Dr Vicki Couzens is Kirrae Wurrong Gunditjmara from the Western Districts of Victoria who works in creative cultural expression by reclaiming, regenerating and revitalising cultural knowledge and language through ceremony, community arts, public art, visual and performing arts. In this audio piece, she takes radio producer Daniel Browning to the crater of a volcano to speak about the histories of defending Country in that place and the songlines that hold the world together.
This is an excerpt from a larger piece from an episode called Listening to country from ABC Radio National’s program AWAYE. This episode is produced by Daniel Browning.
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Listening to country with Daniel Browning and Aunty Vicki Couzens
Today we're here at Koroitj Gunditj in the volcano, in English way, Tower Hill. All the tourists, and we've just walked up, one of the scoria cone craters in the centre, and seen all those beautiful views of Peek Whurrong Country. And the Koroitj Gunditj mob lived in and around here, and ceremonies and people camped and lived in here 'cause there's a big swamp around the outside in the bottom of the crater.
And as you've seen, there's lots of bird life. All the swans nest here, so people would gather the swan eggs. And there's emu, kangaroo, and, yeah, it’s a good place to camp and live. Mm-hmm. Now, of course, this is all volcanic, this part of your Country. Yeah. It's part of what they call the Basalt Plains.
Runs right across from the top of Melbourne, right through to Gariwerd and across. And there's a part particularly called the Stony Rises, down between Colac and Camperdown, but it's all Stony Rises Country from here back through over the back way to Heywood, and it's all the little lava flows from the different volcanoes around.
And this one here, Tower Hill, erupted about 5,000 or 7,000 years ago. They're all supposedly dormant. Who knows? And we say pawan kooloorr for volcanoes, pawan being the lava stone. And the Stony Rises Country was very thickly wooded and swampy, lots of seasonal swamps, so we didn't move far.
And a lot of our mob down here, we built stone huts, lived in villages. And further over from the Eumeralla River, over near Yambuk is what is called the Eumeralla Wars. So when the white people came through this area in the late 1830s and started taking up the land, our mob fought a 40-year guerrilla war, 'cause they couldn't catch us in the Stony Rises and we knew the Country, it's one of those things we celebrate, but it's not recognised outside.
And that's one of my things that my dad's been talking about for a long time. We talked about yesterday with the old people who fought and died trying to defend our Country and our families. And there's no memorials, there's no recognition and mainstream likes to remember and honor their war heroes.
So I've done a bit of work on the massacres and -- I included the Eumeralla Wars in that and, we're kinda still working on trying to get some kind of a memorial in recognition of our old people 'cause it's important and I think the thing that I get sort of frustrated with is the lack of awareness and understanding that, mainstream has of Country and where they're living…
I'm just watching these two little blue wrens, two male ones, they're beautiful.
…Where they're living and you get people come to Tower Hill, the locals and tourists, and they don't necessarily have that deeper sense, because they think they own their houses and their land, but it's the other way around.The Country owns us, and we belong to that and that's hard to try to foster or nurture that level of understanding. And, in a global sense, the whole world, people need to start realising about looking after Mother Earth and because look what's happening, all the things, and she's healing herself and trying to fix things.
It's a hard thing and I think all Aboriginal people feel like that, eh? Across the Country. Look what they're doing, up in Western Australia there with the Burrup. That's such an old... They don't know what they're doing, and they don't know what kind of unease that they're releasing when they're digging into the earth and taking things and destroying sites and they have no regard for that, that deeper meaning and the songlines and all that go through and connect everything and hold the world together.
Them songlines, they hold the world together and they're not taking notice of that. They don't care or understand.They've lost that connection because most of the people at one stage or another come from an earth culture way back, and they've just kind of forgotten.
Got a bit mixed up.