By analysing the sediment – from the traces of pollen, and layers of charcoal and organic matter, to the DNA of lost creatures and micro-organisms – with the local Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung elders and community, Fletcher will add to the collective knowledge of this secluded spot. The billabong off Bulleen Road, now bordered by sporting fields, golf courses and roads, was part of a vast system flowing out from the Birrarung – the Yarra river. This coring exercise is phase one of a research program using scientific and Indigenous knowledge to document remnant billabongs across Melbourne.
It’s hard to conjure what has been lost. “It’s like a day spa for an eel,” Wandin jokes. The Melbourne area was once so lush with waterways and bushland that palaeontologist and conservationist Tim Flannery likened it to a “temperate Kakadu”.
Walk starts and finishes at Bulleen Park, 175 Bulleen Road in Bulleen. “We call it caring for country today, but it’s caring for our mother … she nurtured us, she nurtured our ancestors and she’ll continue to nurture us if we look after her in the way that she’s been looked after for tens of thousands of years.”, Available for everyone, funded by readers.
Since we do love bird-watching and being outdoors in beautiful settings like this we made the trek to the billabong and enjoyed … “I look at a landscape and try and imagine what it was … and that’s going to give me information,” he says. All rights reserved. Researchers are drilling into remnant billabongs across the city to document the landscape as it was under Aboriginal management, Wed 25 Dec 2019 14.00 EST
The top section – containing the most recent sediment – looks more like tar than earth. They could then be fished with a spear. “It looks beautiful, it looks nice and green – but it’s not its natural landscape,” Wandin says.
The walk is nearly 4.5km and takes around 1.5 hours to complete. They point to one enormous red gum which shows the changes that have played out. The grasses are now pasture grasses rather than native ones, which has an impact on insect health.
Led by Wiradjuri man Dr Michael Fletcher, a renowned geographer from the University of Melbourne, the team constructs a pontoon, which they then float to the centre of the billabong. Where Crown Casino sits today “was a giant swamp”, Fletcher says.
“We’re trying to really reimagine Melbourne, as it was prior to British invasion and under Aboriginal management,” Fletcher says. By midday, he has collected the first of four cores, after rowing out to the pontoon with his crew and using a two-metre-long metal stick to push a clear plastic tube deep into the earth beneath the metre-deep water. The fragile tranquility is broken as the scientists fire up an electric drill and get to work. “When we were kicked out, we weren’t allowed to go back down into the city,” Wandin says.
There’s a distinct change in colour about a third of the way down, from deep, jet black to a lighter, healthier brown. But this core already tells the story of the billabong’s post-colonial decline. A team of geographers gather on the shores of the brown and shallow Bolin Bolin billabong, a stone’s throw from modern Melbourne but a world away, where the dull roar of traffic fades behind the warbling of magpies and the rustle of the breeze through the trees. A full laboratory analysis will take about six months and involve high-tech geothermal scanning. Fletcher has studied many similar sites across Australia, and observes that the removal of Aboriginal land management after colonisation led to ecosystems becoming less diverse and less healthy. The Bolin Bolin (Bulleen) BIllabongs were an important territory for the Manna Gum people for approximately 5,000 years. If the seeds of the old vegetation can be sourced, significant replanting could be undertaken by the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Narrap rangers, an Indigenous land management team.
Yarra “improvement” works in the late 1800s, at the height of the gold-rush expansion of “marvellous Melbourne”, severed the Bolin Bolin billabong and others like it from the river. “From an anthropological perspective, it was not a natural landscape but a cultural landscape that was shaped over millennia by Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung beliefs, traditions and land management,” she says.
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