06/10/2020
MAJOR MITCHELL SAW STOOKED HAY FOR MILES - PRE-INVASION
In the early 1800s Major Thomas Mitchell set out to survey NSW. He came back with stories of fields of grain which reached the horizon, hay-like bundles and earth turned up as if it had been ploughed by a hoe.
These were not the farms of Mitchell’s fellow colonisers, though.
These were Aboriginal practices. “Mitchell rode through nine miles of stooked grain. His fellow explorers said it looked like an English field of harvest.
"This is an enormous devotion of labour and ingenuity and couldn't be described as hunting and gathering in any way,” says researcher and writer Bruce Pascoe
"If we assume explorers and anthropologists like Sir Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt, Edward Eyre, Ernest Giles, Alfred Howitt, George Robinson, Augustus Gregory, John McKinlay, Peter Warburton and others were not committing porkies in their diaries, then let us look at the blot from their witness.
If you saw people excavating earth to build a dam, tamping clay and ant bed into the base to make it waterproof,
if you saw them plant seed saved from last year’s harvest and irrigate that planting from the dam or stream diversion or blocking off an entire stream to cause it to flood across the grain field,
if you saw that grain field harvested and stooked,
if you saw the green crop bundled behind brush fences and burnt so that dried grain fell into storage vessels,
if you saw the grain ground on large mills,
if you saw the excess stored in stone silos, skin bladders or mud and straw rendered vessels, if you saw people herding young waterfowl into a stockyard for fattening,
if you saw engineers constructing thousands of kilometres of water races, tunnelling through rock, gauging the hydrology to within millimetres,
if you saw permanent fishing weirs built so that the fences flattened with the incoming tide and could be erected on the outgoing to trap fish in storage ponds,
if you saw a stone house with vegetables growing on the turf roof, if the door of that house had a message telling neighbours where the occupants had gone that day,
if that house overlooked the landscape of weirs and tuber fields,
if the oven outside that house had been swept in readiness for that night’s meal,
if you saw that baskets inside the house were full of fruit or wrapped parcels of smoked fish and preserved plums,
if you saw those things, what would you call those people?
