On an overcast winter’s day in early June, a group of 50 people ranging from babies in backpacks to 70-year-olds sets out to explore the Aboriginal history of the Shag Bay heritage trail on Hobart’s eastern shore.
Our guides are Trish Hodge and Mitchem Everett from Nita Education, an organisation that provides Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural experiences to schools and businesses.
We gather at the end of Debomfords Lane on Geilston Bay, where Trish welcomes us to country. “waranta takara milaythina nara mapali takara,” she says. “Today we walk where they once walked.” Then we cross the creek to the track that goes up and over the headland, stopping to taste saltbush and samphire on the way.
The saltbush is … salty. So is the samphire. They were both part of the traditional Aboriginal diet, and are still used today by palawa people. They are also becoming popular with restaurants.
The track is busy with walkers, dogs and cyclists, but we are the only ones nibbling the plants on either side. Trish and Mitchem point out pigface, “good for burns”, and hop bush leaves, which make your mouth go numb when you chew them.
“The old people used hop bush as an anaesthetic,” says Trish. “It’s also a seasonal indicator – when it flowers it tells us to head to the coast as the oysters are big and fat and ready to eat.”
I’ve known these plants all my life. At least, I thought I knew them. It turns out my knowledge only skimmed the surface. There’s so much more to learn.
Trish tells us that sheoak needles are good for seasoning. “You put them on meat for the vinegary taste,” she says.
Then there’s the native cherry, a parasite that grows on other trees and has a bright red fruit with green seeds on the outside, like a strawberry. The fruit is high in vitamin C, and the wood is perfect for making tools like clap sticks. What’s more, the light green shoots are a coagulant, used for snakebite.
Further along, Mitchem hands around sagg roots, which taste a bit like leek. “The sagg seeds taste like a peppery pea when they’re green,” he says. “Or they can be dried and ground up for flour.”
We come out of the trees onto a wide headland covered in kangaroo grass, with eucalypts and little dark sheoaks dotted across it. It’s dry and golden and beautiful. Behind us, a sea eagle soars across the River Derwent/timtumili minanya.
Trish arranges us in a large circle that represents the timeline since Aboriginal people first arrived across the land bridge from the mainland more than 40,000 years ago. That timeline saw sea level changes, ice ages and megafauna – giant kangaroos, giant wombats, and marsupial lions that hunted from trees. The megafauna were still here up until 10,000 years ago, which is much later than they survived on the mainland and in the rest of the world.
The very last person in the circle – no, the fingernail of the very last person – represents the arrival of Europeans.
“This is the country of the moomairremener people of the Oyster Bay tribe,” says Trish. “The Europeans who first came here thought there were at least 10 large family groups. But there’s so much food around, I reckon there were more.”
We stop for lunch at a cultural living site near a giant sheoak. The kids head for the climbing tree, a sprawling eucalypt with patterned bark and branches set at perfect intervals for small hands. The rest of us eat our sandwiches while Trish describes how these living sites used to be all around the banks of timtumili minanya.
“The British called them middens,” she says, “which is a Scottish word for rubbish dump. They were enormous constructions, but the settlers used them as lime for building, so what we see now is only a small part of what used to be here. This one is five or six thousand years old.”
Far from being rubbish dumps, these sites are as important as museums and history books. “They’re a link to our past and a way to connect to our ancestors,” says Trish. “They’re a shopping list for the food that was available in the area. They’re also protected under the Heritage Act.”
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Trish Hodge has run Nita Education for four years, but she has been learning about country and culture since she was in primary school. “My dad used to take people out to show them this area at Bedlam Walls. I feel like it’s a part of who I am.”
Before Covid the business had 11 employees, and they were visiting four schools a day. “Now there are only three of us, but we’re still doing a school a day. Some schools are in their third or fourth year with us. We do different activities with the different year groups, from kindergarten right up to university level.”
After lunch, we climb down a rocky path to a sheltered bay with mudstone platforms and steep rock rising on either side. We pass old bricks and a rusty boiler, the mute remains of an early 20th century fertiliser plant.
But we’re here to see a site that was once used for making stone tools.
Trish points out the place where a boulder of igneous chalcedony has intruded into the mudstone. “It’s a type of agate that fractures in just the right way. The chalcedony is hard enough to hold an edge.”
She talks about not picking up rock chips or stone tools, but leaving them in place. “They’re like pages in a story, and if we leave them where they’re meant to be, we can read them.”
The stillness in the bay is palpable. So is the extraordinary age of it. I climb back up the track with Trish’s words echoing in my ears. “The old people are still here in the bush medicines and the foods. Even our modern roads follow the old paths.”
There’s an Aboriginal rock shelter down near the water, but it’s closed off for safety reasons. So we finish the day with Mitchem teaching us an emu dance. Our hands and arms are the emu’s head and neck; the men hold one hand behind them, making proud tail feathers. While Mitchem plays the clap sticks, we strut and peck and run from hunters.
Then we walk back the way we came, thankful for what we’ve learned. As Trish says on the Nita Education website, “Sharing our culture, history and heritage is the most important part of who I am. I believe that everyone who lives in or visits lutruwita (Tasmania) should be exposed in some way to the most ancient living culture on Earth.”
This Connecting to Country walk was organised by Clarence Climate Action with a grant from Healthy Tasmania’s Neighbour Day Challenge, to help build our community’s shared understanding of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture.
Lian Tanner has been dynamited while scuba diving and arrested while busking. She once spent a week in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, hunting for a Japanese soldier left over from WWII. Her best-selling Keepers Trilogy has been translated into 11 languages, and won two consecutive Aurealis Awards for Best Australian Children’s Fantasy. Her first picture book "Ella and the Ocean", illustrated by Jonathan Bentley, won the NSW Premier’s Award for Children’s Literature. Her latest children’s novel is "A Clue for Clara", a puzzling and hilarious mystery about a small chook and a big crime. More about Lian and her writing can be found at liantanner.com.au.