Mary Gilmore and The History of Wagga Wagga - Ecological Abundance

Ecological Abundance

Mary Gilmore explained how Wiradjuri applied sanctuary laws to protect and nurture animals and plants: All billabongs, rivers, and marshes were treated as food reserves and supply depots by the natives. The bird whose name was given to a place bred there unmolested. The same with plants and animals. Thus storage never failed. According to Gilmore, Wiradjuri reserved Parkan Pregan lagoon on the Murrumbidgee River floodplain at North Wagga for pelicans, swans, and cranes. Pregan Island, a grassy space between the lagoon and the river, was reserved for the 'guriban', or bush-stone Curlew. Sanctuary regulations fostered vast populations of various species. Often as a child, Gilmore heard thunder in a cloudless sky. She remembered running terrified to her mother: And she would tell me it was swans in the distance beating their wings as they readied for flight. Later on I learned to recognise the sound, and to listen to it unafraid.

Graziers thought immense flocks of swans nesting at Wiradjuri sanctuaries a nuisance. Reeds polluted by the birds repelled cattle from drinking places. As livestock ate feathers trapped in grass, feather-balls gathered inside their stomachs, eventually killing them. Concentrated populations of swans, Gilmore noted, enriched the soil and naturally boosted its productivity. Squatters didn’t recognise or value the ecological offerings of the swans, and rejected Wiradjuri sanctuary regulations in brutal style. Mary Gilmore wrote of ‘the swan-hoppers’: Their work was to hop the swans off the nests in the breeding-season, and smash the eggs. It was filthy work; they reeked of the half-hatched and the addled, and their trousers grew stiffer and stiffer, and filthier and filthier, as the yolks and the whites of the smashed eggs set in the material of which they were made. The old cattle town of Wagga Wagga once had its swan-hoppers on all the stations round about; and the more they stank the prouder they were.