Six Peaks speak. Unsettling legacies in Southern Dja Dja Wurrung Country
Barry Golding with Clive Willman, Illinois USA, Common Ground Books, 2024, 402 pp.
Reviewed by Bill Gammage in Australian Journal of Adult Learning 65(1), April 2025
The Six Peaks of Barry Golding’s title are in southern Dja Dja Wurrung
country in central Victoria. In the order that Golding discusses them,
they are Mounts Kooroocheang/Gurutjanga, Beckworth/Nyaninuk,
Greenock/unknown, Tarrengower/Dharrang Gauwa, Alexander/
Liyanganuk, and Franklin/Lalkambuk. Each peak ‘speaks’ of its rocks
and soils, of Dja Dja Wurrung presence before and after invasion, and
of the impact of invader enterprise, exploitation, and mismanagement
on the land and its people. The peaks say little of other themes well
developed in this book: their plants and animals at the time Europeans
came, the murderous dispossession of the Dja Dja Wurrung, the political
and economic conflicts of settlement, and the question the authors
choose as central: “How can we help future generations deal with
legacies of what happened around these mountains?” (p.346, also p.10).126 Lei Xia
The mountains (Golding rarely writes “peaks”) parallel each other in
addressing these themes. First, for each mountain geology and soils
are described in detail unmatched in any previous local or regional
history, perhaps any history. The authors argue that geology is the rock
on which almost all else is built (for example pp.32-40, 198-9). Golding
has a geology degree, but some text possibly, many photos, and almost
all the beautifully drawn maps (worth printing on their own) are by
Clive Willman. His maps speak, though some text is too small, and the
captions are too faint. Where maps matter, it’s best to increase a book’s
page size to suit.
Though necessarily unevenly for want of sources, Golding next traces
what is known of Dja Dja Wurrung clans, each probably local to a
mountain and its surrounds. He sketches their caring management,
their feeling for Country and language, their shattered survival despite
rapid (p.248) and genocidal (p.316) slaughter by arriving Europeans,
especially on the grassy volcanic plains (p.57), and their continued
presence since despite endemic discrimination. European occupation
follows, a tale of public and private environmental use and misuse up to
the present. Golding concludes with how each mountain might be better
used and cared for, noting that each has a 2024 guide for visitors.
Golding tells his story via two key perceptions: “unsettling”, an
experience common to all the mountains and their surrounds, and
“legacies”, or relics of each mountain’s geology, circumstances and
history. These two perceptions shape Golding’s subtitle, which he uses
in striking ways to illustrate how the land and past influence the present
and future.
As Golding notes (p.23), “unsettling” is a word gaining traction among
historians. They take Aboriginal society on the eve of invasion as settled,
with land, people and animals balanced and flourishing. This world was
unsettled, upended, destroyed, when white “settlers” came, and it is still
unsettled, built on greed and ignorance and menaced by environmental
degradation in many forms. Golding does not overlook the ways in
which a minority of people have attempted—and continue to attempt—
to repair Dja Dja Wurrung land, but such respect is often overshadowed
by the pioneer urge to improve, develop, and exploit. His multi-faceted
account of unsettlers as aliens smacks more of the Goths sacking Rome
than of a civilisation in harmony with its surroundings.Book review 127
“Legacies” are not necessarily gifts or inheritances, but more often
consequences or vestiges. Many stem from the original or continuing
unsettling of individuals or communities. The flavour of Golding’s
treatment of them is seen in his comment on pioneer squatter John
Hepburn, who “remains locally celebrated, while the mountain
[Kooroocheang/Gurutjanga], the gorges, the creeks, the waterfall, every
oven mound and the ceremonial earth rings are virtually unknown. All
are out of bounds on private land. I contend that this area… [is] a unique
cultural landscape and an outstanding part of our national heritage”
(p.88, also p.210).
Other legacies tell of the Dja Dja Wurrung persistence in the face of
uncaring or unthinking newcomers, the visible remnants of European
pastoralism, mining and building, and little-known examples of the
numerous small to medium scale activities of a new society. The book
selects ceremonial rings, oven mounds/middens, quarries, mill floors,
mine workings and machinery, Aboriginal Protectorate sites, Farmers’
Commons, springs, cairns, memorials, graves, tree plantings and
clearings, places of too much activity and too little, snapshots of failure
and success past and present.
Golding says his book “might be categorised as an environmental and
cultural history. However,…” (p.379). The category is closest to his
content, but that “However” matters. This is a history unlike any I have
read, regional in focus but universal in argument and I hope readership.
It ranges from deep geological time to calls for future repair and
restoration. It argues for Dja Dja Wurrung expertise to be recognised,
and for Aboriginal people everywhere to be given a fair go. It adds depth
and detail to what informed locals know, is crowded with instances of
past injustices and misuse, and is firm for better management of the
land. Especially in a concluding chapter, it urges a need to reconnect
“Peaks, People and Place”, there and everywhere. Histories are rarely so
overtly crusading.
No one else could write this book. It needed locals to spend decades
tramping or cycling the land, seeing and questioning as Golding and
Willman have. It needed too a nose for paper sources scattered and
hidden. The authors found good information in the most unlikely places,
much of it not seen since contemporaries bound it with that familiar
red tape. From both fieldwork and paper (p.379), things great and small128 Lei Xia
speak. This book is solid going, but well written with few typos, and
bubbling with insights and remedies. Golding and Willman enlighten
not only where they live, but where you live too
Barry Golding 
Great review, well deserved.