In 2017, the Indigenous elder George Gorringe led a small research expedition in the Channel Country of south-west Queensland.
The expedition, on the traditional land of the Mithaka people, visited several sites including sandstone quarries, stone arrangements, and the remains of gunyahs – dwellings made from excavated structures covered with branches.
The region is archaeologically significant: the landscape has been dramatically altered by a huge network of quarries, which Mithaka people once used to make seed-grinding implements.
“George Gorringe showed me some really monumental sites,” recalls Dr Michael Westaway of the University of Queensland. “The scale of them is just mind-blowing.”
A team involving traditional owners and researchers eventually identified 179 quarry sites, spread over 33,800 sq km – an area about half the size of Tasmania. Some quarry pits are estimated to be more than 2,000 years old.
In December, Westaway and collaborators received grant funding to investigate plant domestication and possible village sites on Mithaka land. The research seeks to determine how best to “define traditional Aboriginal food production and settlement systems”.
The project, Westaway says, will test the Dark Emu hypothesis: the idea, propounded by Bruce Pascoe in his bestselling book, that Indigenous people in pre-colonial Australia were not hunter-gatherers, but practised agriculture.
Pascoe’s book has been praised for challenging assumptions about Indigenous Australia, but also criticised by academics for distorting evidence and implying that agricultural societies are more advanced than hunter-gatherers.
The definition of agriculture is closely linked to domestication, Westaway says. There are historical accounts of flood-driven irrigation systems and plant cultivation on Mithaka land, and the team plans to analyse pollen samples for genetic evidence of plant domestication or translocation.
“If people are manipulating plants and the environments they live in, it is likely that they’ll have some kind of impact on the evolutionary trajectory of those plants,” Westaway says. “It’s a really important step towards testing these ideas that Bruce [Pascoe] was putting forward.”
But Westaway also believes binary labelling does not adequately reflect the diversity of Indigenous food production systems. “We need to move away, I think, from these terms – hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist – because it doesn’t capture that complexity,” he says.
‘Australia’s Silk Road’
The Channel Country is so named for its intertwined channels, which monsoonal rains transform from arid desert into lush greenery. A complex exchange system once operated up and down along these rivulets.
Mithaka land was once at the heart of a vast transcontinental exchange route that spanned from the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, down to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia – a system Westaway describes as “Australia’s Silk Road”.
“It connected large numbers of Aboriginal groups throughout that arid interior area on the eastern margins of the Simpson Desert,” he says. “You get people interacting all across the continent, exchanging ideas, trading objects and items and ceremonies and songs.”
Grindstones mined and produced on an industrial scale on Mithaka land were exchanged for ochre, wooden objects, stone axes, and pituri, a narcotic. “We don’t really know how far and wide they were being distributed, but they were an important element,” Westaway says.
Prof Rachel Popelka-Filcoff, an archaeologist at the University of Melbourne, who was not involved in the project, says the research adds “data to the fact that there was significant exchange in the archaeological record of these different materials”.
“[Indigenous] people may have had stories and traditions about [these exchange networks] and this is just additional evidence for these interactions.”
One of the sites comprises 25,000 individual quarry pits, says Shawnee Gorringe, a Mithaka traditional owner. She describes the archaeological research findings as “scientific validation of something that you already knew was pretty special.”
Artefacts from several key quarry sites are included in a new exhibition – Kirrenderri, Heart of the Channel Country – which opened last Friday at the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum.
The exhibition draws together research and ethnohistorical accounts documented in contemporaneous books written by Alice Duncan-Kemp, says Tracey Hough, a director of the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, who, along with Shawnee Gorringe, is an Indigenous co-curator of the exhibition.
The collaboration has been a means of “rediscovering our own past”, Hough says. “Through colonisation we lost a lot of information – a lot of our ceremonies, our language … As we dig deeper into our interior, we’re finding so many artefacts, we’re finding information.”
Craig Crawford, Queensland minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander partnerships, was astounded by the scale of the Mithaka quarries when he flew over the region. “The mining operations were extensive – you could even see ones where there had been exploratory digs,” he says.
“Anyone that wants to question the sophistication of the networks that First Australians had – I think this challenges it to its core.”
For Hough, the discovery of large-scale mining raises other questions: “That’s manpower – you’ve got to feed all those people [excavating the quarries]. So where is all your food coming from?”
She is excited by the Dark Emu research project. “They’re looking at different grains … and seeing if they have been altered by human interaction,” she says. “It’s a great thing for Australian history.”
