A group of Aboriginal schoolchildren gathered under the spreading canopy of a Moreton Bay fig tree in a Melbourne park, their schoolteacher explaining the significance of the location.
It was here, he said, that over the years Aboriginal activists had gathered to demand a better future for their people.
The chatter of the excited children was matched by the musical call of a red wattlebird, flying into the lower branches of the tree and perhaps hoping that the gathering might provide rich pickings of schoolbag snacks.
A commemorative plaque states Aboriginal people had been meeting under the fig tree since the 1950s and, no doubt, the birds have been a witness to these events during all this time, matching passionate human words with birdsong.
Birds link the past and present and have had an intimate connection to our First Nations peoples from long before the Carlton Gardens meetings. Throughout 65,000 years of Aboriginal history, the birds have travelled with the Aboriginal people on their remarkable journey, providing a soundtrack to the world’s oldest continuing culture, an inspiration for song lines and art.
The Moreton Bay fig is a more recent fixture for Aboriginal gatherings in Melbourne. The tree belongs to hotter climes, mainly Queensland, and was planted as an exotic feature when Melbourne’s parks were first laid out by colonial town planners determined to put their own mark on the Australian landscape. Carlton Gardens not only features avenues of fig trees but those of European oaks and elms, along with showy exotic plants like camellias and rhododendrons.
Although the Moreton Bay fig meeting place is celebrated for its cultural significance in more modern times, for a closer and more profound connection to Aboriginal country one must travel south over the Yarra River to the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.
This is the site of a scattering of red river gums which date from before European settlement in the early 1800s. It is not hard to imagine the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples standing in the shelter of the gums and it is there that the impact of the arrival of European settlers was first felt in Victoria, the birds a witness to dispossession and pain.
Although most of the original landscape of Melbourne has been lost, replaced by concrete, glass and steel, many of the bird species remain, their calls and songs competing with the hum of traffic from roads beyond the gardens.
On the day of my visit to the botanic gardens, a magpie-lark called from the native grasslands. Its tinny, two-note call sounded as if it was saying “paywit’’, a name the European pioneers adopted for the bird after hearing the onomatopoeic version given to it by local Aborigines in the Boonwurrung language.
The call of the paywit, the flute-like song of the magpie, the “laugh” of the kookaburra – the birds sing the story of our land.