What lay beneath?

By peeling back the layers of the wider Port Phillip landscape to reveal what lay beneath, buried under two centuries of built form from European colonisation including houses, roads, factories and shopping centres - what would be left? Imagine for a moment a landscape that had been carefully managed for over 65,000 years by communities who were deeply and ecologically attuned to a particular ecosystem. A landscape created to appear more like a Picturesque ‘gentleman’s parkland’, where the understorey was not a dense thicket but cleared and manageable to enhance foraging; enable navigation or easy animal herding. Instead of nomadic wanderers, there were communities of people living in houses or stone huts, like those made by the Gunditjmara People at Tae’rak (Lake Condah). Some of these homes were often surrounded by agricultural pastures like we have today, where fields of indigenous grasses were cropped for their grain to make the world’s first bread – tens of thousands of years before the Ancient Egyptians were claimed to have invented bread around 8000bce. A landscape that hosted communities of people who had a sophisticated sustainable philosophy and approach to managing and caring for the lands and waters, who moved with the seasonal harvest so they did not deplete the natural resources in one location, and had an attuned understanding of the ecological fabric of the landscape. This paper considers the Port Phillip landscape of the Kulin Nation, specifically the Wadawurrung language group, and it ‘de-constructs’ this landscape to reveal an alternate civilisation, and offers thoughts as to a more attuned approach to ‘re-making’ the landscape.