19/01/2015: Taste of Summer: Eel season in south-west Victoria, Australia

Under the Blackwood trees, the rain and wind barely mar the surface of the swollen creek.

Tyson Lovett-Murray, 25, up to his waist in water, feels his way through mud with his bare feet. Something moves. He recoils.

In one hand, the aluminium fishing spear is poised, ready.

Bubbles ooze up. On the bank, a wise crayfish scuttles away and the tall Cumbungi reeds sway.

For Gunditjmara aboriginal people like Mr Lovett-Murray, summer is eel season.

Now is the time to catch the sinuous fish as they wend through the waterways and creeks of the volcanic plains near Portland, in Victoria's south-west, The Age Victoria reports.

Aboriginal eel trap

Eels have always been prized by the Gunditjmara.

Cured in Mallee gum smoke, for millennia they were traded with indigenous neighbours for valuable razor-sharp flint, says elder Denis Rose, a project manager at the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation.

Today most people hunt eels with spears or rods. But when Mr Rose was young, he fished at the full moon with his uncles using a stocking stuffed with worms and hung in the water.

"I remember uncles flicking them back over their shoulders and kids running around catching them," he says.

Summer is also the time for bush fruit. Mr Rose snacks on the orange-hued Cherry Ballart and the gelatinous Pig Face fruit when he camps at the Fitzroy River to catch bream.  

In a few months the adult eels – some more than 25 years old – will gather at the mouth of the Fitzroy.

The shifting tides move the sand from the river's mouth and the eels swim into the sea.

Little is known about the journey to their spawning grounds in the Coral Sea around Vanuatu. The fertilised eggs and baby "glass" eels drift back on the currents to the Victorian coastline and swim up its rivers: the Barwon, the Glenelg, the Fitzroy.  

Gunditjmara country sits on a great sweep of ancient lava that flowed from Budj Bim (Mount Eccles), and into the sea, leaving a land blessed with spring-fed creeks that never run dry.

This rich country was the site of one of the world's oldest aquaculture systems, dated at more than 6000 years.

Its residents modified the wetland system into pools, runnels and stone traps to farm and harvest eels and fish.

The foundations of circular stone huts, once home to a permanent village for thousands of Gunditjmara people, can be seen today at Tyrendarra, an indigenous protected area open to the public.

Elder Eileen Alberts threads her way through the stone foundations and picks a long strand of ‘puunyuurt’ reed, traditionally used to make baskets to catch the fish as they moved through the aquaculture system.

She splits it with the edge of a sparkly red nail (she had them done for her son's graduation) and begins a spiralling basket stitch.

Ms Alberts was taught basket weaving by her auntie, Connie Hart, who learned in secret watching her older female relatives.

Gunditjmara who passed on indigenous language or cultural traditions at the Lake Condah Mission were punished, and fear remained long after the mission was closed.

"When Aunty Connie taught me [in the '80s], we had to lock the doors and pull the blinds because she was still scared someone would come to take the kids away," Ms Alberts says.

Dressed in a pair of gumboots emblazoned with the word "Deadly", Tyson Lovett-Murray says his community's native title win and land buybacks mean young people have far more access to their country than the generation before them.

If a Gunditjmara person fancies eel today, young people like Mr Lovett-Murray (a project officer at Gunditj-Mirring) will be called on to stalk the creeks and catch a feed.

"For a lot of mob who face hardship and social inequalities, maintaining cultural practices on-country is the best way to keep you healthy; it's a safe place," he says.

Read the article HERE.

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