Constructing Hierarchy

The eel fishery at Lake Condah is a well known site in Aboriginal archaeology, attracting respect and controversy in equal measure. Located on the Tyrendarra Lava Flow, it is an extensive system of water channels constructed in hard volcanic rock.

A map drawn up by a colonial surveyor called Ingram shows a part of the scheme as at 1883. It identifies a dam at the Lake Condah outlet and gives it two labels: "Overflow dam Darlot Creek during winter" and "Wooden barrier or fishery". This neatly states the structure's dual purpose. It was built to control the flow of water and direct the movement of eels.

The fishery is a complex network of inlet and outlet channels linking swamps and streams to create a flow between them. These man-made connections allow elvers (young eels) from the Pacific Ocean to migrate up the waterways into 'new' marshes and wetlands, where they 'fatten' for 15 to 20 years. The erection of stone and wooden weirs in the same channels enabled a good harvest of silver (mature) eels on their outward migration back to sea to spawn.

Ingram's "Rough Diagram of Aboriginal Fishery Lake Condah" reproduces a northern section of the system and was accompanied by a letter explaining how it worked.

      "These channels have been made by removing loose stones and portions of the more solid rocks between the ridges and lowest places, also by constructing low wing walls to concentrate the streams. At suitable places are erected some barriers of timber built in so to form openings of from 1 to 2 feet wide, behind these openings were secured long narrow bag nets made of strong rushes, the mouths of these nets were 2 to 3 feet wide secured to a hoop, these were of various lengths some 10 feet long the principal portion being about 4 or 5 inches in diameter, the smallest ends were made so that they could be opened so that the eels could be easily extracted."

Most impressive today is the concentrated effort made by the original builders, cutting through the solidified lava known as "stony rises". With only basic tools such as stone strikers and digging sticks they followed the natural cooling cracks in the basalt, prising out boulders to a depth of half a metre and stacking them on either side of the channels to add height.

By definition, hunters and gatherers are supposed to adapt to their environment, not alter it. Evidence of prehistoric engineering is rarely found on the Australian continent, and nothing to this degree of difficulty. The modified landscape at Lake Condah implies a significant shift in behaviour by local Aborigines, from foraging to farming. This makes it all the more important to get the dates right.

That part of the fishery that Ingram's map focussed on is also the site that archaeologists achieved their first successful radiocarbon dating results. The intricate interweaving of channels that the surveyor recorded is known as Muldoons Trap.

The structure is made up of 350 metres of incised rock and shallow sediment conduits. This artificial water course runs along a 20-30 metre wide corridor, flanked by 5-6 metre high flat-topped basalt rises. It features a remnant block of bedrock in the centre of a stretch of 'carved' channel. Sediments stuck in the voids around this block were extracted and tested to establish when the adjoining lava blocks were taken out.

Up until this investigation, most estimates of the age of the fishery were Late Holocene (the last 3 or 4 thousand years). Instead, a cluster of dates around the Mid-Holocene were returned. This portion of the scheme was much older than expected.

7 dates on charcoal taken from 18.6 to 21.4 centimetres ranged between 5,301 and 5,906 YBP. 4 ages from basal levels to 44.4 centimetres were between 6,509 and 6,632 years ago. However, the next radiocarbon signatures were not until1,370 YBP. This suggested a hiatus of 4 millennia, when no obvious attention was paid to the channel (like maintenance or repair).

Some of this start, stop, re-start, sequence is down to climate change. Regional pollen counts from lakebed drill cores had been done at Lake Surprise, Lake Condah, Fred Swamp and Tyrendarra Swamp by palaeontologists a few years before. Channel construction of Muldoons Trap (6600-5300 YBP) coincides with an increase in "maximum effective precipitation" between 7,500 and 5,500 YBP, with full-lake conditions peaking about 6,000 years ago. Human abandonment of the site ( 5400-1400 YBP) corresponds with a period of lower or irregular rainfall lasting from about 5,000 to 2,000 YBP, with a definite shift towards more drought tolerant plant species recorded at 4,700 years ago.

A reasonable interpretation of this information is that the building of this particular channel occurred in response to consistently high water levels and associated overflows from Lake Condah. When the climate deteriorated and overflows ceased, so too did the efficiency of Muldoons Trap.

PALAEO POLITICS

Unpacking the dates for construction and re-activation is an important conceptual step in untangling the layers of misinterpretation that the fishery has accrued since European settlement. It is a reminder that prehistory, like contemporary human experience, is a number of separate events. Different things happen at different times, and what seems obvious now was then only one of a number of options that could have taken place. Looking at the Lake Condah eel fishery as it is ― the remains of a completed project ― is not a reliable guide to its real provenance.

There are two views about how societies cope with fundamental change and it is useful to look at both of them.

The first model assumes gradual change. Economic advances are at a hesitant, experimental level. The actions of one individual may be copied by another. A young family member might be taught the lesson of re-arranging some rocks to form a strategic pattern. Small, incremental steps leave space for explanatory social beliefs to absorb and adjust. The new system steadily expands and the community prospers.

The second model assumes resistance to change. The many resent the few, fearing the loss of old and familiar custom. Pre-existing values like kinship obligations (distribution of the daily catch) and traditional divisions of labour (man the hunter, woman the digger) are challenged. New entitlements are yet to be established. 

The innovation of channel construction was a potentially disruptive force acting on hunter-gatherer mentalities. Human experience suggests that these sort of tensions are usually resolved by violence. There is also a tendency to transition from highly mobile egalitarian groups towards more disciplined and stratified semi-chiefdoms.

There is no Mid-Holocene evidence of how the Lake Condah people responded to these pressures. They were the pioneers of "food security" and "production surplus" in Australia, possibly the only Aboriginal population to reach this radical position, and the choices were all theirs.

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REFERENCES:

Thomas Richards, 2011, 'A late nineteenth-century map of an Australian Aboriginal fishery at Lake Condah', Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2, 64-87

IJ McNiven, J Crouch, T Richards, N Dolby, G Jacobsen, GMTOAC, 2012, 'Dating Aboriginal stone-walled fishtraps at Lake Condah, southeast Australia', Journal of Archaeological Science, 39, 268-286

H Builth, AP Kershaw, C White, A Roach, L Hartney, M McKenzie, T Lewis, G Jacobsen, 2008, 'Environmental and cultural change on the Mt Eccles lava-flow landscapes of southwest Victoria, Australia, The Holocene, 18.3, 413-24

Ian Keen, 2006, 'Constraints on the Development of Enduring Inequalities in Late Holocene Australia', Current Anthropology, 47.1, 7-38