 20, 48

Ulladulla 8, 37 Ulgundahi Island 5, 88 W Wagga Wagga 28, 78 Walcha 22 Walgett 27, 28–9, 38, 54 walkun see abalone Wallaga Lake 24, 36 Wallis Lake 16 Warrego River 31 water dog 29

bunyip 35–6, 73–4 gu-ru-ngaty 62 mondagatta 30

well being 39 Wellington 15, 40, 48 whales 14, 61–2, 86 Wilcannia 14, 32 Wiradjuri 1, 40 Wollongong 33, 88 Wongaibon 62 Worimi 15–17, 31–3, 78, 81 worms 16, 32, 47, 49, 52, 66, 69, 92 Wreck Bay 7, 11, 15, 21, 38, 89, 90, 91 Y yabbies 1, 28, 29, 31, 40, 80 Yaegl 50, 51–2, 66, 68 Yamba 5, 17, 18, 47, 50, 51, 57, 58 Yantabulla 20 Yuin 23–5, 37, 38

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Aboriginal Women’s Fishing in New South Wales

An Annotated Bibliography of Documentary Sources

aboriginal women’s fishing in new south wales aboriginal women’s fishing in nsw: annotated...

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