River Lives: Gender and Canoes in Gunaikurnai Waters

On the still waters of the Gippsland Lakes, a woman once paddled a small bark canoe, a child seated in front of her, a small fire lit in the rear for cooking shellfish. Her husband, perhaps further out in deeper water, stood poised in a larger canoe, spear ready. Both moved with confidence and grace, each performing roles learned through generations of lived experience. These were not just family outings — they were part of an organised and adaptive water-based economy, shaped by Country and culture.

In this third article of our series, we explore how Aboriginal men and women used canoes in different, complementary ways. Drawing from detailed observations by ethnographers like D.E. Edwards (1972), and from cultural knowledge maintained by GunaiKurnai people, we highlight how watercraft were embedded in everyday life, and how those practices differed according to gender, age, and region.

Canoes in Daily Life

In communities across south-eastern Australia — including Gippsland — canoes were central to subsistence. Men and women used them not just for movement but to access and gather key resources.

Men generally used canoes for:

Spear fishing in deeper waters
Hunting waterbirds with throwing sticks
Longer-distance travel between family groups
Transporting materials and trade goods

Women typically used canoes for:

Harvesting shellfish (mussels, pipis) in shallow areas
Collecting water plants, such as cumbungi (bulrush) and nardoo
Caring for young children during travel
Setting eel traps and baskets

One of the more remarkable practices involved women balancing small cooking fires at the rear of their canoes. These fires were used to prepare food while out gathering. D.E. Edwards documented this in several south-east Australian communities, noting the canoe’s broad design allowed for safe fire use without tipping — a testament to Indigenous knowledge of stability and function.

Gendered Knowledge and Craft

Canoe use was part of a broader system of gendered roles. While men typically built the canoes, women were closely involved in their maintenance and use. Knowledge was passed down within family lines — grandfathers to grandsons, grandmothers to granddaughters.

Each group’s techniques were shaped by their local waters:

On Lake Tyers and the Mitchell River, women worked in wide, stable canoes well suited for still water.
In faster-flowing rivers like the Tarra, men used narrower, more manoeuvrable craft for precision spear fishing.

This division of labour was not rigid — roles could overlap, and everyone learned to handle a canoe from a young age. Children joined their parents early and quickly developed balance and coordination, often helping paddle or manage catch.

Canoes and Ceremony

Beyond everyday use, canoes held cultural significance.

In some communities, bark canoes featured in initiation rites — young men would paddle to a ceremonial ground, or prove their skill on the water. Funerary practices also sometimes involved canoes: either to transport the deceased or, symbolically, as vessels to carry a spirit home.

In oral histories and songlines, canoes appear frequently as markers of journey, movement, and transformation. Among the GunaiKurnai, the creation story of Borun the Pelican begins with a canoe — one that carried him from the high country to the sea. At Port Albert, where the Tarra River meets the ocean, Borun first heard the footsteps of Tuk the Musk Duck. That canoe was not just a vehicle — it was a part of identity, kinship, and law.

Seasonal Movement and Canoe Clans

GunaiKurnai people moved seasonally across their Country. Canoes enabled this movement — allowing families to follow eel migrations, reach coastal fisheries, or attend gatherings. Clans such as the Brataualung and Tatungalung, who lived near water year-round, had particularly strong canoe traditions.

David Payne (2021) notes that canoe use was deeply embedded in the landscape: “Waterways were living corridors, and the canoes were adapted to each bend, bank, and beach.”

Women’s Economic Role on Water

Anthropological records and early settler diaries (though limited in scope) confirm the important economic role of women in canoe-based resource collection.

At Lake Tyers Mission, women were known to maintain fishing spots and pass down net-making skills.
In eastern Gippsland, eel farming and basket trapping were often led by women — requiring knowledge of seasonal water flow, lunar cycles, and plant-based construction.

This contradicts stereotypes that placed men as the primary providers. In reality, the canoe was a shared tool in a shared economy.

Children and Learning

From a young age, children were involved in canoe life. Small bark sheets were often used as toy canoes, and games on the river became training in balance and control. By adolescence, both boys and girls could paddle independently and participate in fishing or gathering.

Elders taught through observation, correction, and storytelling — and these lessons were layered with cultural knowledge. To know how to handle a canoe was to know how to read the river, how to behave respectfully, and how to care for Country.

Then and Now

With colonisation, many of these practices were disrupted. Canoes were often replaced by European-style boats, and many women were confined to missions or displaced from their waters. However, knowledge persisted in fragments — through oral tradition, memory, and place.

Today, organisations like GLaWAC (Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation) support cultural renewal projects, including those that bring young people back onto water. Events like the revival of Boorun’s Canoe in 2011 honour both male and female roles in canoe culture. Elders, rangers, and artists work together to ensure that the next generation not only paddles again, but understands the stories carried in each stroke.

In the Museum Context

At the Port Albert Maritime Museum, we view canoes not just as objects of engineering, but as reflections of social life. By understanding how different members of the community used them — and the knowledge systems behind them — we deepen our understanding of this region’s maritime heritage.

The rivers, lakes and inlets of Gippsland remember these movements. So too do the scarred trees, the fishing grounds, and the stories passed on by Elders.

Next in the Series: From River to Ruin — How Colonisation Disrupted Watercraft Traditions

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:

Tree 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.
Ginkgo-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:

Tarwinia 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 Gippsland The 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.