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

Built in 1864, the former Port Albert Post and Telegraph Office is Gippsland’s oldest surviving post office and a rare example of early government architecture in a small maritime town. The brick and bluestone building served Port Albert for more than a century, linking the district to Melbourne by mail and telegraph. Recognised by the National Trust and listed on the Victorian Heritage Register, it remains one of the few intact post offices of its era in Victoria. Now a carefully restored private home, it stands as a tangible reminder of how communication and community helped shape Port Albert’s identity.

On Wharf Street, overlooking the wharf, stands one of Port Albert’s most recognisable landmarks – the former Post and Telegraph Office. Built in 1864, it served the community for more than a century and is recognised as the oldest surviving post office in Gippsland and among the earliest still standing in Victoria.

Its simple, symmetrical form and arched windows give it quiet authority. In a town once built mostly of timber and corrugated iron, this solid brick and bluestone building represented permanence – a statement that Port Albert had become a place of consequence.

Preserving a Local Landmark

The post office closed in 1972 and was later sold by Australia Post. Unlike many rural post offices that were demolished or heavily altered, Port Albert’s survived largely intact. Its early recognition by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) in 1970, followed by inclusion on the Victorian Heritage Register (Hermes No. 70028), helped secure its protection.

old Port Albert Post OfficeToday it remains a private residence, carefully restored and adapted for modern use. More recent owners have retained its defining features – high ceilings, arched windows, Baltic pine floors, and solid brickwork – while adding an accommodation wing at the rear. The building sits within a 1,597 square-metre block overlooking the historic Government Wharf, its courtyard shaded by mature trees.

This sensitive reuse reflects the principles of the Burra Charter, which emphasises ongoing use as the best form of conservation. By keeping the building lived in, Port Albert has preserved not only its structure but also its connection to the community.

A Port Built on Communication

When the post office was constructed in 1864, Port Albert was Gippsland’s main seaport. Everything – settlers, livestock, goods, and mail – arrived by sea. Before the railway reached inland towns, ships brought the world to this remote edge of the colony.

Postal services had operated here since the 1840s, first from makeshift premises, then from a small timber office. The new brick building, combining postal and telegraph functions, signalled a shift from provisional settlement to permanence. It also coincided with the arrival of the telegraph line, which reached Port Albert that same year, linking the town to Melbourne in hours rather than days.

For local residents, the building represented progress. It was where shipping news arrived, government payments were made, and families collected letters from the other side of the world. The rhythm of life often turned on its deliveries – a reminder that communication, as much as trade, sustained the district.

Design and Craftsmanship

Port Albert Post OfficeThe Port Albert post office was built in a conservative Italianate style, a restrained interpretation of the architecture popular in Melbourne during the 1860s. Its symmetrical façade, bracketed eaves, and tall arched windows gave the small coastal town a touch of metropolitan civility.

Constructed from locally fired brick with bluestone detailing, the building contrasted sharply with the surrounding weatherboard cottages. Inside, the plan followed a typical layout of the period: a public office at the front, living quarters at the rear, and a telegraph room attached. No record survives of its architect, though its proportions and detailing suggest it was designed through the Public Works Department – one of a series of standardised yet regionally adapted buildings produced for frontier settlements.

The use of durable materials reflected both confidence and necessity. The coastal environment demanded strength, and the government wanted longevity for what it saw as essential infrastructure. A building of this quality in a town of fewer than 500 people made a clear statement about Port Albert’s standing in the colony.

The Telegraph Era

The opening of the telegraph service transformed communication across Gippsland. Operators at Port Albert tapped messages to and from Sale, Alberton, and Melbourne, reporting shipping movements, weather, and emergencies. Telegrams Australia records it among the earliest telegraph offices in the region.

The system turned the post office into a communications hub – a single-room link between a remote district and the capital. Within months of its opening, it was handling everything from maritime news to government dispatches. The speed of information changed how the community functioned; decisions that once took weeks could now be made in hours.

Decline and Endurance

Port Albert Post OfficePort Albert’s prosperity peaked in the 1860s. As railways reached inland towns, trade routes shifted, and larger ships bypassed the shallow inlet. The port declined, but the post office endured.

For more than a hundred years, residents came here for their letters, pensions, and newspapers. By the mid-20th century, the building remained largely unaltered – a functional public office with a distinctive sense of place. Photographs from 1949 show the same brick façade, the same view across the harbour, and the same quiet reliability it offered from the beginning.

When it finally closed in 1972, the closure marked the end of an era rather than a loss. The building passed into private hands but continued to serve the town in a different way – as a reminder of how central communication once was to daily life.

Part of a Larger Story

The former post office is one of several surviving nineteenth-century civic and government-era buildings in the Wharf Street precinct, standing alongside the former Bank of Victoria (now the Maritime Museum), the former Customs House site, and the historic Government Wharf with its early sheds and maritime structures.

Within a state context, only a handful of comparable post offices from the 1860s survive largely intact – among them those at Camperdown (1863), Heathcote (1861), and Port Fairy (1868). Port Albert’s building therefore represents one of the earliest regional examples still in use, and the only one of its age remaining in Gippsland.

Its continued presence demonstrates how architectural conservation often relies on community pride. Local ownership, early recognition, and practical reuse have protected the building more effectively than legislation alone.

2024 former Port Albert Post OfficeAn Enduring Connection

Viewed from the harbour road, the former post office looks much as it did 160 years ago. The brickwork has weathered, but the proportions remain the same. It stands as both a home and a local landmark – not a museum piece, but a working part of the town’s fabric.

The building’s survival mirrors Port Albert’s own story: shaped by the tides of commerce and change, yet sustained by care and continuity. It reminds us that heritage is not only about preserving the past, but about maintaining the structures that continue to tell it.

In Port Albert, the old post office does just that – a quiet witness to how this coastal town once reached out to the world, and how it still keeps that connection alive.

 

References

  • Victorian Heritage Database, Hermes No. 70028, Former Port Albert Post Office
  • National Trust of Australia (Victoria), File FN 2732 (1970)
  • Graeme Butler, Port Albert Conservation Study (1982)
  • Guidelines for the Assessment of Heritage Planning Applications: Port Albert & District (Wellington Shire, 2002)
  • Telegrams Australia, Telegraph Offices: Gippsland South
  • Kenneth Cox, Land of the Pelican: The Story of Yarram and District (1982)