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had chiefs, for example, with lots and lots of power." Perhaps the biggest surprise about the Gunditjmara prehistoric fishing society came when Builth asked Monash University geologist Peter Kershaw to try to put a date on it. He drilled into some of the ponds that still have water today (much of the area was drained in the 1800s) to take cores of soil from the muddy bottom. Kershaw was able to drill 13 metres before hitting the bedrock, which produced a core that stretched all the way from the present day down to soil made 18,000 years ago. Like a forensic scientist, Kershaw hoped to date the eel farm from indirect evidence. Eventually he found the region of the core where the plant species abruptly changed. The vegetation had gone from being dominated by plants that preferred a drier environment, to water-loving aquatic species. "This doesn't occur naturally," says Kershaw. "It had to have some help. People have been here—that is the most likely explanation. And those people could well have been human eel farmers flooding the area with an artificial ponding system." But the most dramatic finding was when Kershaw radiocarbon-dated the part of the core showing the abrupt change. It was 8,000 years old, making the fish farming industry at Lake Condah one of the most ancient. The only comparable group at this early time were the indigenous people on America’s northwest coast, who caught salmon as they naturally migrated up the rivers. But the Gunditjmara's farming practices were far more developed. They actually brought the young eels in from the ocean and trapped them in their artificial waterways for up to 20 years. Builth also suspects that the Gunditjmara traded the smoked eels across Victoria and South Australia. The famous escaped convict William Buckley, who lived with Aborigines for many years, mentioned eels from western Victoria in his diaries, as did Victoria's first Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson. Builth was originally attracted to Lake Condah because of the boulders scattered all over the ground. Many of them seemed clumped into circular patterns. Since the 1970s, people ad argued that these were the remains of the village huts’ stony oundations, but the claims had always been controversial. In 1990, the Lake Condah stone circles were officially surveyed, and he conclusion, after just a 40-day study, was that most of the circles were not hut foundations at all. This was too much for Builth, and she began her Lake Condah research. This research eventually ended with a highly praised PhD thesis tha demolished he Victorian Archaeological Survey's negative conclusions. To prove that the circles of stones were not natural formations, Builth painstakingly measured and weighed each of the rocks in them. She then performed a statistical analysis and showed that the chance of their coming together in this way naturally was almost zero. The only likely remaining explanation was that the circles were the stone foundations of huts. So how. could — previous archaeologists have missed all this, given the scale of the operation and that the fish farms would still have been operating when Europeans arrived? Builth suspects that it is because the Gunditjmara disappeared quickly after white settlers came. "History tells us, many [of the settlers] had a military background and they knew tactics, they knew how to survive, they knew how to win, and they knew how to get rid of Aboriginal people pretty quickly.” By the time archaeologists had arrived in Australia, the only Aboriginal people still leading traditional lifestyles in significant numbers were the ones living on the ess desirable land. “Most studies, certainly anthropological studies, focused on people dwelling in desert in semi-arid conditions, because they were the ast people to live in their traditional and. These people [the Gunditjmara] were the first to lose heir land; that's the difference." oo (Source: The Age, 13 March 2003, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/ 2003/03/12/1047431092972.html) “You | GoTrA somew:/le NEXUS ¢ 65 APRIL - MAY 2009 www.nexusmagazine.com