This film is centred on a beautiful and complex map with the ungainly name of Plan of the General Survey from the Town of Malmsbury to the Porcupine Inn, from the sources of Forest Creek to Golden Point, shewing the Alexandrian Range, also Sawpit Gully, Bendigo and Bullock Creeks.
What is immediately compelling about the map is its ability to reveal what the landscape of central Victoria looked like when Europeans first saw it.
The map can help our imagination lift away the rectangular and linear grid of fence lines, paddocks, house blocks, roads, irrigation channels and power lines that characterises our modern society and glimpse the land as it was before European occupation. What the map allows us to see is not pristine primordial wilderness or untrammelled nature, but a humanly made landscape.
The map reveals to us an Aboriginal landscape shaped over many generations by deliberate decision, expert knowledge and precise technical intervention. The main tool of Aboriginal landscape management was the firestick. Areas of good soil were regularly and carefully burned to create grasslands or open woodlands, to encourage the breeding of kangaroos and emus and the growth of murnong (yam daisy) and other edible plants.
Looked at one way, the map tells the history of great settler achievements; if we think about it from the perspective of Aboriginal people, however, it represents a tragic moment of cataclysmic destruction. The map challenges us to acknowledge the interdependence of both realities. In the period the map was made, politicians in London and colonists in Victoria, knew what the moral issues and practical consequences of this reality were and debated them in parliaments, the pulpit and newspapers.
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TRANSCRIPT
[The Map and Remembering]
[NARRATOR]
This map has a big name.
[Title appears on map]
[NARRATOR]
A 'Plan of the General Survey from the Town of Malmsbury to the Porcupine Inn, from the sources of Forest Creek to Golden Point, showing the Alexandrian Range, also Sawpit Gully, Bendigo and Bullock Creeks'.
[Aerial view of the coast of Victoria]
[NARRATOR]
It covers a big area of Victoria, from Sunbury and Mount Macedon in the south to Rochester and Fernihurst in the north, and from the Campaspe River in the east to the Loddon River in the west.
[Close-up on the old map]
[NARRATOR]
The map was made in 1852 by the staff of the Surveyor-General's Department, especially by Surveyor-General Robert Hoddle and Deputy Surveyor-General William Urquhart.
[Painting of men surveying]
[NARRATOR]
It represents 15 years of arduous field work.
[Close-up on old map]
[NARRATOR]
Alfred Selwyn, newly appointed chief geologist to the colony of Victoria, took this map with him into the field in 1853 and made his own rough notes about the geological structure of the country.
[Green and pink areas on the map]
[NARRATOR]
Selwyn also added to the map the green and pink colour-coding to represent the geological structure and history of the landscape. The green represents the basalt rock.
[Close-up on Green Hill]
[NARRATOR]
Green Hill, near Malmsbury, is this little spot on the map.
[Vision of current countryside landscape]
[NARRATOR]
From around five million years ago, this little extinct volcano, in a series of eruptions, poured out billions of tonnes of lava, filling the old valleys and covering the sandstone hills to form these extensive volcanic plains.
[Vision of Turpins Falls today]
[NARRATOR]
The depth of the basalt can be seen here at Turpins Falls. It goes from way below the bottom of this deep pool right up to the horizon line.
[Close-up on pink area on old map]
[NARRATOR]
Selwyn used pink to denote the granite country centred on Mount Alexander. This marks the beginning of scientific geology in Australia. The map is a beautiful work of art and the credit for this must go to one of the survey officer's draftsmen - CAC Bayly.
[Close-up on CAC Bayly's handwriting on map]
[NARRATOR]
The evenness and clarity of his handwriting, even where the size is minute, is breathtaking. He must have been proud of his work for he signed it in writing so tiny that it is at once extremely modest and a display of his virtuosity.
[Close-up on CAC Bayly's signature]
[Vision of the entire map]
[NARRATOR]
People love this map. It is fascinating, enchanting, magical. It looks so calm, still and beautiful. It invites us in to explore its intriguing, detailed descriptions, to go searching for familiar points that allow us to link the world of 1852 to the familiar present. It allows us to become time travellers. We go looking for the beginning point of our stories - Major Mitchell's story of exploration, the story of the squatters, the story of gold, the stories of Bendigo, Malmsbury, Carisbrook, and places not yet named, whole areas yet to be surveyed. The map is seductive and encourages us to linger and bathe in a soft, comfortable and comforting, nostalgic light. But this is very paradoxical. We need to break this spell.
[Painting of a countryside scene with white and Indigenous people]
[NARRATOR]
1835 - John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner of the Port Phillip Association arrive and establish a beachhead, later, Melbourne.
[Painting of 1836 Melbourne]
[NARRATOR]
1836 - Melbourne, population 200.
[Painting of 1839 Melbourne]
[NARRATOR]
1839 - Melbourne, population more than 2,000.
[Aerial view of 21st-century Melbourne]
[NARRATOR]
21st-century Melbourne - over four million.
[Map of the purchased & measured lands counties, parishes of the Melbourne & Geelong districts]
[NARRATOR]
Thomas Ham's 1849 'Map of the purchased and measured lands, counties and parishes, of the Melbourne and Geelong districts' takes us back to the violent moment of origin, the springing forth of modern European culture in this place. It represents the moment when British people burst into this part of the world and suddenly, utterly transformed it.
[Close-up on the Plan of General Survey map]
[NARRATOR]
Our 'Plan of General Survey' map is a plan for the spread of the same pattern. By the time it was made, there were over 100,000 Europeans in Victoria. Now this same region of central Victoria looks like this.
[Current aerial view of Victoria]
[NARRATOR]
From space, we can see how our history, our modern culture, inherited from Europe, has printed itself on the landscape of this place.
[Plan of General Survey map]
[NARRATOR]
But the magic of this map, made in 1852, is that it enables us to look back behind this moment of origin to see the landscape as it was before Europeans transformed it, which shows us the landscape made by Aboriginal people, by the Dja Dja Wurrung clans in this region.
[Aboriginal people camp in the bush]
[NARRATOR]
50 years of scientific and historical research has told us that Aboriginal people used the technology of systematic burning to create grasslands and open woodlands on all the areas of good soil.
[Vision of trees and yam daisy]
[NARRATOR]
This created an ecology that supported large mobs of kangaroos and emus and grew fields of yellow-flowered murnong, or yam daisy.
[Close-up on the map]
[NARRATOR]
These beautiful descriptions of the vegetation and soils follow the sweep of the landscape. They give us detailed understanding of how this Aboriginal-created and managed landscape looked when Europeans came into it.
[Vision of current soils]
[NARRATOR]
The best soils of this region are those of volcanic origin.
[Close-up on the map: 'Chocolate soil']
[NARRATOR]
This is how they were shown on the map.
[Vision of green grass]
[NARRATOR]
Often we assume that all the open country was cleared by the European Acts, but here is what Major Mitchell saw from the top of Mount Greenock.
[Black-and-white panoramic sketch]
[NARRATOR]
He drew this 180-degree sketch showing the cleared volcanic hills. He called them the 'Mammeloid Hills'.
[Views of the Mammeloid Hills today]
[NARRATOR]
If we stand on the same hill today, we can see a very similar pattern of clear country and patches of forest. The forest is on the poor sandstone country. Major Mitchell described the country in the following terms - 'Coming through similar grassy valleys, we approach two lofty, smooth round hills and I enjoyed such a charming view eastward from the summit as can but seldom fall to the lot of the explorer of new countries. The hills consisted entirely of lava and I named them, from their peculiar shape, the "Mammeloid Hills".'
[Close-up on a river on the map]
[NARRATOR]
The alluvial soils on the vast river plains and creek flats were kept open by Aboriginal burning practices. The map has these descriptions.
['Extensive level rich grassy Plains']
[NARRATOR]
They looked like this then.
[Old painting of the plains]
[NARRATOR]
In the 1840s, squatter Henry Godfrey drew the extensive grassy plains with their belts of box, she-oaks and Murray pines.
[Current images of the plains]
[NARRATOR]
The Boort Plains look like this today.
[Old painting of the plains]
[NARRATOR]
The rolling granite country was described by early Europeans as having a park-like, open woodland appearance. In many places, it is similar today. It was these grasslands that drew Europeans here.
[Focus on the map]
[NARRATOR]
So the map can remind us of something we usually prefer to forget - that our society, our modern Australian way of life is founded on an act of violent invasion and dispossession.
[Old paintings of guards and Indigenous people]
[NARRATOR]
In 1835, there were a handful of British people in Victoria.
[Old painting of houses in Victoria]
[NARRATOR]
Just 16 years later, there were over 100,000.
[Old painting of Aboriginal people's ceremony]
[NARRATOR]
In 1835, there were around 20,000 Aboriginal people in Victoria.
[Sepia photograph of Aboriginal family]
[NARRATOR]
By 1852, their numbers had fallen to around 3,000.
[Old painting of sheep stations]
[NARRATOR]
By 1852, there were over 1,000 sheep stations, outstation huts, and roadside inns spread right across Victoria. There were six million sheep and 400,000 cattle.
[Close-up of all stations on the map]
[NARRATOR]
We can see this new reality on the map. Aitken's Station and Huts, Argyle Inn, Barker's Station, and Hawkins Inn, Birch's Station, Bryant's Station, Simson's Hut, Carlsruhe Inn and Dryden's Station, Langdon's Homestead, Orr's, Stratford Lodge. There are many more stations, huts and inns on this map. They were all occupied by armed British people and they commanded all the places where there was good water and grass.
[Cover of James Boyce's book, '1835']
[NARRATOR]
Historian James Boyce argues that the invasion of Victoria was one of the fastest and most comprehensive conquests in the history of the British Empire.
[Close-up on areas of the map]
[NARRATOR]
This quiet, calm, beautiful map can show us many big stories. We can see the vast story of geology and climate here. It's the story of the Earth that has provided the opportunities and set the limits for all the human societies that have existed here.
[Images of modern town in Victoria]
[NARRATOR]
It does indeed show us the beginnings of the great stories of modern Australia as they unfolded here in this place.
[Black-and-white painting of white officers killing Aboriginal people]
[NARRATOR]
But it can also help us remember some terrible, disturbing things about our history that should not be forgotten.
[Modern, colour-coded graphs]
[NARRATOR]
Are these the new invasion and dispossession maps? These are the government maps of the climate-change projections for Victoria in 2070.
[Vision of the plains]
[NARRATOR]
Today we stand at a point of choice about what level of devastating climate change we will cause.
[Close-up on 'Aboriginal Station' on the map]
[NARRATOR]
If the map can help us remember the shameful story that should not be forgotten, it may also help us think ahead and embrace the changes necessary for the happiness of our grandchildren.
[Modern windmills]
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