The aboriginal adjustment movement in colonial Victoria
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Kerin, Rani , Rippon, Kylie
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article , Conference paper
- Relation: Journal of Religious History Vol. 43, no. 4 (2019), p. 478-494
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Whilst much has been written about Aboriginal religious syncretism in Australia, particularly about what has become known as the “Adjustment Movement” that occurred in Arnhem Land in the 1950s (see McIntosh 2004), there were several remarkable examples of spiritual adjustment by Aboriginal people a century earlier on the Victorian goldfields that hitherto have not been explored by historians. Building on Magowan's (2003) discussion of the connection between Christianity and the ancestral law of Aboriginal culture in northern Australia, this article will examine how Christian influences in colonial Victoria competed with, and conversely moulded, southern Kulin ancestral understanding. Several Kulin ceremonies — including the Myndee ceremony and the “Veinie Sacred Sunday Dance” — will be examined. These ceremonies were described by colonial officials (Joseph Panton, a Gold Commissioner, and William Thomas, the Aboriginal Guardian of Aborigines in Victoria) in the midst of a second wave of invasion and rupture for Victorian Aboriginal people — the first being the sheep herders in the 1830s, and the second being the gold rush which commenced in 1851. Serving as exemplars of what might be called the Victorian Aboriginal Adjustment Movement, these ceremonies demonstrate the extent to which Aboriginal people on the goldfields of Victoria engaged in a culturally congruent mode of Christianity. © 2019 Religious History Association
Fire and Late Oligocene to Mid-Miocene peat mega-swamps of south-eastern Australia : A floristic and palaeoclimatic interpretation
- Authors: Sluiter, Ian , Blackburn, David , Holdgate, Guy
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article , Conference paper
- Relation: Australian Journal of Botany Vol. 64, no. 8 (2016), p. 609-625
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article is a presentation that formed part of the Ecological Society of Australia's annual symposium entitled "Fire in Australia : how was the biota prepared for human occupation". The Late Oligocene to Mid-Miocene (25-13million years ago) brown coals of the Gippsland Basin in southern Victoria, Australia, were deposited in peat mega-swamps, unlike any in the world at the present day. The swamps preserve a rich botanical suite of macro- and microfossils, many of which can be identified with plant genera and families present today in Australia, New Caledonia, New Zealand and New Guinea. The peat-forming environments also preserve evidence of past burning in the form of micro-charcoal as well as macro-charcoal, the latter being evident as regional lenses or layers of fusinite, generally in coals of the darkest colour termed dark lithotypes. The presence of micro-charcoal in dark and some other lighter lithotypes indicated that fires also burnt locally, although they may have been extinguished before regional-scale burning occurred. It is also feasible that some peat mega-swamp plant communities dominated by rainforest angiosperm plants may have been fire excluders and prevented widespread fires from developing. Pollen and macrofossil evidence is presented of a distinctive southern conifer and angiosperm flora with an open canopy, primarily associated with the darkest coals that formed in the wettest parts of the peat-forming environment. Elsewhere, swamp forests with a large rainforest component grew on swamps raised appreciably above the regional groundwater table in a structural context akin to the ombrogenous peats of tropical coastal Sumatra and Sarawak. These vegetation types were not fire prone, but may have occasionally burnt at a local scale or at forest margins. Evidence is presented for the existence of seasonal climatic conditions that would appear to have facilitated a drying-out of the peat swamps in the warmest months of the year. A mesothermal climate was invoked where mean annual precipitation was at least 1500mm, and possibly as much as 2000mm, and mean annual temperatures were ∼19°C. © 2013 CSIRO.