Features

Members of two Aboriginal language groups – Ngiyambaa and Paakantji – hold traditional associations with Gunderbooka Range. Ngiyambaa people lived at the range and across the red soil plains east of the Darling River, while Paakantji groups resided mostly along the river while regularly visiting the range. Gundabooka’s stony formations gave food, water, shelter, surfaces for rock art and spaces for ceremonies. To Ngiyambaa people, the range is a feature along the ancient path walked by Biaime, a creation figure. Paakantji people tell stories about Ngatji, the rainbow serpent, that link the Darling River to Gunderbooka Range.

Physical conflict accompanied European incursion of the Gundabooka area in the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Bean travelled up the Darling early in the twentieth century and recorded memories of violence associated with the establishment of Gundabooka station and other local properties in the 1850s and 1860s. These cattle and sheep runs covered wide areas. Gunderbooka Range lay across the junction of Yanda, Gundabooka and Curraweena stations.

Night falls at Gundabooka

Photo: George Main

Pastoralism put an end to Aboriginal fire-stick farming – the basis of a finely tuned land-management system. During droughts sheep now bared the red soil to the wind. Dust storms darkened the sky.

Efforts to promote closer settlement on the western plains of NSW began in the 1880s and continued through the early twentieth century. By the late 1930s Curraweena, Yanda and Gundabooka stations comprised only the central paddocks of their former spreads. Closer settler families worked to intensify pastoralism. Communities of native flora and fauna weakened as wind and rain bore soil away, and as hardy merinos trod paths from deep tanks to graze and graze and graze. Pastoralism fostered the spread of different indigenous shrubs and trees that some call ‘woody weeds’.

The ecological alterations wrought by a century and a half of grazing undermined pastoral viability. While of little worth for pastoralism, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service saw other cultural and natural values in this scrubby, stony country. Swift property sales followed brief negotiations. Gundabooka park rangers are today working with traditional Aboriginal owners to find new ways of managing the park’s red plains and rocky slopes.

George Main has qualifications in economics, cultural heritage management and history. He has worked with the Australian Heritage Commission and the National Museum of Australia. This year, at the Australian National University, he completed a research project that considered patterns of interaction between people and the physical environment of Gundabooka.