Crafting the Current: How Bark Canoes Were Built in South-East Australia

In the forests of Gippsland, a scarred tree stands near the Tarra River. Its bark was removed long ago, but the tree still grows. The scar tells a story — of a canoe made by hand, guided by knowledge passed from one generation to the next. These canoes once carried people along the waters of Port Albert, across Lake Wellington, and along the many rivers that thread through GunaiKurnai Country.

This article looks closely at how bark canoes were built in south-east Australia. Drawing on the work of maritime historian David Payne (2021), and ethnographer D.E. Edwards (1972), we explore the practical skills and cultural knowledge that shaped these vessels — from tree selection to the final launch.

The Bark Canoe: Simple but Sophisticated

Bark canoes were common across much of southern and eastern Australia. They were lightweight, fast, and perfectly suited to calm inland waterways and estuaries. For the GunaiKurnai people of Gippsland, they were essential for fishing, transport, and cultural ceremony.

Despite their simple appearance, bark canoes required careful planning and teamwork. Their design reflected the local environment — the type of trees available, the water conditions, and the purpose of the journey. In Gippsland, red gum and stringybark trees were most commonly used. The canoes had to be light enough to carry, but strong enough to hold an adult and their tools or catch.

Step by Step: Building a Bark Canoe

  1. Choosing the Right Tree

The first step was to find a suitable tree. It had to be tall, with straight, thick bark, and located near the water. Red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) and stringybark (Eucalyptus obliqua) were often preferred. The time of year mattered — bark came away cleanly in the warmer months when sap was flowing.

“Aboriginal canoe-builders selected trees carefully, often returning to known groves over many years.”
— David Payne, 2021

This was a cultural decision as much as a technical one. Elders and skilled men made the final choice, based on experience and respect for Country.

  1. Cutting and Removing the Bark
Lake Tyers (Gippsland) real photo card by HD Bulmer (Bairnsdale) of Aborigine with tomahawk climbing tree inscribed 'Stripping A Bark Canoe

Lake Tyers (Gippsland) real photo card by HD Bulmer (Bairnsdale) of Aborigine with tomahawk climbing tree inscribed ‘Stripping A Bark Canoe

The bark was cut in an oval or rectangular shape, usually about three to four metres long and one metre wide. Stone axes, shell tools, or later iron implements were used. Once cut, wooden wedges or levers helped peel the bark from the trunk without splitting it.

The tree was not destroyed. With time, it would heal and continue to grow. These canoe trees, as they are now called, remain as important cultural markers across Victoria, including along the waterways near Port Albert.

  1. Shaping the Canoe

Once removed, the bark sheet was laid over a small fire or hot coals. Heat made the bark pliable, allowing it to be bent into a shallow U-shape. Wooden props or sticks were sometimes placed underneath to hold the curve.

The ends were drawn up and tied together, usually with natural fibres — such as bark strips, rushes, or vine. In Gippsland, the bow and stern were kept slightly open, giving the canoe a wide, stable base.

D.E. Edwards, writing in 1972, described this as “a flexible form of watercraft, easily shaped and adapted to suit the needs of the local river or lake.”

  1. Sealing and Strengthening

To make the canoe watertight, the joints were sealed with clay, resin, or chewed-up grass. In some areas, beeswax or animal fat was used. Extra strengthening ribs could be added inside, but many Gippsland canoes relied on the natural strength of the bark.

Paddles were simple but effective — usually made from a flattened stick, with one end rounded or slightly shaped.

Built by Hand, Informed by Culture

Bark canoes were usually made by men, though women played important roles in gathering materials and in teaching younger generations. Building a canoe was not just a technical task — it was cultural work. The act of removing bark, shaping it with fire, and launching it into water was guided by knowledge systems that included respect for the tree, the river, and the ancestors.

In some communities, canoes were built for specific events — a seasonal fishing trip, a ceremonial journey, or a marriage exchange. Each canoe carried the imprint of the land it came from.

In the words of Elder Albert Mullett (2011), “The canoe is not just a canoe. It’s who we are.”

Practical Design

Gippsland bark canoes were designed for inland lakes and rivers, not open ocean. They were:

  • Lightweight: so they could be carried between waterways
  • Wide and stable: for fishing and carrying tools or children
  • Easily repaired: using natural materials found along the banks

D.E. Edwards recorded that canoes in south-east Australia could last for weeks or months, depending on usage and storage. Some were left by the river for regular use. Others were made for a single trip.

What the Canoe Trees Still Tell Us

Though the canoes themselves no longer survive, the trees do. All across Gippsland, including near Port Albert, scarred trees still mark the places where canoes were made. Their scars — vertical, oval-shaped wounds — are now protected as Aboriginal cultural heritage.

They remind us that these were not just boats, but part of a much larger system of knowledge, land care, and community.

Continuing the Practice

borun's canoeIn 2011, Albert Mullett and his grandson Steaphan Paton made the first traditional bark canoe in Gippsland in more than a century. Using red gum bark, fire, and traditional bindings, they shaped a canoe by hand and launched it on Lake Tyers.

The canoe, called Boorun’s Canoe, is now held by Museums Victoria and featured in the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre. It is a living reminder of a skill that was nearly lost — and a powerful act of cultural renewal.

In Port Albert and Beyond

Here in Port Albert, at the edge of the Tarra River, the story of bark canoe-making is close to home. This region was once a hub for water travel, with GunaiKurnai people moving between freshwater and saltwater environments by canoe.

As a maritime museum in the heart of Gippsland, we are committed to sharing these histories not only as records of the past, but as part of the ongoing story of cultural strength and continuity.

Next in the Series: River Lives – How Aboriginal Women and Men Used Canoes Differently

TL;DR

During the Early Cretaceous, Gippsland’s rift valleys nurtured some of the world’s earliest flowering plants. Fossils from the Koonwarra site reveal a lush forest filled with ferns, conifers, ginkgoes, and primitive angiosperms — as well as a diverse insect community that pollinated and fed among them. These ancient interactions shaped modern ecosystems.

How Ancient Plants Shaped Gippsland’s Lost World

Before birds took to the skies and mammals emerged from the shadows, a silent revolution unfolded on the forest floors and riverbanks of what we now call Gippsland. Somewhere between the age of dinosaurs and the last days of Gondwana, the world’s first flowering plants, angiosperms, began to bloom.

This wasn’t just a pretty change in the landscape. It was a botanical upheaval that transformed ecosystems across the planet. In the shaded, swampy valleys of the ancient Strzelecki Group, these pioneering flowers opened their petals for the first time, changing what the dinosaurs ate, what insects pollinated, and how life on Earth evolved.

Gippsland holds part of that floral origin story, etched into layers of fossil-rich rock and echoed in the temperate rainforests still clinging to its ranges today.

From Ferns to Flowers: A Global Shift

For hundreds of millions of years, the world’s green cover was dominated by spore-bearing plants, ferns, horsetails, and conifers. These plants thrived in moisture and shade, reproducing without seeds or flowers. But during the Early Cretaceous, around 130–100 million years ago, angiosperms began to appear.

The earliest flowers were small, simple, and often overlooked, not showy garden blooms, but modest experiments in reproductive innovation. Unlike conifers, which used cones and wind-blown pollen, angiosperms used insects to spread pollen more efficiently. They also enclosed their seeds in fruit, giving future plant life a new way to travel, thrive, and diversify.

This gave them a distinct advantage in the rapidly changing climates of the Cretaceous.

The Koonwarra Fossil Bed: A Snapshot of Early Flora

While the most famous Victorian dinosaur fossils come from Dinosaur Cove and Inverloch, the Koonwarra Fossil Bed, southeast of Leongatha, offers a unique look at the ecosystem plants were building.

Koonwarra is a lagerstätte, a site of exceptional fossil preservation. Its fine-grained mudstones have revealed:

  • Fossilised leaves and flowers, including angiosperms
  • Ancient insects, like beetles and wasps, likely early pollinators
  • Delicate fish skeletons and evidence of aquatic life
  • Even feathers, suggesting nearby bird-like dinosaurs

Among these discoveries are early flowering plants that help scientists track when and where angiosperms first took root in Gondwana. Their tiny, symmetrical petals and enclosed seeds mark a clear break from the world of cycads and ginkgoes.

What Grew in Ancient Gippsland?

The forests of Early Cretaceous Gippsland would have looked alien to modern eyes yet strangely familiar in places. Dominated by spore-bearing plants and early conifers, these were cool-temperate rainforests, damp and dense, filled with low light and steady rainfall. They formed part of the broader Gondwanan forest belt, a vital green lung for the southern hemisphere during the age of dinosaurs.

Fossil evidence from the Strzelecki Group and neighbouring formations such as Koonwarra reveals a wide range of prehistoric flora, including:

  • DicksoniaTree ferns, especially species similar to Dicksonia and Cyathea, populated the understorey. Their fronds, preserved in fossil beds, are nearly identical to those found in modern temperate gullies today.
  • Coniferous trees such as Bellarinea richardsii, a deciduous conifer described from the Tyers River Subgroup, are known from well-preserved foliage fossils. Other conifers like Podocarpus and Araucaria likely dominated the upper canopy, forming vertical complexity across swampy valleys.
  • cretaceous landscapeGinkgo-like plants, such as Ginkgoites australis, added to the prehistoric diversity. These broad-leaf gymnosperms, with fan-shaped leaves, were already ancient by the time flowering plants appeared.
  • Cycads and possibly Leongathia, an early gnetophyte genus, grew near rivers and floodplains. Gnetophytes are seed-bearing but unrelated to true flowering plants, representing a once-diverse group that is now reduced to a few arid-adapted species.
  • Early angiosperms are recorded at Koonwarra in the form of small, symmetrical fossil flowers and broad-leafed impressions. Though often unnamed, their form and structure point to primitive shrubs or herbs, among the earliest of their kind on the continent.
  • Aquatic plants, including algae and primitive duckweed analogues, thrived in the freshwater lakes and wetlands, often fossilised alongside fish and insects.

These forests supported a multilayered habitat with abundant resources, canopy shade, leaf litter, decaying wood, and stable water sources, ideal for a broadening array of invertebrate life.

 

Insects and Pollination: Partners in Evolution

As flowering plants began their slow but transformative spread through Gippsland’s forests, the insect world responded. Fossil beds such as those at Koonwarra have preserved a remarkable array of Early Cretaceous insects, offering one of the best windows into Gondwana’s ancient invertebrate biodiversity.

Among the named species discovered:

  • DuncanoveliaTarwinia australis, a primitive flea and one of the earliest known members of its kind, was unearthed at Koonwarra. Its presence suggests that small mammals, potential hosts, may also have lived in the area.
  • Duncanovelia extensa, a fossil water beetle, and Chauliognathus koonwarra, the world’s oldest described soldier beetle, demonstrate that the Coleoptera were already diverse and functionally specialised.
  • Eodinotoperla duncanae, a fossilised stonefly nymph, hints at cold, oxygen-rich freshwater streams, where it likely spent most of its life before maturing.
  • Koonwarraphis rotundafrons, an Early Cretaceous aphid, represents the complex evolution of plant-sap-feeding insects, perhaps already exploiting flowering shrubs.
  • Koonaspides indistinctus, a freshwater syncarid crustacean, and Victalimulus mcqueeni, a rare freshwater horseshoe crab, round out the aquatic invertebrate community, showing a well-established food web in ancient Gippsland lakes.

These insect species point to the growing complexity of pollination and plant-insect relationships. The emergence of flowers introduced nectar and pollen into the ecosystem, attracting beetles, flies, wasps, and other pollinators. Though true bees would not appear until later, these early insects were already interacting with angiosperms in ways that shaped the course of terrestrial evolution.

Climate and the Forest Environment

Early Cretaceous Gippsland had a cool-temperate, wet climate, with frequent rainfall and limited sunlight in winter months. Snow was likely, and the forest canopy created a dim, closed-in world ideal for mosses, fungi, and ferns.

Despite the cold, plants thrived due to long summer daylight hours and rich volcanic soils. The landscape included:

  • River deltas and swamps
  • Shallow lakes and boggy floodplains
  • Low hills cloaked in forest

This environment gave flowering plants the space to spread and adapt, gradually outcompeting slower-reproducing ferns and cycads in many niches.

A Living Legacy: Tarra-Bulga and Beyond

Today, places like Tarra-Bulga National Park preserve remnants of these ancient forests. While most modern trees and shrubs are newcomers in evolutionary terms, species like:

  • Myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii)
  • Sassafras, wattles, and southern laurels
  • Tree ferns and mossy undergrowth

All bear genetic and ecological links to the Cretaceous plant world. Walking through these gullies is a stroll through evolutionary history, a forest shaped over millions of years, with roots deep in Gondwana.

Why Flowers Matter

Cretaceous GippslandThe rise of flowering plants wasn’t just about colour and beauty. It changed:

  • Ecosystems, by supporting more insects and animals
  • Soils, by creating more organic matter and faster cycles
  • Climate, by influencing water retention and carbon cycling
  • Evolution, by opening up new niches for animals and insects

In Gippsland, it laid the groundwork for everything that came after: the mammals, the birds, and ultimately, us.

The Bloom That Changed the World

The ancient forests of Gippsland didn’t just hide dinosaurs and giant amphibians, they cradled the first blossoms of a planetary revolution.

Flowering plants were quiet innovators, steadily overtaking the old fern-and-conifer world, and bringing with them complexity, colour, and new life.

Next time you walk through a gully in Tarra-Bulga or see a native flower blooming near the coast, imagine its ancestors, tiny, tenacious, and quietly rewriting the rules of life beneath the feet of dinosaurs.