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LIFE WAS NOT A WALKABOUT FOR VICTORIA'S ABORIGINES Some of the modifications were impressive. In parts, the channels were dug through rock to allow water to flow from swamp to swamp. Some of the chains of channels and ponds stretched more than 30 kilometres. But Builth's research revealed something more remarkable. She estimated the output from these eel farms could have fed up to 10,000 people. On the basis of this research, she believed this was more an ancient fishing industry than a subsistence farm, and she set out to prove it. She had noticed the landscape was scattered with burnt, hollowed-ou trees that were often next to the ee! traps. Could the structures have been ancient smokehouses? Smouldering fires could have been lit in the bases of the trees and the freshly caugh eels hung up above, to be preserved by the smoke. To confirm the theory, Builth took soil samples from the bases of four trees. Laboratory analysis revealed that the samples did contain traces o! eel fat. "Suddenly the whole picture changed. The Gunditjmara weren't just catching eels, their whole society was based around eels. And that to me was the proof,” she says. The villages associated with the Lake Condah fish farm, she says, were actually more like company towns, with dwellings built to house the people who worked the farms. "It's ike you have your council houses for he factory. That's what was going on ere," says Builth. Archaeologists know a society undergoes a quantum leap in sophistication when it can produce a surplus of food, because the community has more time to devote to pursuits other than basic survival. "This puts the people here in a different category than we've generally put Aboriginal groups." Aborigines are usually thought of as living in small communal bands, where power and wealth are shared relatively equally. But Builth believes the Lake Condah farmers lived in a much more complex society. "| think what we had here was a hierarchical, structured society. We by Dr Graham Phillips, edited from The Age, Melbourne, 13 March 2003 ccording to Heather Builth, Awe Victoria's Aborigines were ot nomads; they lived in villages. This conclusion, which contradicts the long-held belief that Aborigines existed solely as wandering hunter-gatherers, is the result of investigations carried out by the researcher from Flinders University, South Australia, over the past eight years. Builth says that the Gunditjmara people in the Lake Condah region of western Victoria were also farmers and that they modified more than 100 square kilometres of the landscape to breed eels. They constructed artificial ponds across the grassy wetlands and dug channels to connect them. The whole scheme was systematically punctuated with eel traps. “The area was naturally a wetland, with natural swamps, but they modified these with weirs, channels and dams to make the whole landscape eel-friendly," says Builth. 64 * NEXUS APRIL - MAY 2009 www.nexusmagazine.com