The Story of Your Place: South-West Australia

The First Australians

The oldest site of human occupation around Perth is in

the Upper Swan north-east of the city. It shows that there were Australians living here around 400 centuries ago.

At the time of European settlement, about 250 distinct languages were spoken in Australia. About the same number of languages are spoken

in Europe today. In other words, for

thousands of years the Australian continent has been home to many, many different cultures

and societies.

The people of south-western Australia spoke dialects of the language Nyoongar. Further north and east where the rainfall dropped off the Western desert people lived. These were people who were culturally different from the Nyoongar in many ways, for example practicing circumcision as part of male initiation ceremonies.

They sleep on dried sheets of paperbark or the leaves from balga (grass trees) in their mias, a word that means house, but can also mean the haunt of an animal. Their mias are small beehive shaped dwellings whose frame is made from the spears of balgas and thatched with the leaves of balgas or with paperbark.

If we travel back two hundred years in time we are more likely to bump into people on the Swan coastal plain than, for example, in the thick karri forests to the far south. These people don’t live in tribes, but in what is more accurately described as large extended families of up to fifty people (often around 20 or 30). Each group calls its home its ka-la, or hearth. Some people say that where they hang their hat they call their home, and these people would say that where they set their fire, they call their home.

South Perth 1840s

They walk naked in summer. The men have string belts around their waists from which hang throwing sticks, hammers and kyli, or boomerangs. Each has a totem animal. Some of these nomads have headbands with red tipped black cockatoo or emu tail feathers stuck in the side, rising regally above their faces. The men have long hair done up with string in a matted bundle, in what today we would call dreadlocks.

In winter they retreat to the area inland just below the Darling Ranges, away from the strong and chilly winds coming off the ocean. They hunt yonga, or kangaroos, at this time. They wear bukas, long cloaks made of around three female kangaroo furs sewn together. This area looks like a park with jarrah and marri trees here and there and

lots of grass. This is because of the habit of the locals of seasonally starting small fires. They light the fires in order to create carpets of lush new growth the next year which will be good

hunting pastures. They are fire-stick farmers.

Nearly all species of Banksia trees come from Australia. But 61 of the 78 species in

existence come from the south-west.

As the year progresses and summer approaches the people move westwards over their sandy home towards the coast. It is early summer (December) so thousands of tall candle-stick banksia (Banksia attenuata) flowers start to glow yellow in the sun. The people collect them and put them in paperbark-lined holes filled with fresh water. The flowers soak and then they sit around the hole and taste a sweet liquid. They call this drink mungitch. It is yellow season in banksia country.

As summer comes on fishing starts to become their main source of protein. At this time the rivers and estuaries such as the Swan are really alive with healthy shoals of big fish. The locals fish by herding fish into the sandy shallows and spearing them. Canoes and fishing hooks are not to be seen, but here and there weirs are used to trap fish. This fish trap above, a monument to thousands of years of human history, existed into recent decades near Albany.

More than you or I, the first Australians had kallip of the south-west.

Kallip is an old Nyoongar word meaning ‘a knowledge of localities; familiar acquaintance with a range of country…

also used to express property in land’.

It is a word that we might today translate as awareness of the nature of the local terrain, plants and animals in one’s area. While you and I can read printed text, we cannot read the sounds and shapes of our natural environment with the same enormous skill and insight as the first Western Australians.

Line drawing taken from The Colonial Eye, Barbara Chapman, Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1979. P.66. Photo of Nyoongar

fish trap taken from Brearley, Anne. Ernest Hodgkin’s Swanland: Estuaries and Coastal Lagoons of South-western Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press,

2005. All other photos copyright of Tom M. Wilson.