Ancient Aquaculture Sites in Budj Bim Cultural Landscape

Australia’s Southeast is home to some of the world’s most intriguing and historic aquacultural sites. 

Located on Gunditjmara Country within the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, ancient eel traps that were engineered by Indigenous Australians thousands of years ago have recently been gaining national attention. 

This Indigenous Protected Area has approximately 500 recorded stone structures, with close to 160 of those structures lying within the volcanic bedrock surrounding Lake Condah. These structures consist of stone houses, stone-walled fish races, stone-walled weirs and channels. 

While these eel traps have been surveyed for many years, the 2020 Australian bushfire catastrophe has led to the discovery of additional structures in the area.  

An attendee and friend of the Indigenous Mapping Workshop (IMW), Tyson Lovett-Murray, works at Gunditj Mirring and surveyed many of the ancient eel traps in the Budj Bim National Cultural Landscape. 

After the discovery of these eel traps made headlines, we reached out to Tyson to discuss some of the work that he has been doing around Lake Condah. 

Can you tell us about the work you have been doing at Gunditj Mirring?

In my previous role as a Project Officer at Gunditj Mirring, I observed the eel traps and the water levels at Lake Condah. I would also lead guided tours in the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, worked on national resource management projects and cultural flow projects across Gunditjmara Country. 

You shared your discovery of new stone structures in the article that we shared on Facebook. Would you mind talking us through that discovery in more detail?
The article that you shared discussed how the bushfires revealed ancient eel traps that were made by our mob 6600 years ago. These eel traps are scattered across the Budj Bim lava flow and its associated wetlands, an area that extends for about 30 kilometres. We predicted that the recent bushfires would clear large volumes of vegetation to reveal additional structures that we had not previously recorded.  

When I was working as a Project Officer at Gunditj Mirring, it was my responsibility to monitor the water levels along a two kilometre section of Lake Condah. These water levels were monitored in relation to the elevations of 80 recorded stone fish traps. We have up to 500 stone structures across the Budj Bim lava flow, where there are clusters of up to 27 stone houses on one stoney rise inside a 50 metre radius. There are also trap complexes that contain up to five eel holding ponds that are connected by five channels. These were cut into the bedrock to divert water into the holding ponds.

 In some cases the holding ponds were natural sinkholes that formed within the lava flow. As the surface of the lava cooled, the molten lava underneath would drain away and create an underground lava tunnel. Over time, the roof of the tunnel would cave in, creating these circular sink holes. Gunditjmara cut the channels into the ground to divert water into these sinkholes and these would be used as the eel holding ponds.

The stone house structures, known as ‘wuurns’, were C-shaped structures that were roughly 50 centimeters in height. These foundations held a wooden frame in place that was packed with mud and turf. The openings of the stone house sites usually faced toward the northeast. This positioning was deliberate as it ensured that bad weather from the southwest was blocked, while allowing the structures to face the morning sun. Some of the structures were also formed in the shape of a six, and this acted as a wind breaking wall. 

Archaeologist, Ian McNiven, dated these traps to be 6600 years old which means the area is now considered the world’s largest and oldest aquacultural site. These traps are archaeological sites of cultural heritage and are also UNESCO world heritage listed.

Can you describe to us how you used the drones to do your land mapping work? 

Prior to using drones, I would cover this area on foot. This was two kilometres of stony rises  that would take a considerable amount of time to cover, and was also known to be infested with snakes in the summer. Now that we have a drone, we can map to a much higher standard and this allows us to tell our story far more effectively. 

Myself, along with some other Gunditjmara people attended the Indigenous Mapping Workshop in 2019 and attended the DroneDeploy workshop sessions. Here we were taught how to create elevation maps, skills in 3D modelling of landscapes, and how to stitch aerial images from drones together. 

We used these skills to identify unrecorded stone structures prior to the January bushfires and we knew that the fires would clear the stones of the low-lying vegetation. This enhanced the ability for our tools to identify more stone structures, and as well as finding a number of fish traps we were also able to capture elevation maps of stone house clusters in better detail.

Were you impacted in any way by the fires? 

The fires we experienced were started by a lightning strike on the stony rises. Due to the nature of the stoney rises, the fire trickled along the ground and burnt low lying vegetation and dropped old dead trees, and unfortunately the koalas were the most heavily impacted by this. Our firefighting agencies initially had the fire contained before a second lightning strike lit another fire on the other side of the containment line. 

Due to the amount of bracken fern regrowth that we can see as well as the epicormic growth, it can be concluded that the trees have been recovering. 

Once the fires passed, we put our DroneDeploy skills to use and identified many new C-shaped stone foundations. There are approximately 80 C-shaped house structures at Lake Condah, and another 140 C-shaped structures clustered on the Allambie Indigenous Protected Area.

You mentioned using the Drone Deploy skills that you learnt at the workshop to help with this discovery. Can you tell us more about the workshop sessions that helped you to do that?

The Drone Deploy workshop session run by Indigenous Mapping Wananga leader, Moka Apiti, was one of the most helpful sessions at the workshop. We also gained a lot of insight and knowledge at the Fulcrum workshop as we were using a lot of out of date Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software at the time. 

Within the last month, we have been working on a project and have undertaken training to use a new cultural information management system. We have been using Fulcrum to upload and manage the data on each of the different properties that we manage. 

We are looking at resurveying many of our sites again with our new Drone Deploy skills. There were a lot of sites surveyed back in the 1970s and 1980s, however utilising these skills to take photos and create 3D models allows you to map the area far more accurately. 

By using the Drone Deploy skills we can pinpoint where each rock is located in the structure and we’re pretty excited about that. There are 500 stone structures on this landscape and we’re always finding new ones. 

What will you hope to learn from the Indigenous Mapping Workshop in the future?

In the future, I would like to expand my knowledge in the area of fire scar mapping. As a traditional owner organisation, we undertake cultural burning programs and we would like to practice fire scar mapping with the skills that were taught at the previous IMW. 

I also remember a session that taught participants how to capture the age of vegetation on Country. We would like to be able to capture that information as it would help us to tell the story of how we maintain Country via traditional burning techniques. 

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