From River to Ruin: Colonisation and Bark Canoes in Gippsland

On the banks of the Mitchell River or by the edge of Lake Wellington, there are still trees that carry the long vertical scars of bark removed for canoe-making. Yet the canoes themselves — once so common on these waters — are largely gone. Their absence speaks volumes.

With the arrival of British colonisation in the early 19th century, Aboriginal life in Gippsland and across Australia was profoundly disrupted. Canoes, as tools and symbols of mobility, were among the many cultural practices impacted. In this fourth article of our series, we explore how colonisation affected Aboriginal watercraft traditions — from forced displacement and mission life to environmental destruction and loss of intergenerational knowledge. Yet, despite this, canoe culture has not disappeared. Traces remain, and in some places, revivals are underway.

Before Contact: A Maritime Lifeway

Prior to European arrival, Aboriginal peoples across Australia used a wide range of watercraft — bark canoes in the south and east, dugouts in the north, reed rafts in arid zones, and outriggers in the Torres Strait. In Gippsland, the GunaiKurnai used bark canoes to move between lakes, fish in rivers, and transport families during seasonal movement.

This maritime culture was embedded in every aspect of life: economy, travel, ceremony, and story. Knowledge of canoe construction and use was passed from generation to generation, often linked with lore and language.

The Disruption Begins

The early years of colonisation in Gippsland were marked by violence, land seizure, and forced relocation. For the GunaiKurnai, the arrival of settlers in the 1840s and ’50s led to dispossession of Country, disruption of mobility, and restrictions on access to traditional waterways.

Three major forces eroded canoe culture:

  1. Environmental destruction
    Logging operations removed many of the old-growth trees needed for canoe bark. Wetlands were drained for grazing, and rivers were diverted or polluted by mining and farming activity.
  2. Displacement and missions
    People were moved off Country and placed on missions like Lake Tyers or Ramahyuck. Access to traditional canoe sites was denied, and cultural practices were often actively discouraged or forbidden.
  3. Tool shift and cultural suppression
    With the introduction of metal tools, new fishing gear, and European boats, traditional canoes were increasingly replaced — not always by choice. Aboriginal people were pressured to abandon “native” technologies in favour of settler norms.

By the late 19th century, canoe-making in many parts of Victoria had ceased. Only remnants survived — in stories, in trees, and in rare colonial records.

Silencing the River

Mission policies, particularly from the 1860s onwards, focused on assimilation. At Lake Tyers, GunaiKurnai families were relocated and made to follow strict daily routines. The use of language and traditional crafts — including canoe construction — was often restricted.

Yet even under these conditions, knowledge was sometimes passed quietly. Children were taught to fish. Scarred trees were remembered. Women continued to weave baskets and set traps, and some Elders continued to speak of the old canoe routes.

Survival in Fragments

While few physical canoes remain from the 20th century, cultural records have helped preserve fragments of memory:

  • D.E. Edwards (1972) recorded interviews with Elders from Victoria and NSW, who described how canoes were built and used.
  • Scarred trees in Gippsland, especially along the Mitchell, Tambo, and Snowy Rivers, remain visible and protected under heritage laws.
  • Early photographs, such as those by Nicholas Caire (c.1886), show bark canoes still in use in eastern Victoria.

These fragments became the foundation for cultural revival work in the 21st century.

Cultural Revival

In 2011, the making of Boorun’s Canoe by Elder Albert Mullett and artist Steaphan Paton marked a major turning point in Gippsland’s cultural history. Using traditional techniques and materials, the canoe was launched on Lake Tyers in front of community and Elders.

It was the first traditional bark canoe made in the region in over a century.

The project was not just about a canoe — it was about restoring connection. Connection to Country, to culture, and to identity.

“We were taken off the land and away from our waters. But we haven’t forgotten who we are. This canoe helps bring that back.”
— Albert Mullett, 2011

Today, organisations like GLaWAC support this work through ranger programs, cultural education, and heritage protection.

The Role of Museums

Museums have long held Aboriginal objects, often disconnected from their communities. But that is changing. Institutions like Museums Victoria have partnered with GunaiKurnai representatives to co-curate exhibitions, return stories to Country, and use items like Boorun’s Canoe to educate.

At Port Albert Maritime Museum, we recognise the importance of telling not just the technical story of canoes, but the social, historical, and political context of their disruption — and return.

What the Trees Still Say

Scarred canoe trees are not silent. Each one marks a place where knowledge was acted upon, where a community shaped the land to meet its needs. These trees — many near Port Albert and across Gippsland — stand as quiet witnesses to change and continuity.

They remind us that Aboriginal maritime culture was never lost — only interrupted.

Next in the Series: Reviving the Craft: How Canoe-Making Returned to GunaiKurnai Country

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.