The Wurundjeri People And Sustainable Living

There are seven clans that make up the Wurundjeri people. Their language is called Woiworung and Woiworung country is the entire Yarra Valley from the Yarra headwaters down to the Maribyrnong River and Kooyong-koot Creek. The main clan in the Nillumbik-Doncaster-Templestowe area around the Yarra is the Wurundjeri-willam. It is part of the Kulin Nation.

Our Land Is Part Of Us And We Are Part Of The Land

The Elders teach that we are made from the earth just as the animals and trees were. The earth is our Mother, who gave birth to us and provides us with food, clothing and shelter. So we need to look after her, and all the creatures that are her children, just as we take care of our human mothers.

The Yarra was the focus of the Wurundjeri’s environment. The water played an important role as it provided many varied foods - fish, shellfish, eels - and the fertile land around the river grew many edible native plants such as the Murnong, or Yam Daisy and native animals such as rats, lizards, wombats, koalas, birds (and their eggs), insects and snakes. In Winter, possum skins were joinede together by sinews of kangaroo to make cloaks. Strips of bark or long branched of tres, supported at an angle against a fallen log or trunk of a tree provided shelter.

Social Relationships And ‘A Typical Day”

The social relationships linking family and tribal groups enabled large gatherings to take place for the purpose of kangaroo hunts and catching eels as well as social activities.

Possible tribal meeting places include Pound Bend and the Bolin Swamp where initiation ceremonies often took place. Every year large numbers of people spent up to four weeks at the swamp. In a typical day, women and children would fish using fish traps, nets and spears made from bark, rushes and reeds. They also gathered and prepared plant foods and made baskets, digging sticks and stone tools. The men hunted kangaroos, possums, emus and wombats and trapped birds with nets and snares.

Different Foods In The Region

The Wurundjeri people knew their land, plants and animals intimately, they knew how to track and hunt and fish and find bush foods in season. They never took more than the land could spare because they knew the health of the land and their own health were one and the same.

Different foods were plentiful at different times of the year and they moved to where the eating was best.

• At Yarra Glen, hundreds of birds gather in the breeding season and there were also swan and duck eggs.
• At Bulleen in the autumn, eels are on their way to migrate down to Port Phillip Bay and out to the ocean to breed. They were easily captured in weirs, enough for the hundreds of people who gathered for the Bolin Bolin corroboree.
• At other times, places like Kangaroo Ground have abundant kangaroos and rich fields of yams and orchids and other bush foods to gather. These lands were regularly burnt so the plants would grow back lush and attract animals.

Bush Foods

Yam Daisy

- Murnong This plant once grew abundantly especially in the richer soil alongside creeks and in volcanic soil such as at Kangaroo Ground. The underground tubers were the most important vegetable food. Its flower is similar to a dandelion and its tuber resembles a small turnip. Large quantities were cooked in baskets placed in a hole previously heated with hot stones.

Orchids

In season the bulbs of fifty or more edible ground orchids that grow in Nillumbik were collected and eaten.

Cumbungi

Cumbungi grows in the shallows of streams and billabongs - and in dams today. The fibrous, underground stems or rhizomes, were steamed in pits lined with stones. Fibres were also extracted to make the string used in nets and dilly bags.

Water Ribbons

Most shallow streams in Nillumbik have water ribbons growing in them. They can be readily identified by their long, slender leaves floating in the current. Water ribbon tubers were eaten raw or cooked by the Wurundjeri in ground ovens.

Bulbine Lily

Once plentiful in the region, this plsnt grows in clumps in poor soils - its flowers form a yellow spike iun spring. The plump round corms were collected year round and probably cooked.

Cherry Ballart

This light green tree - like a cyprus - has small sweet red fruit that can be eaten raw. Before European settlement the tree is recorded as having fruited more prolifically, but nowadays, for some unknown reason, not nearly as much.

Apple Berry

The small cucumber shaped fruit of the climbing plant has an enjoyable sweet-sour taste when ripe and can be eaten raw. In the Yarra Valley its flower is purple.

Kangaroo Apple

This shrub, with purple flowers and deep green leaves shaped like the foot of a kangaroo grows in most of the moist solis of Nillumbik. Its fruit is ripe in late summer and it is about the size of a cherry changing from green to cream as it ripens. This fruit must only be eaten when perfectly ripe or it is poisonous.

Chocolate Lily

The purple flowers of this lily have a distinctly chocolate aroma. Each plant produces a bunch of tasty tubers and these were roasted before being eaten.

Vanilla Lily

Like the Chocolate Lily, the tubers of this purple-flowered plant were collected and eaten.

Acacia

The seeds of many local wattles were collected and ground into a cake which could be eaten either raw or cooked. Sweet drinks were made from the flowers of various species of wattles, banksias and grass-trees.

Bush Medicines

Blackwood Wattle

The bark of this tree was used as a treatment for rheumatism.

River Mint

The leaves of river mint were crushed and used to ease coughs and colds as wells a flavouring in cooking. The plant grows alongside billabongs and streams and is easily identifiable by the strong mint aroma given off when crushed.

Clematis

Clematis roots were used to ease headaches.

River Re3d Gum

The gum or sap of these gums was used to shrink and seal burns, also as a cure for diarrhoea. The leaves were sometimes used in an aromatic steam bath to help cure a variety of illnesses.

Bracken Fern

The young stems of thism plant were used to ease stinging and itching caused by insect bites. Its roots, rich in starch, were ground and eaten.

Contact details

• Website: Nillumbik Reconciliation Group
• Address: Nillumbik Reconciliation Group Inc, P O Box 1017, Research 3095

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