An extensive integrated river and billabong system can be found along the south bank of Birrarung/Yarra. Indigenous clans gathered close to the river for fresh water and abundant food found in the wetlands and billabongs. March was eel season, when this favourite food was fat and ready to harvest. An important food source for Eastern Kulin people, eels migrated downstream to the Bay for their once-in-a-lifetime journey up the east coast of Australia to the Coral Sea breeding grounds.

Over millennia the course of Birrarung/Yarra has changed countless times, resulting in seasonal foods for the Boonwurrung and shifting sediment deposits and tidal pools for those negotiating the river. As it was low-lying with rock shelves and tree stumps obstructing its course, occasionally the river flooded. After the floodwaters receded, large pools of water, called billabongs, were left behind near the main river course.

Colonial settlers recorded the first flood in 1839.To alleviate excessive flooding, works commenced to not only widen and deepen the river, but also to straighten its course to better serve the burgeoning river trade. When the river was straightened at the end of the nineteenth century, Tromgin Billabong formed the basis of the large ornamental lake found in the Royal Botanic Gardens.

While the influx of settlers dispossessed the Kulin, it was official government policy to ‘protect’, ‘improve’ and ’conciliate’ the Indigenous people. In 1837, 895 acres on the south bank of Birrarung/Yarra, now part of the Royal Botanic Gardens, was reserved for Victoria’s first, and short-lived mission under the Aboriginal Protectorate.

Today, physical evidence of the Indigenous presence along in this section of Birrarung/Yarra banks is scant as the area was subjected to changes over millennia, such as flooding. sediment build-up, and fluctuating sea levels. The straightening of the river towards the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, resulted in massive earthworks to move the river and form smooth, grassed banks. The impact of such radical river works has made it very difficult to read the Indigenous landscape. What remains is a profusion of inner-city parklands, particularly the Alexandra Gardens, the Domain, the Queen Victoria Gardens, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Batman Park and Enterprize Park. These linear parklands and river frontage reserves are crisscrossed by popular pathways and trails.

FURTHER READING

• Mapping Aboriginal Melbourne, https://aboriginal-map.melbourne.vic.gov.au/127

• N’Arwee’t Professor Carolyn Briggs, ‘Yulendj Boonwurrung’, Meanjin, Summer 2023,
  https://meanjin.com.au/essays/yulendj-boonwurrung/

• Margaret Anderson and Ann Wilcox, Yarra: Stories of Melbourne’s River, Old Treasury Building, 2021

IMAGE CREDIT
John Cotton, Aboriginal camp on the banks of the Yarra, c.1845, State Library Victoria