History revisited - a short 40,000 year tour of the Macleay Valley

Growing up, did you build castles or forts on the beach to try to hold out the waves? The waves come in rushes, overtopping the walls. You hastily rebuild, waiting for the next wave to arrive. In the end, you have to go home, leaving your construction to be destroyed by the waves.

We remember the inexorable power of the waves from our childhood experiences or from playing on the beach with our own children. It’s not all that long ago since my own girls were young enough for me to play with them in this way, sometimes attracting other kids from the length and breadth of the beach. I still miss those times!

This is a history column, not a chance for personal recollections, attractive though that may be.

You are standing on Smoky Cape, looking at what will become South West Rocks. It is forty thousand years ago. The sea is 50 metres below its current level. You look across a coastal plain sloping down. You turn to your right. The coast is distant.

It is now twenty thousand years ago. The sea is 120 metres below its current level. From your perch on Smoky Cape you face out to sea. You cannot see the water. It’s much colder, perhaps 6-10 C degrees below current levels.

You think of popping down to the coast for a swim, then shrug, Perhaps not. You come from the cold Tablelands. There are glacial ice sheets at Guyra. You are used to the cold. Still, it’s just too cold. You shrug and pull your fur coat around you.

It is now seven thousand years ago. From around fifteen thousand years temperatures began to rise, the ice sheets began to melt.

The rush of water was quite sudden. On the vast plains and wetlands that stretched between the current Australian continent and New Guinea, up to a metre of land was lost to the seas each year. Entire ancestral lands were lost within a generation. The myth of the great flood was born.

Smokey Cape has become an island. Looking inland, you can see sea stretching to modern Kempsey. But further changes are afoot.

Around six thousand years, the seas began to stabilise. As they did, sand barriers began to extend from coastal islands such as Smoky Cape. The silt deposited by the Macleay River was no longer washed away, but began to accumulate. A new estuarine environment was being formed.

Around five thousand years looking north east of Smoky Cape, you would have seen an Aboriginal camp begin on the foreshores near what would become Clybucca Creek.

Drawn by the rich shell fish resources, the camp would last for over two thousand years, but was then abandoned. The silting of the Macleay estuary meant that the previous marine food resources would no longer support a camp at that point.

The Macleay Valley as we know it today had emerged.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 15 April 2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.

History revisited - the Aborigines: comparing work place efficiency

GATHERING FOOD:  the Aborigines used tools such as fishnets to catch more food quickly and thus to spend more time on personal, ceremonial and spiritual life.

In my last column on Aboriginal New England, I suggested that the Aborigines did not have to work as hard as the later Europeans to feed and house themselves. They had more time available for other things, for companionship and ceremony.

Farming communities first emerged during the Neolithic period. In those communities, the work routine was often dawn to dusk just to feed families and gain a small surplus for later use.

In England during the first decades from 1788, working hours for many could exceed twelve hours per day. It is not surprising that one of the major industrial fights of the nineteenth century was the fight first for a ten hour and then eight hour day.

This was replicated in Australia. Down in the coal mines of the lower Hunter, Australia’s first large scale industrial activity, the miners were early concerned with what was called bank to bank, the time taken from entering to leaving the mines.

By contrast, an Aboriginal group could generally feed itself with six hours work, leaving eighteen others for other things including sleep.

The Aborigines strike me as pretty efficient. There was time spent just lazing around, something we might envy in today’s time poor world, but they also spent time making future life easier for them. Today we would probably refer to this in terms of investment and productivity gains.

Take gunyahs or housing. Often this might not be required. In other cases, the gunyah might be no more than a few sheets of bark leaning on a pole fastened a few feet up from the ground with a fire in front. However, in still other cases, far more substantial dwellings were constructed forming small villages.

On the Clarence, for example, Captain Perry in 1839 described two villages on the banks of the river with canoes moored in a line in front of the village with carefully made fishing nets, baskets, water vessels and cooking utensils on display.

I said that the Aborigines were efficient. These more substantial semi-permanent dwellings were not permanently occupied, but were built at points where food resources allowed regular group occupation at certain periods. It was therefore worth investing time to create structures for later re-use.

Time was also invested in making future food collection easier. These included the creation of standing nets in the bush to aid hunting and, more permanently, the creation of stone fish traps. The latter must have involved considerable effort, but once created gave long term gains.

Time was invested, too, in constructions connected with ceremonial and spiritual life. This included carved trees, bora rings and stone arrangements. Perhaps the most spectacular example of the last are the Serpentine standing stones, a site that must have taken considerable time to create and then maintain.

I hope that I have given you enough in these two columns to gain some feel for the complexity of traditional Aboriginal life. In later columns, I will look at the way traditional life varied across New England. 

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 8 April 2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.

History revisited - misconceptions of Aboriginal material possessions

In this column, I want to take you deep into New England’s past, well before the arrival of the Europeans. New England as such did not exist, of course. That was a later European construct.

There is still, I think, a belief that the Aboriginal peoples were an unchanging people living in an unchanging land. That holds even though we now know that the Aborigines modified the landscape to suit their needs, that Aboriginal life including the technology used changed many times over the millennia of Aboriginal occupation of this continent.

There is also a deeply held perception that the Aborigines were poor in material things but rich in imaginative and spiritual life. I am sure that the second is true, in part because the Aborigines did not have to work as hard as the later Europeans to feed and house themselves. They had more time available for other things, for companionship and ceremony.

The idea that the Aborigines were poor in material things dates back to the early days of European settlement. It’s partly a matter of contrast between the apparent simplicity of Aboriginal life and the clobber that Europeans accumulated when they could afford it. However, it’s also connected to misunderstandings of key aspects of traditional Aboriginal life.

Our views of the pattern of traditional Aboriginal life are deeply affected by our perceptions of nomadic and hunter gatherer life. One of Geoffrey Blainey’s best known books is called simply The Triumph of the Nomads. Blainey was in fact trying to challenge previously held perceptions of Aboriginal life and history, but the title itself arguably acts to conceal.

Aboriginal groups moved on foot across defined territories as food and to a degree fashion dictated. The kit they carried with them was dictated by that life style. This is the hunter-gatherer life style. However, it’s not the end of the story.

Just as the modern Armidale person may have a second house on the coast with its own kit, the Aborigines had multiple homes, regular camping places. The archaeological remains found at those sites are not just the detritus of life, but also things deliberately left behind for use on future visits. You don’t need to carry things if they are already waiting for you.

The landscape the Aborigines moved through was less overgrown, more open than it is now because of regular and targeted burning. However, in the thick bush of the North Coast and Southern Queensland the Aborigines created a network of paths to make travel and communications easier.

Some of these were formed through regular use, but they also involved conscious action to create and maintain. Think of them as roads.

In the drier parts of the North with limited water in dry periods, the Aborigines created wells and water storage facilities to support travel in dry times. With restricted tools, there creation took considerable time and conscious effort. Think of them as service stations!

I will continue this story in my next column. 

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 1 April  2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.

History revisited - memories of artists' camps

As part of their on-going fund raising, the New England Regional Art Museum has been running an “Adopt and Artwork” program. In simple terms, you adopt an artwork, and pay for the conservation costs.

It’s not cheap, although you can donate smaller amounts. Conservation work is expensive, but its part of the price we pay to maintain those things that we love about our city.

That was a view a friend took. He gulped, and then adopted Arthur Streeton's "Sydney from the Artist's Camp", a classic Australian painting.

I am obviously a history nut. I wouldn’t be sitting here year after year writing this column, trying to interest you in the history of Armidale and the North, if I were not. However, the history of the things that you see around you in Armidale, the things that we take for granted, can lead you into worlds that you might not expect, worlds with their own excitement totally disconnected with the routines of our daily life.

Arthur Streeton returned to Sydney on 19 April 1920. Art collector Howard Hinton met him on arrival, taking him to lunch at the Café Francis. On 22 April, Hinton visited Streeton in his rooms at Dalley Street which he was sharing with painter Benjamin Edwin Minns (1863-1937).

Minns is a Northerner. Born at Dungog, he grew up in Inverell where he had his first lessons in painting and drawing.

Hinton recorded his visit to see Streeton in his notes: “bought one of his panels showing Cremorne Point and the city from Sirius Cove – an easterly breeze is blowing over the blue water – fine strength – full charm in his blue water contrasted with the gold of distant shores and bronze gum trees.”

This is, I think, the painting Paul adopted, an Australian classic.

The painting is significant for another reason as well. Sirius Cove is the location of one of those artists’ camps that dotted the shores around the Sydney suburb now called Mosman.

Howard Hinton was born in England in 1867. It seems almost certain that when or soon after he arrived in Sydney in 1892, Hinton went to live with artist friends in a camp on the edge of Balmoral Beach.

Today as Sydney café society gathers at Balmoral for their morning breakfast overlooking the water, it is hard to imagine what it looked like then, a beach camp in bush near the water’s edge.

Mind you, camp is a relative concept. C B Newling, a friend of Hinton’s and the first principal of the Armidale Teachers’ College, described the camp in this way.

Several strong tents with wooden floors provided sleeping accommodation. A central marquee with a piano, table etc provided a dining and living room. Nearby were a kitchen and shower room, while canvas deck chairs dotted the grounds. An ex-navy rating acted as cook, caretaker, housekeeper and gardener.

That’s what I call camping!

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 25 March 2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.