STORY OF COUNTRY

“The Mallee Sky Garden, in Victoria’s north-west corner, lies within the ancient ancestral lands of the Nyeri Nyeri Peoples. The People of the Nyeri Nyeri are thankful and welcome this beautiful garden to take its position within these lands and most importantly to continue its gift of forever giving life”

Mark Grist, GRIST ANTHROPOLOGY

“In its notions of time and soul, its demand to leave the world as found, and its blanketing of land and sea with totem responsibilities, [the Dreaming] is ecological. Aboriginal landscape awareness is rightly seen as drenched in religious sensibility, but equally the Dreaming is saturated with environmental consciousness. Theology and ecology are fused. The Dreaming taught why the world must be maintained; the land taught how.”

Bill Gammage

The Mallee Sky Garden, is located on the traditional lands of the Nyeri Nyeri people who occupied this country for more than 40,000 years. The Nyeri Nyeri, with their neighbours the Latji Latji and Wergaia people, shaped the ecology of this region with their traditional land management practices.

Recent scientific evidence suggests that traditional people in the Mallee cultivated the Murray Pine community of plants.  They maintained a series of parklike areas consisting of a sheltered grassland surrounded by Murray Pine, spaced roughly one days walk apart, throughout the mallee. The grassland attracted small mammals and marsupials which were the mainstay of their diet.

These areas are vividly described for their beauty by many early settlers and have been documented more recently in, ‘Something Went Missing’, The Royal Society of Victoria, 134, 45-84, 2022.

Jointly authored by an archaeologist, anthropologist, historian and ecologist, the paper argues that ecological destruction was primarily caused by the cessation of traditional land management and was already well advanced before further habitat destruction caused by widespread European settlement and the arrival of weed plants and feral pests in the late 1880s.

Traditional land management in the region effectively ceased in the 1830s due to the rapid decline of the indigenous population caused by disease, displacement and massacre. Ecosystems which had been cultivated and maintained over tens of thousands of years began to degrade, resulting in the extinction of twenty-four mammalian species by the 1890s [Allen 1983].  This is widely regarded as the worst extinction of mammals in world history [Wioinarski et al., 2015].

The Blandowski Expedition (1856-1857) was one of the first documented European encounters with the indigenous people of the area. Blandowski described the Yarree (Nyeri) as his “good friends”.[7] Notably one of William Blandowski’s 1857 illustrations depicted traditional Nyeri Nyeri recreation. Blandowski ended his account with a general statement on the recent state of these Murray riverine tribes:

“On the whole I have but to make the most deplorable statements concerning our natives. Extermination proceeds so rapidly, that the regions of the Lower Murray are already depopulated, and a quietude reigns there which saddens the traveller who visited those districts a few years ago.”

Without the people to care for them the pine forests all but disappeared. Today only 1% of the Murray Pine community of plants remains in Victoria and NSW.  The Sky Garden is at the centre of the area where Murray Pines dominated the landscape.