Budj Bim Aboriginal Hydraulic Works - Engineering Heritage National Landmark #12 Tyrendarra, Victoria, Australia
By Team MavEtJu on 20-Oct-15. Waypoint GA7661

Budj Bim Aboriginal Hydraulic Works - Engineering Heritage National Landmark #12

The history of the aborigines of the western district of Victoria and details of the settlements they lived in prior to European settlement, whilst it is at times an interesting story, adding to the total cultural significance of the place, it has only passing relevance to this nomination, suffice it to say that few attempts were made by settlers, the colonial government and the state government, right up until the 1960s, to understand or preserve the culture which existed previously. It has only been since the 1970s that a serious attempt has been made to recognize the culture and investigate its scope.

Burnum Burnum has written “...the traditional Aboriginal economy was much more complex and varied than most textbooks have described it, some white explorers and early administrators described villages of finely constructed huts, methods of harvesting and storing grass seeds to prolong the season by many months, as well as complicated fish and game traps. some of the fish traps, as at Brewarrina, still exist, though damaged by time and vandals. In Victoria, a vast network of canals and ponds, which brought eels across a mountain range to be stored and harvested at will, has been discovered and partly excavated, gradually it is dawning on the outside world that life in the traditional aboriginal way involved a great deal of knowledge and skill.”

In the definitive monograph published in 1978, Coutts et al suggest that “...by the time Europeans arrived in western Victoria the Aboriginal inhabitants of the region had developed a diverse technologically-oriented economy, the Lake Condah structures provide further evidence for specialised and large-scale technological adaptation in the district ...”.

The structures at and near Lake Condah “comprise the remains of semi-circular stone-walled houses, cairns, free standing rock walls, stone-walled channels, and fish-traps and canals excavated into fractured and weathered basalt”. As further mentioned by Coutts, “nor were they all small structures – some were more than 450 m long, greater than 0.5 m deep and around 0.5 m wide”; It is also mentioned that Dawson in 1881 described the construction of races and channels with clay embankments 0.6 – 1 m high and 250 – 300 m long. It is these structures which led to an assessment of the whole infrastructure and led to this nomination for recognition as engineering heritage.

Fish traps are known from throughout australia. The big difference at Lake Condah and tyrendarra in western Victoria, which involved what we would call engineering, is that dams, stone races and canals were built to manipulate the water levels in the various basins of the lake and divert water from the creek at tyrendarra into the engineered trap system. Coutts defines stone races as “above-ground structures for directing water” and canals as “channels dug into the ground”, though observations on site suggest a blurring of this distinction. Stone races appear to have been built to force fish (mainly eels) into fish traps as lake waters rose or fell. Canals appear to have been formed to force water into various basins of the lake where natural flows were not reaching: in some cases it appears that these artificially filled basins were used as holding ponds to keep fish fresh until they were needed. Stone walls also appear to have been used to artificially define ponds.

The different systems of channels, races and ponds in Lake Condah were used at different lake levels, with transfer of activities from one to another as the lake level changed with seasons. At Tyrendarra the single system was associated with Darlot Creek and could be described as an off–stream facility into which the water of Darlot Creek was diverted as required by a stone weir.

Fish were caught in traditional woven traps placed in the channels, either supported by stone structures for single traps or by timber palisade–like structures across wider channels holding multiple traps.

When logging this virtual, please add a photo of yourself or your GPSr at the plaque.

For more information, please see the nomination PDF at the Heritage Register at the Engineers Australia website: https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/portal/heritage/budj-bim-aquaculture-engineering-works-lake-condah-tyrendarra