Murnong on Maar Country

The colonial impact on Indigenous peoples’ food practices was catastrophic and its effects still reverberate today. Murnong (Microseris sp.) is often referred to as ‘yam daisy’ and was one of the most important staple foods for Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia prior to the British invasion. Today, this plant of profound cultural and economic importance is only found in remnant stands of vegetation and in extremely small patches south eastern Australia. The Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation, representing the Gatabanud, Gulidjan, Kirrae Whurrung, Peak Whurrung and Gunditjmara tribes of south-west Victoria, grew great swathes of murnong crops as a staple food on the productive volcanic plains that dominate this region.

The Eastern Maar are in the process of designing a Cultural Landscape Project, to map dreaming stories across all their territories as means of documenting the multi-layered and Country-specific cultural practice embedded within historical and contemporaneous Eastern Maar land management practices. This AIATSIS funded project will provide information critical for these efforts for cultural resurgence by the Eastern Maar and will provide the basis for developing business opportunities for the cultivation of murnong. More specifically, this Aboriginal-led project will investigate the extant and pre-British invasion distribution, community ecology and soil condition of murnong across Maar territories.

This information is essential for understanding where murnong grew under traditional Aboriginal management and what environmental factors are essential for successful murnong cultivation. The historical distribution and compositional data will be generated using a novel combination of ethnohistorical (Aboriginal CI B Pascoe) and palaeoecological (Aboriginal CI Fletcher) sources, whereby the ethnohistory will guide the location of palaeoecological research (the study of past plants, their distribution and ecology from remains stored in sediments).

The contemporary distribution and composition data (Aboriginal CI J Pascoe) will be derived from systematic plant surveys of extant Microseris populations. The soil environment, known to be critical for root crop health, will be analysed using state-of-the-art pedological analyses (CI Howell) of soil from extant populations and through the analysis of soil biota in the palaeoecological record (Aboriginal CI Fletcher). All data will be available to the Eastern Maar community to bolster and inform future projects which will be especially useful for reinvigorating Aboriginal agricultural practice.

This includes data which will directly contribute to and benefit the Eastern Maar Cultural Landscapes Project, such as: high quality plant spatial distribution data, including data which informs cultural management practices over time; the potential distribution of murnong is impacted by the catastrophic effects of colonisation; a more robust estimation of the environmental envelope of murnong in the region; information about other plants and fungi present in murnong ecosystems (community ecology); an assessment (using soil stores charcoal) of the role that fire played in Aboriginal cultivation of murnong; and a thorough understanding of the ideal soil environment for murnong cultivation.

The aims of this project require a thorough understanding of the biology, ecology and distribution of murnong across the lands of the Eastern Maar and the assembled team is uniquely situated to execute this proposed project successfully.