Category: Six Peaks Speak

Click to access AJAL-Apr-2025-BookReview.pdf

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