Aboriginal people managed the place we now know as Victoria for millennia.

Waterways were a big part of that management. Rivers and waterholes, part of the spiritual landscape, were valuable sources of food and resources, and rivers were a useful way to travel. Thus skills such as swimming, fishing, canoe building and navigation were important.

This lithograph is based on a painting by Eugene Von Guerard of Victorian Aborigines on the Mitta Mitta River with the Bogong Ranges in the background. It harks back to an imagined pristine, more noble, time before colonisation. The Upper Mitta Mitta, in North-Eastern Victoria, was probably the country of Dhudhuroa and Jaitmathang speaking peoples before the new wave of settlers arrived.