Special talk at Riddells Creek Landcare's AGM, Saturday, 15 August: AGM 2:00; Talk 3:30: How did Aboriginal Australians manage their knowledge of plants and animals critical to their survival? What does this tell us about ancient monuments like Stonehenge?

Bill Hall's Introduction to Lynne Kelly's

Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies

 

On July 3 at La Trobe University, Castlemaine local naturalist and author Lynne Kelly launched her new book, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies. 


In her talk Lynne will explain how her research and discussions with Aboriginal Australians about how they maintained their detailed knowledge of the detailed natural histories of a wide variety of animals and plants gave her the insight to see how Stonehenge functioned that is different from any of the many ideas that have been put forward to now. Lynne is a great story teller, and I am sure her talk will be entertaining as well as important.

Personally, I am convinced that Lynne Kelly's work will revolutionize our understandings of ancient monuments like Stonehenge and how our prehistoric ancestors made the transition from hunting and gathering to managing agrarian city-states.

 
Dr Kelly is a science writer who started her career as a school teacher with a background in engineering, physics, mathematics, information technology and gifted education. This made her a very good story teller. She then went on to write 10 books for education before turning her hand to popular science titles. Lynne is also a skeptic who became an amateur magician and memory specialist to better debunk mystical and paranormal clap-trap. Her first popular science book, The Skeptics Guide to the Paranormal (Allen & Unwin - click book pictures for more information about each book from Lynne's web site) explains how the magician's tricks and feats of memory work.

 

For her next two books, also with Allen & Unwin, Crocodile: evolution's greatest survivor - looking at 23 species of crocodiles around the world but focusing on the two Australian species, and Spiders: learning to love them - an award winning look at their natural history, Lynne researched the surprisingly detailed and accurate natural history knowledge recorded in the Aboriginal dreaming.

     

On a holiday in England Lynne's husband, Damian, a prominent local birder, archaeologist and IT specialist decided they would have to visit Stonehenge. Lynne tells me she was initially reluctant to go with him because she was so put off by all the nutty and mystical explanations put forward to explain why the monument was actually constructed. Trying to answer why people with no more sophisticated tools than stones, bones and antlers would expend the huge amount of effort required to dig huge ditches and drag stones weighing many, many tons from than 100 km distant, certainly provided an opportunity for fanciful explanations.

Lynne and Damian at Stonehenge

However, Lynne's skepticism, dabbling in magic and mnemonics, and understanding of how Aboriginal Australians used tracks through the landscape to manage their detailed and extensive knowledge of natural history, geography, bush medicine, astronomy, etc. - all without writing - prepared her to see in a totally new light why people would want to build something like Stonehenge. She brought her idea back to Australia, and completed her PhD at La Trobe University in 2013 researching and testing her explanation against observations how pre-literate (primary oral) people around the world managed and transmitted large bodies of knowledge that could only be held in living memories.

In her talk, Lynne will explain how ancient monuments such as Stonehenge act as mnemonic devices in formal knowledge management systems. Systems like Stonehenge helped prehistoric cultures accumulate and transmit the great increases in new knowledge they required to make the transition from hunting and gathering to specialized trades and roles in settled agricultural communities and city-states.


From my own point of view, it took Lynne about 10 minutes to convince me that she had made a great and revolutionary discovery. I have been working for some time on my own book charting the evolution of tools and humans' capacity to manage knowledge from when our ancestors began hunting and gathering on the African savannas up to now. The only transition I could not easily explain was how hunters and gatherers could accumulate enough practical knowledge to take up agriculture and build towns and small cities without any concept of writing.

Lynne's idea that circular monuments allowed people moving from a mobile existence across broad landscapes where they indexed their mnemonic songs to conspicuous sites, to a sedentary existence in much smaller areas. The circles with their stones and pillars also provided memorable locations that could be used to index stories containing essential survival knowledge.

The entirely practical explanation of Stonehenge's functions makes sense of a lot of puzzling observations in prehistoric anthropology and archaeology, and from my own investigations, also coordinates very well with how memory is organized in the human brain.

Understanding how Stonehenge was used by pre-literate cultures to organize and index important survival knowledge also emphasizes in ways European Australians could not otherwise understand just how important their association with "country" was to our Original Australians. Their Country provided the loci for indexing their memories of natural history, technology and culture in song-lines.

Oh Deer

Snapped by Gill Best, on the north bank of Sandy Creek, late July 2015.

Places We Love - Invitation to a Conversation

Are you concerned that the natural places you love are vulnerable?
Do you want to see more assured protection in law and in the policies of government, including local government?

The Places We Love alliance has invited people to step forward, and start talking to each other about a) what they care about in the places they love, and why, and b) what would better protect those places.

The alliance is made up of 42 state and national environmental groups. I heard about it through Michael Pulsford at Australian Conservation Foundation, who is supporting conversations in the marginal Federal electorates of McEwen (yep, that's Riddells) and Deakin (over the east side of Melbourne).

The change strategy is to connect numbers in communities with advocacy at national level for stronger laws protecting natural places. The alliance formed when the Commonwealth started talking about giving back decisions under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 2000 to the States. The EPBC has often been the only thing between developers and a lot of Australia's wild or definitely-wilder-than-urban places.

The alliance has developed an agenda for the conversation, which I learned by being part of a conversation Michael Pulsford ran a few weeks ago. Here's a photo of Michael (on the right, and that's Helen from the Daly Reserve group in the middle, and Chris who's a member of 350.org and lives in Diggers Rest).

Speaking personally, I want a way to influence policy, so I'm up for hosting some conversations. The simplest next step after the conversation is staying tuned to what the alliance does at national and State level, and they're offering to keep us informed.

The agenda is simple, but rich: first the Heart (What places do you care about? Why?), then the Head (what enviro issues do you care most strongly about?), and we close with the Hands (what needs doing on those issues?).

As the host, I document our views, and that goes into the Places We Love synthesis of views at the local level.

We need 2 hours for the conversation, and I'm suggesting my place at 288 Gap Road (the house beside the winery), 7-9 this Thursday evening 16th July. My living area has room for 6 people round the fire, plus me, so email or phone to say yes if you want to be in it. 

If you can't do that time, but want the conversation, call or write and we'll find an additional time.

Warm regards
Ross Colliver, 0411 226519  ross.colliver@bigpond.com

Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies

Dr Lynne Kelly’s new book, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: orality, memory and the transmission of culture (Cambridge University Press), is about to revolutionize our understanding of knowledge in prehistoric societies. 

Join us at 2.00, , Saturday 15th August, Dromkeen, 1012 Gisborne-Kilmore Rd, Riddells Creek for the Riddells Creek Landcare AGM. Hear what we’ve been doing this year. 

Afternoon tea at 3.00, then Dr Kelly at 3.30, to explore how pre-literate aboriginal cultures rehearsed and transmitted their survival knowledge about plants and animals as they moved through the landscape. Monuments and ritual recitations, songs and dances helped people index in living memory everything they had to remember about husbandry, cultivation, and crafts to build the first urban settlements. 

80 down and another 80 to go

Julie, Heather, Alice and Ross set out last Sunday with pruning shears, saw, mattock and chainsaw to discourage the sweet pittostrum, and we did. My rough calculation is 80 plants, many just babies, but quite a few larger and in seed, so it was good to get them out.

We've left them where we cut them, so wave as you go up Gap Road. But we cleared off the berries, and took them away, and we made a start on the creek side of Gap Road, which is where they are migrating from. That's another project waiting in the wings - another 80.
 

 Alice Cummins, Julie Macdonald and Heather McNaught with the berries.

Great progress restoring Sandy Creek

Sunday in late June, residents of Sandy Creek (many of them members of Riddells Creek Landcare) walked their way from the start of the creek, near the Blairs, to close to where it joins Riddells Creek. We had done a similar walk 5 years ago, and wanted to look at how the condition of the creek had improved.

We have all been involved in Melbourne Water's the Stream Frontage Program, which provides funding to get rid of weeds and plant native vegetation, though the stream sides often have plenty of seed and small plants hiding under the weeds (blackberry and gorse) that come back when spraying knocks these off.

What a change! The Red Hot Pokers on the Blairs need another round of discouragement, as do the blackberries on Vicki's place, next along the creek. But the Best's place is a delight, and the section from Ross's to Stig's has seen a big change as the blackberry dies back.

The creek keeps changing as we walk down it - the next section through to Lachlan and Suze's has a bedrock bottom, high sides, Prickly Moses Acacia verticillata  doing well, but also many sweet pittostrum.

From there we jumped to Helen's place, well out into the lower slopes, where there's a grand canyon formed only in the last 80 years. Water running fast off the cleared country has eroded the creek, but Dean reckons its stablised now.

Just a little further on, at the Godfrey's place, the creek is back to small banks. Robin Godfrey sent in this photo of this section in the 2010 floods.

Here are grabs from Dean Platt's notes:

Lachie and I found some interesting plants along the way – Gahnia radula Thatch Saw Sedge along the Nicolaides-Best frontage and what may have been Dianella tasmanica nearby to this as well.

Although there was little water in the creek, some ponds supported aquatics – I would like to get back and have another look and Russell will be able to clarify with me, but maybe there was Callitriche near the start of Best u.stream end.  I need to correct that the attractive water lily at Russell and Gill’s is actually the Cape Pond Lily Aponogeton distachyos (South African) and is a problem in parts of waterways around the Melbourne area.  So it is one to watch out for lest it becomes completely dominant.  I think the ephemeralness of the Sandy may hold it back a bit. 

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It was good to see the Blackberry clearance along the way, long sections have now been cleared.  Excellent and quite probably contributing to the wombat spread into the creek now.  Logic would say that if the wombats have moved into the creek from the forests of the range above then either the habitat is now improved along the Sandy or the habitat has been degraded in the range forests.  I don’t think the latter is true so it is likely that the Sandy has improved and Blackberry removal has been a major change there.  Well done.  Remember there is a local native raspberry growing well in sections as well, hopefully it can spread now.   

We didn't make it all the way to the junction of Sandy Creek with Riddells Creek. Dean says it has "rugged volcanic steps with remnant manna gums above blackberry." Here's a photo, and this will be an adventure for another time.

Working Bee in Barrm Birrm

Sunday 5th July 10-12, meet on the verge at "Riddells Creek Winery" 292 Gap Road.

We're out to kill the sweet pitostrum that has spread into the lower slopes of Barrm Birrm. Birds drop seed, new tree grows up, more seeds. Break the cycle. Bring gloves, pruning shears and pruning saws for the bigger trees. I'll have Roundup.  Ross Colliver