Experience 60,000 years of culture in Victoria, Australia

It’s a landmark that splits a city, but the Yarra River also plays a vital role in Melbourne’s daily life. In the early morning, rowers stroke its straight reaches. The city has grown up on either side of it. Its neighboring green spaces are a place of connection and recreation. For the Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung people, however, Birrarung, as they call the river, has played a crucial part in their culture for 60,000 years.

“Not many people are aware that the Birrarung once carved its way through the [Royal Botanic] Gardens,” says Christopher Jakobi, Aboriginal programs facilitator at Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. “This was before the river was straightened and widened to prevent natural seasonal flooding in the early twentieth century. This whole area was where thousands of people gathered together for ceremony, for trade, celebration and to hold inter-nation business.”

On the other side of the Yarra is the Koorie Heritage Trust, located within Federation Square, where Rob Hyatt is the manager of education and visitor experience. Through his work, he’s become aware most people aren’t aware of the Aboriginal cultural offerings in the city.

“There’s an appreciation of suddenly understanding Melbourne has an Aboriginal history,” he said of those who take the center’s tours. “But also that the culture is still alive in the Melbourne area, whether it’s through Aboriginal people telling their stories on our tours or at other sites, like the Botanic Gardens, Bunjilaka [Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum] and those sort of places.”

The trust acts a cultural center and gallery, and conducts a number of walking tours along the Yarra River. But it is also “a keeping place that looks after Victoria’s unique Aboriginal cultural heritage,” said Hyatt.

The Koorie Heritage Trust isn’t the only place within Fed Square with a First Nations focus. There’s also NGV Australia, with its impressive collection of Indigenous art and artefacts, and Big Esso, a new restaurant from Nornie Bero. Bero, who’s from the island of Mer in the Torres Strait, the passage of water between Australia and Papua New Guinea, serves up flavors representing her heritage. On the menu, you’ll find namas, a dish of coconut-cured kingfish with lemon myrtle, as well as ingredients including yams, saltbush, wattleseed, Davidson plum and local fish and shellfish.

To get the full depth of the history of Australia’s First People, however, you need to venture further, although not as far as you might imagine. An accessible option is to travel along the spectacular Great Ocean Road, part of the Great Southern Touring Route. As well as being able to visit landmarks like the 12 Apostles, stunning rainforest in the Otway Ranges, and seaside towns like Apollo Bay, the road eventually arrives in Warrnambool, 160 miles from Melbourne. People travel here during winter (June–September) to watch the southern right whales come to calve off Logans Beach.

Nearby, on the site of a long dormant volcano, Worn Gundidj at Tower Hill offers travelers a chance to learn how native plants are still used – the guides refer to the landscape as a ‘living supermarket’ – for food, fiber and medicine. There’s also wildlife, including kangaroos, emus and koalas, and learning to throw a boomerang. In the evening visitors experience the bush at twilight and the nocturnal activity of Australian animals.

Tower Hill sits on the land of the Gunditjmara people, as does the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape. Beyond its crater lake, laval rock formations and lush bush surroundings is one of the world’s oldest aquaculture sites, which was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019.

The landscape is part of the Victorian Volcanic Plains that stretches from Melbourne to the state’s western border, all of it significant to different Aboriginal nations. Here, at Lake Condah, is what people refer to as an eel trap system, carbon dated to 6,600 years old. According to Budj Bim visitor ranger Braydon Saunders, it was more a sustainable agricultural practice, however, than a trap.

“It was about the manipulation of water movement,” he said. “What we wanted to do was make sure the eels and fish were only living in one area of a waterhole, and then, when the weather was right, we’d move them. It was a genuine farming of eels and fish and keeping them in places where we wanted them.”

It also ensures the short-finned eels, which swim to tropical waters around New Guinea and Vanuatu to spawn, can carry on their natural life cycle.

Near the site is evidence the the Gunditjmarra people lived in villages (there is a long-held but now debunked colonialist belief that all Aboriginal people were nomadic hunter-gatherers). Not only is the landscape around the traps dotted with burnt, hollowed-out trees that science has proven were used to smoke surplus eels, but carbon dating has also shown water-loving species of plants were introduced to the environment about 8,000 years ago. There are also the remains of hundreds of stone huts.

“They are foundations we found in the ground,” said Saunders. “Basically the stone is set up in a horseshoe shape and we would burn blackwood branches so they become pliable to create a dome shape. The stone in the ground would act as an anchor for either end of the branches. Then we’d intertwine other branches in between to make a nice big hut.”

About a hundred miles directly north of Warrnambool lies Halls Gap, the central township for exploring the Grampians. This region is much loved by outdoor adventurers, especially hikers, for its rugged natural beauty, plunging waterfalls and spring wildflowers. The full hundred-mile-long, 13-day Grampians Peaks Trail is due to open in November 2021, but there are many walks of all distances in Grampians National Park. It’s also a significant site for Aboriginal heritage. In fact, Gariwerd, its traditional name, has the largest number of rock art shelters and paintings in southern Australia, with five significant sites accessible to the public. Bunjil Shelter, near Stawell, protects the only known rock art depiction of Bunjil, the creator. Another, Billimina Shelter, is home to about 2,500 small paintings made using red ochre.

After the Grampians, head towards Melbourne via Ballarat, 90 miles to the southeast. Here you can explore the region’s goldmining history – Ballarat’s alluvial fields were considered the world’s richest between 1852 and 1853 – and enjoy a thriving arts and food scene. Stroll down Police Lane to see Diana Nikkelson’s piece Goanna Ground, a tribute from the Gunditjmara artist to the local Wadawarrung people, etched into the paving.

For more information on Aboriginal tourism experiences in Victoria, head to the Visit Victoria website.