The Indigenous people of Australia were the world’s first stone tool makers and they were also the first to produce art and almost certainly the first to make water craft, including outrigger canoes. Paintings of canoes in Australian cave paintings pre-date all other peoples known to use watercraft, well before recorded use by the Egyptians, Sumerians and Chinese.

A huge variety of stone tools were manufactured using a sophisticated technique of napping flint, greenstone, silcrete, quartz, chert and other hard stones. Without steel, Aboriginal people were able to make axes with wooden handles, spears with barbs and points, knives with incredibly sharp blades, scrapers, spoke shaves, grinding tools and a host of other useful implements.

Flint and greenstone axes with ground edges were bound into cleft sticks using kangaroo sinew and grass tree resin. The sinews contracted and tightened as they dried while the resin acted as a super bonding glue.

Baskets were woven from hair and grass, very strong rope was made from stringy bark, fishing nets up to 30 metres long were made from hair and bark cords, while bowls, basins and babies’ cradles were shaped from the bark of trees. Water vessels could be manufactured from animal skins and hollow limbs, clothes were shaped from tanned animal furs and sewn together with thin tendons. Some people even wore the skins of swans and pelicans as a decorative shawl.

There was almost no end to the ingenious applications the people could find for things found in the environment. I once found  a seamstresses needle sharpening kit which had a series of graded holes for sharpening various diameter needle points, a notch for cutting thread, grooves for sharpening bone hole punches, and made as neat as you like from a piece of stone. It looked like something you’d find in your grandmother’s sewing box. And these are the people the English squatters considered too unintelligent to understand the concept of land ownership. But I suppose if the English had allowed for the intelligence and humanity of Australia’s indigenous people they would not have been able to take away their land and their lives without a conflict within their Christian conscience.

For two centuries, historians have underplayed the extent to which Aboriginal people managed their environment, some even claiming that they used nothing but crude rafts. The captain of the Marie Gabrielle struggled to round Cape Otway in high seas in 1869 but when he did, found Gadabanud (the people of the Otways)  women calmly fishing from their canoes in the open sea.

These canoes were cut from the bark of trees and some of these vessels were 6-10 metres in length. A shaped slab of bark was wedged from a living tree and the ends tied together with kangaroo sinew, twine and wooden pegs and thwarts inserted to maintain the canoe’s shape. The tree continued to live and several of these ‘canoe’ trees can be seen , including one outside the MCG and one outside the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-op.

At night the people would place a small mound of wet clay in the bow and light a fire on it so that they could go out on the water and have the firelight attract fish to the canoe. Fish were speared or caught on lines made from human hair and with hooks shaped from filed shells or bird bone.

Here is a description of nocturnal fishing fleet by an early white observer, George Augustus Robinson. ‘At night the fishermen launch into the stream and the noiseless sport begins. From some points of view the brilliant fire lights, like floating meteors have a “beautiful” appearance. The scene at times, fairy like and enchanting, it called to mind the Portuguese boats of Teneriffe. (GAR Vol 4 Annual and Occasional Papers 1841-1849 Heritage Matters p62).

Bruce Pascoe
Wathaurong Co-operative