Mary Gilmore and The History of Wagga Wagga - Destruction of The Sanctuaries

Destruction of The Sanctuaries

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, as farmland spread and settlement intensified, Wiradjuri could no longer enforce sanctuary law or maintain established ways of engaging with country. The natural productivity and bounty of land and river systems declined. Even though fewer people now lived beside the Murrumbidgee River, fish and freshwater lobsters became scarce, Mary Gilmore explained: I do not remember in just what year it was, but the chief of the tribe at Wagga Wagga in talking to my father, said that, white settlement increasing along the river, it was not only fished in by the settlers, but fished in season and out, so that the breeding-stocks were diminishing as well as the grown fish which the blacks’ laws allowed them to take for sustenance.

When Mary Gilmore first knew Parkan Pregan lagoon beside the Murrumbidgee at North Wagga, it was simply covered with pelicans, teal, duck, cranes, and swans; but being specially a pelican sanctuary, these birds predominated. When I first went to the Wagga Wagga school, as we trudged in from Brucedale Road, where I remembered clouds of them there were seventy only, then forty, then twenty, then four, and then there were no pelicans at all. The swans went till there were but two; the ducks came only at night—the few that survived.

Wiradjuri complained with bitterness to Donald Cameron, Mary Gilmore's father, about the destruction of native animal populations by settlers. Cameron listened and acted. He argued for the maintenance of Wiradjuri sanctuaries on Deepwater and Ganmain stations, to the west of Wagga, ‘to be held as such in perpetuity for the people.’ Cameron and several other Wagga men tried to enforce the wide boundaries of an emu sanctuary on Eunonyhareenyha station, northeast of Wagga. The Wiradjuri placename ‘Eunonyhareenyha’, according to Mary Gilmore, meant ‘the breeding place of the emus’. For a short while, the men convinced people not to shoot emus on Eunonyhareenyha, or to hunt there with dogs at nesting time. When Donald Cameron counted the once numerous emu flock inside the sanctuary, only a few hundred birds remained. ‘Then’, wrote Gilmore, ‘the town growing, and land-settlement increasing, there was objection made that one of the sweetest spots for grazing should be set aside for birds, when selectors could farm and make homes there.’ Department of Lands officials opened to selection the part of Eunonyhareenyha ‘semi-reserved’ for emus. Donald Cameron spoke with the station manager, who then erected notices banning shooting and dogs. Unluckily the eggs were forgotten, wrote Gilmore of the action to protect the emus, so next year when we drove out to see them there were only about half a dozen flocks of young birds to be found in the whole area. The nests had been raided everywhere.

Donald Cameron made other attempts to reserve land for wildlife. His daughter remembered him returning home excited one evening, ‘saying that the larks were coming back again.’ On a grassy flat beside Houlaghan's Creek, northwest of Wagga, Donald Cameron counted a hundred groundlark nests. Flocks of groundlarks nesting among tussocks had vanished in recent years, as agricultural development erased and modified grassy woodland. Mary Gilmore recalled how the brown, mottled birds shot into the air when disturbed, and ‘glittered like sparks in the sun, as they mounted and sang in their myriads.’ Her father built a log fence around the creek flat to exclude horses and cattle. Grass tussocks thickened, sheltering the nesting larks. Travellers on a passing road noticed the dense grasses, and put horses inside the enclosure to graze. Donald Cameron found the nests trampled, the air above empty and silent. The event pained him: After that father went by a different road to town. He had loved the larks, and they were gone. As to the fence, it became a neighbour’s firewood.