Budj Bim: The Ancient Gunditjmara Eel Traps of Victoria

Budj Bim is a volcanic landscape in south-west Victoria, Australia, where the Gunditjmara people built an extensive system of channels, weirs and ponds to trap, store and harvest eels. The oldest scientifically dated parts are about 6,600 years old, from around 4600 BC, making Budj Bim one of the oldest known aquaculture systems in the world. In 2019 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape.

The volcano and the lava flow

Budj Bim is the Gunditjmara name for the volcano long known in English as Mount Eccles. Its eruption, dated to around 37,000 years ago, sent a long tongue of basalt lava, the Tyrendarra lava flow, south-west toward the coast, a distance of some 50 kilometres. In Gunditjmara tradition, the volcano is an ancestral creator being whose body forms the land.

The lava flow created an uneven landscape of stony ridges, hollows and wetlands. Over time, rivers and swamps formed along and beside it, including Tae Rak (Lake Condah). These wetlands became an ideal habitat for the short-finned eel, known to the Gunditjmara as kooyang.

The crater of the volcano now holds Lake Surprise, part of Budj Bim National Park.

How the system worked

Short-finned eels migrate seasonally. Young eels move upstream into inland waters, where they grow for many years, and adult eels later travel downstream to the sea and on to spawning grounds in the Coral Sea. Their movements are triggered by seasonal rains and floods.

The Gunditjmara turned this natural cycle into a managed harvest. They cut channels into the basalt and built walls and weirs from stacked lava stones, sometimes moving rocks weighing several hundred kilograms. When water levels rose in the wet season, the channels carried water and eels from the lake and wetlands into a network of ponds and smaller channels.

Woven baskets, made from plant fibres, were set in gaps in the stone weirs to catch eels as they moved. Ponds held eels alive until they were needed, allowing a supply that lasted beyond the migration season. Gunditjmara accounts and early colonial records also describe the smoking of eels for preservation and their use in trade with neighbouring peoples.

The system was not a single structure but a whole engineered landscape. Channels and weirs were built, extended and modified over thousands of years in response to changing water levels.

Dating the traps

Dating stone structures is difficult, because the stones themselves cannot be radiocarbon dated. In a study published in 2012, archaeologist Ian McNiven and colleagues, working with the Gunditjmara, dated sediments within one of the channel systems at Tae Rak. The results showed that a channel had been cut into the basalt by about 6,600 years ago.

That date places the oldest known part of the system at around 4600 BC. Other parts are much younger, and the system remained in use into the 19th century. Some researchers think that elements may be older still, but the 6,600-year date is the one most widely cited and accepted by UNESCO.

Stone houses and settled life

Scattered across the lava flow are the remains of many circular stone structures, interpreted as the bases of houses. In the 19th century, these supported walls of timber and roofs covered with turf or bark. Colonial observers noted groups of such huts near the eel traps.

The dependable food supply from eels, alongside other resources, supported relatively large and settled communities for at least part of the year. This evidence challenges the long-held European view of Aboriginal Australians as exclusively mobile hunter-gatherers with no permanent structures or engineering.

Colonisation and dispossession

European settlement of the Western District of Victoria began in the 1830s. Gunditjmara resistance to the occupation of their land led to a long period of violent conflict, often called the Eumeralla Wars, lasting from the late 1830s into the 1860s.

In 1867 the Lake Condah Mission was established in the area, and many Gunditjmara were moved there. In the 20th century, parts of the wetlands were drained for farming, including Lake Condah in the 1950s, damaging the eel traps and the landscape around them.

From the late 20th century the Gunditjmara campaigned to regain control of their Country. In 2007 the Federal Court of Australia recognised Gunditjmara native title over large areas of the region. A weir was rebuilt in 2010 to restore water flows to Lake Condah, reviving the wetland, and the former Mount Eccles National Park was renamed Budj Bim National Park in 2017.

Heritage recognition

The Budj Bim landscape was added to the Australian National Heritage List in 2004. On 6 July 2019 UNESCO inscribed the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape on the World Heritage List, the first property in Australia listed exclusively for its Aboriginal cultural values. The listed area covers three components: Budj Bim, Tae Rak and Kurtonitj.

Bushfires in December 2019 burned through parts of the landscape and cleared vegetation, revealing additional channels and stone structures that had been hidden by undergrowth.

The site joins other places that record the depth of Aboriginal history in Australia, from the first arrival of people on the continent to the burials at Lake Mungo and the rock art of the Gwion Gwion paintings.

Kooyang in Gunditjmara life

For the Gunditjmara, kooyang were far more than a food. The eel harvest shaped the seasonal round of the year, the location of settlements and the gatherings of neighbouring groups. Knowledge of how to build and repair the channels, read the water levels and time the harvest was passed down through generations.

Eels are rich in fat and could be preserved by smoking, which allowed surplus to be stored or exchanged. Gunditjmara oral tradition and 19th-century accounts both describe eels being traded beyond the lava flow, giving the Gunditjmara an important place in regional exchange networks.

Today, kooyang remain central to Gunditjmara cultural identity. The restoration of water flows to Tae Rak has allowed eels to return to parts of the old system, and the Gunditjmara Traditional Owners manage the landscape through their own organisations together with government agencies.

Myths and facts

A common assumption is that Aboriginal Australians did not build permanent structures or alter the land in planned ways. Budj Bim contradicts this: its channels, weirs and stone house bases are deliberate works of engineering, maintained over thousands of years.

Another misunderstanding is that the whole system is 6,600 years old. In fact, only one dated channel has produced that age. The system as seen today is the result of many periods of construction and repair, some of them much more recent.

Timeline

• c. 35,000 BC: Budj Bim erupts, creating the Tyrendarra lava flow.
• c. 4600 BC: The oldest dated eel channel at Tae Rak (Lake Condah) is cut into the basalt.
• Late 1830s–1860s: The Eumeralla Wars between Gunditjmara and European settlers.
• 1867: Lake Condah Mission is established.
• 2004: Budj Bim is added to the Australian National Heritage List.
• 2007: The Federal Court recognises Gunditjmara native title.
• 6 July 2019: UNESCO inscribes the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape as a World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Budj Bim shows that Aboriginal Australians engineered their environment on a large scale thousands of years ago, building one of the world’s oldest aquaculture systems. It has reshaped understanding of Aboriginal societies, and its recognition reflects the continuing connection of the Gunditjmara to their Country.