Aboriginal women as lead hunter/gatherers on early 19th Century Kangaroo Island give life indigenous rhythm
Collecting mutton bird eggs from Althorpe Island, south of Yorke Peninsula, were among practices and knowledge brought by Aboriginal women hunter and gatherers on Kangaroo Island before "official" European settlement of South Australia in 1836. The map shows the bases of the pre-settlement Kangaroo Islanders.
The Kangaroo Island sealers of the early 19th Century relied on the hunting of Aboriginal women who'd been brought to the island – something that continued after official settlement of South Australia as a British province in 1836.
The Kangaroo Island flora and fauna had much in common with coastal southern Australia and Tasmania. This enabled Aboriginal women brought there to transfer their hunting and gathering skills Kangaroo Island coast. In Aboriginal fashion, the women generally went on expeditions without men and ventured to the more rugged south coast to find abundant kangaroos, wallabies, possums, fish and shellfish.
Kangaroo Island life took on the subsistence rhythms of mainland Aboriginal life. A 1826 report described how, “when the fishing season for seals is over, these men, with the native women and their offspring, amounting in all to about 40, retire into a valley in the interior of the island, where they have a garden and huts.” The movement of the Islanders away from the coast during autumn was to avoid the fierce winter weather along the coast.
To capture wallabies, the Aboriginal women on Kangaroo Island made noose traps. The wallabies were skinned, the pelts stretched on wire or stick hoops, then bundled into lots of 50. The skins of wallabies, along with kangaroos and seals were important commodities for island trade. The wallabies’ tails were boiled, the skin scraped off, and then cooked in ashes before being eaten. The sinews from the tails were used to sew wallaby skins into rugs and coats for the Islanders.
When seals in the caverns along the Kangaroo Island coast became scarce, the Islanders used Aboriginal women’s knowledge of Bass Strait practices to go to Althorpe Island, off Yorke Peninsula, in whale boats to collect eggs of the mutton bird.
The reliance on Aboriginal hunters increased, as game became scarce from over exploitation. Wild pigs were another source of food. It seems likely that pigs existed on Kangaroo Island as early as 1803, after ae boar and sow was left by French explorer Nicholas Baudin. The last Kangaroo Island drawf emu was reportedly killed by the Aboriginal wife of an Islander several years before official settlement. The kangaroos and wallabies eventually retreated into thick scrub.
The settlers arriving on Kangaroo Island in 1836 noted the apparent absence of its kangaroo (macropus fuliginosus fulinginosus) that was still considered extinct early in the 20th Century. Although the density of people on Kangaroo Island was low, the pre-1836 inhabitants had made their mark upon the landscape.
One report from a colonist arriving at Kangaroo Island in 1836 and meeting Islanders for the first time described how “the two Islanders—clothed in opossum skin shirts, and with coats, trousers, and boots made of the skin of the red kangaroo—were mistaken for savage inhabitants of the new country.” The sealer's practice of having several Aboriginal wives would have strengthened the first assumptions of official colonists that the Islanders were all Aboriginal people.
A passenger on the Cygnet, one of South Australian first fleet of ships bring official settlers in 1836, noted that Islanders used the bush tea tree as a medicine to “purify” the blood.
The Aboriginal women on Kangaroo Island retained some of their preferences for certain types of food. An early island visitor, taken on a duck-hunting expedition near Cygnet River, reported on Aboriginal women breaking clumps off termite nests and gleefully eating handfuls of teaming ants. Another Aboriginal woman carried grubs, her great delicacy, in her frizzled hair.
