Keryn Walshe is a South Australian Museum Officer with a special interest in Kangaroo Island’s Aboriginal archaeology which has built a picture of Aborigines living here permanently over a total time span of 13,000 years.
It is thought that Aborigines first occupied the Island 20,000 to 18,000 years ago and then stopped living here 5000 to 6000 years ago. Much of the evidence in support of these time lines was found at Seton Rock Shelter as well as another cave shelter site on the Island.
Ms Walshe is Aboriginal and Archeology collections manager at the SA Museum. The research and knowledge she has gathered over 10 years of field work on KI was shared recently with more than 60 people who packed into the NRM Board room to hear her presentation.
She said that during the last big ‘dry’ known as the Glacial Maximum period - 25,000 years ago - sea levels dropped dramatically and Kangaroo Island was actually a wide, high hill sited on a plain. At that time the coastline was 200km further away than it is at present which made it possible to walk to the Island from the south-east of SA, Yorke Peninsula, or the Great Australian Bight.
Permanent occupation of the Island by Aborigines occurred during this time and possibly ended as sea levels rose again over tens of thousands of years.
Ms Walshe’s survey research builds on the work of archaeologists beginning in 1903 when the first Aboriginal stone tools were collected from KI.
Two types of stone tools, such as the large ‘pebble choppers’ and the smaller quartz cutting tools are in abundance on the Island. They lie just below the surface soil and are revealed after a paddock is ploughed or a road is graded and confirm the first, ancient stage of Aboriginal occupation during an era which is likely to have included mega-fauna.
Her field survey work has also revealed evidence of what she describes as a second stage of occupation of Kangaroo Island by Aborigines – the women brought here by whalers and sealers in the early 1800s from Tasmania, the Fleurieu, Eyre Peninsula and the Coorong. Her archaeological finds support the theory of participation by these Aboriginal women in an early Island industry which exported 60,000 Tamar wallaby skins to the mainland and then to China. This was documented in an historic account written by JS Cumpson, ‘Kangaroo Island 1800-1836’.
“Aboriginal people provided those goods and it’s possible the wallabies were caught with a simple snare technique widely used by Tasmanian Aborigines” Ms Walshe said.
She has discovered additional archaeological evidence to support the theory that Aborigines living on KI in the early 1800s used traditional materials, skills and resources, or adapted European materials to traditional methods.
For instance, the Telegraph Line came to KI in 1878 and Ms Walshe has found a ceramic telegraph insulator from which a tool - identical in shape to a traditional stone tool - has been chipped. She says it’s clear that Aboriginal people continued their traditional practices on the Island from 1800 until at least, the 1880s.
“Even though they were separated from their home lands, they were able to pick up on activities and skills which were familiar to them and I imagine that brought them some happiness.”
Author: Catherine Murphy | Source: The Islander [August 19, 2010]