An ancient inland trade route connecting Australia’s northern coastline to the southern deserts runs through Aunty Lorraine McKeller’s country.
For thousands of years tribes met, traded and conducted ceremonies around the semi-permanent waterways of Mithaka country in south-western Queensland’s channel country. It was a place of commerce, production and cultural exchange – and on Saturday it was added to the national heritage list.
“If you’ve never been out there, it’s really hard to explain the feeling,” McKeller tells Guardian Australia. “I’ve been out there, and sitting on a rock, and you can hear the chatter (of the old people), the yabber going on and there’s nobody there, but you can hear it.”
The region, known as the Mithaka cultural landscape, spans 33,000 sq km and includes one of the oldest quarries in the world made by a non-agricultural society and the two oldest known intact houses in Australia, built by Mithaka people.
“When going to the quarries, you don’t touch, you don’t move stones or shift anything out of the roadway,” says McKeller.
“If you don’t know that type of country out there, it’s easy to damage it without realising.”
Known as Morney Plains, the quarry covers 4.2 sq km, including 55 hectares of quarried ground.
Recent archaeological dating of the site suggests it was built between 3,000 and 610 years ago and had been continuously used until colonisation. It contains up to 15,000 individual pits that likely produced more than 1.5m grindstones over the life of its operation.
Michael Westaway, professor of social sciences at the University of Queensland, has been working alongside the Mithaka people since 2015 and says researchers have “barely scratched the surface” of what is on Mithaka country.
“We’ve found remarkable archaeological records, and these include the largest quarry sites – mega quarries where they are extracting these grinding stone slabs to process grain to make bread – and this is mining on an industrial scale,” he tells Guardian Australia.
“Some of these quarry sites are some of the largest hunter-gatherer quarries in the world – if we want to continue calling them hunter-gatherers, because these people are mining these massive quarry sites.
“There is evidence of Aboriginal dams out here, so they’re damming large areas with water. We call this ‘niche construction’, where they’re modifying the ecological niche. So they’re modifying the environment so it provides quite an economical benefit for themselves.”
Westaway says archaeological evidence shows there were also townships along the waterways of Mithaka country in more recent years, with gunyahs (Aboriginal houses) dated to between 1770 and 1780. The gunyahs had been preserved through continued care by Mithaka people, their remote location and the dryness of the landscape.
He says small to large populations once lived in the area, with “evidence of fish traps and possible fish storage pens”.
Traditional owner and general manager of the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, Josh Gorringe, describes his country as “harsh but beautiful”, and says his and other tribes using the trade route had “covered the continent”.
“The trade route went from the Gulf of Carpentaria, right down to the northern Flinders Ranges, and because we’ve got all these major river systems through our country, it was the easiest way to get down to that area,” he says.
“It would have been a couple of different tribes in the area that worked [the quarry] like a mine … and then those tribes would have packed up the grindstones for trading, and then had another area that they would have traded them from.”
Mithaka country was also the backdrop for peace negotiations in 1889, when more than 500 Aboriginal people from across the channel country gathered with pastoralists to end decades of frontier wars and violence.
The Mithaka people won native title rights over the 33,752 sq km area in 2015. Gorringe says the years since have been a“significant” time for his people in protecting and maintaining their culture.
In addition to that native title area, Mithaka people are also cultural custodians to a further 22,000 sq km of land to the east.
The minister for the environment, Murray Watt, said the Mithaka cultural landscape was an “incredible piece of history” that would now be protected for generations to come. He added that traditional owners had been “extremely hands-on” in seeking the national heritage listing, including personally writing parts of the application.
“The Mithaka cultural landscape tells the story of some of Australia’s earliest manufacturing and trade,” Watt said.
“It provides fascinating insight into village life on an important trade route, and holds an ongoing, meaningful cultural connection to the Mithaka People.”
