Interview with Russel Mullet

02 Movement

Russell talks about the evidence of First Nation peoples movement from the lowlands to the high plains

Transcription

I  guess one of the things is that you know the movement patterns and one of the things that you know i was always interested in and you know when we look at historical accounts uh there’s often a bias in it of what people are seeing and uh people think that that’s you know um a fact or a the truth and i always think okay that’s someone at a certain time that took a bit of interest in putting something down on paper uh but for me it was more around uh getting physical evidence real tangible stuff that you can talk about and so one of the ways to do that was through archaeology and the movement patterns of stone when you go to the to the high country there’s very little local resources as far as stone tools so with that in mind let’s look at the stone tools and then we we understand that the tools that were up at that altitude are very small uh in other words you know people were taking tools uh up there uh by the time they got there their tool kit was very small um but where were they coming from and so we were able to sort of look at the material raw materials and then understand the movement patterns and that aligns a little bit to boundaries because certain tools and also explain this to Roderick that certain tools were coming from different directions and I said to him well look you know the material coming on to the Bogong high plains i said is coming from the east and it’s coming from Omeo and that fits in nicely I guess with some of that historical evidence of you know wells and brown being led by uh yet Nathan people onto the bogongs but the material at Hotham is coming from the south so it’s coming from the Dargo riverside very little material is moving from the north into the alps or into that high country like the bogongs uh if you look at mount bogon itself yeah that’s uh more isolated from the southern bogon so i can refer to the northern bogong which is bogong itself and then the southern bogongs and people can’t it’s really difficult getting from the southern Bogongs to the northern section uh but it’s very easy for those coming from mount beauty side and um Estelle spur for example uh getting up onto the uh bogong and the materials are showing that so um so we can get a movement pattern and that that becomes also a line that’s evidence-based it’s not no biases with uh what people have recorded or the lack of information recorded and i think that’s the thing with it dan you know there’s very little um written history around aboriginal people yeah there’s a little bit around Omeo and there’s a little bit about um one gather those sort of locations but there’s not a lot there and so the archaeology can fill that background in and provide real sound evidence to movement patterns and that evidence all also goes down to maybe some lines on a map then now you know with Roderick and you know from uh Gunairkurnai site for example were um intermarried with you know those from the ethno-thing or even though the historical records talk about conflicts going on and there was probably more to do with the arrival of Europeans there