Original subtitles

VOICEOVER: We acknowledge the many first nations across the country

and their elders and knowledge holders,

who have generously shared their stories

and welcomed us on to their country for this series,

and we would like to warn Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers

that the following program may contain images and voices

of deceased persons.

(BIRDCALLS)

Imagine yourself back in time some 65,000 years ago.

It is the dawning of a new era...

..where modern humans take their first brave steps into new worlds.

But you're not in the Middle East, Europe or Asia.

You're here.

Australia.

You encounter plants no-one has ever seen before,

on landscapes where no other humans have ever set foot.

(ROARS)

There are 7-metre lizards,

wombats the size of cars,

deadly carnivorous marsupials...

(SNARLS)

..and yet you survive.

Around you, communities are developing navigation,

astronomy, art,

aquaculture,

communications

and entirely new societies.

Today, what remains tells an incredible story

of knowledge, resilience and invention.

This is my part of that world, Tiwi...

Hey, everybody! Hello.

..and this is my mob.

We know some of the story.

MAN: The fire was a friend and not seen as an enemy.

Only the ancestors know it all.

(SPEAKS INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE)

To reveal what was lost, a new generation of detectives...

It's so obvious. It's really quite stark.

..will re-tell the ancient story

of the world's oldest living culture.

MAN: So what we're looking for today

is evidence that people were here, living on what is now the seabed.

Tens of thousands of years in the making,

the story of the first inventors can now be told.

Being the first people in Australia tens of thousands of years ago

would be like landing on a different planet today.

No other human life exists,

except for the people around you.

Nature constantly threatens your life and theirs.

37,000 years ago at the bottom of the Australian mainland,

in what is now Victoria,

the landscape is changing dramatically.

Budj Bim Volcano erupts.

Lava flows for 50 kilometres,

eventually hardening into giant ridges, which trap water.

The local Gunditjmara people seize the opportunity,

building a sprawling network of fish farms.

It is an engineering triumph

and possibly the oldest aquaculture system on earth.

But the evidence now lies hidden

under a century and a half of vegetation.

Today, Gunditjmara traditional owner Tyson Lovett-Murray

is working with archaeologist Chris Wilson...

Good to see ya.

..to uncover the secrets of this hidden world.

So, there's something really special about Gunditjmara country.

What I'm really interested in

is finding out how people have reshaped this landscape

over thousands of years.

So, what are we looking at here, Tyson?

We're on the stony rise here. This is all lava from Budj Bim.

It was a volcano that erupted, you know, 36,000 years ago.

This formed this big lava ridge

that runs right through the middle of the lake.

It's been referred to as an eco-cultural landscape.

So, they've changed the landscape

to increase the production of short-finned eels,

to fatten them up without, you know,

taking away any of the biodiversity out here.

The Gunditjmara built a vast network of canals, weirs, and ponds

to trap the eels during winter wet spells.

An ingenious design,

turning a highly variable food source into an anytime buffet.

So, how do you actually use the traps?

So, the traps work - they cut a channel that diverts water

from the main body of the lake into a holding pond,

these naturally formed depressions from the lava flow,

they run a weir wall across that channel,

where you'll place your basket in.

Made by the women, weaved from the punyut reed.

The wall will hold the basket in place, along with a wooden frame,

so the eels can only really funnel through this basket.

So, the mob have come here

and because of the way in which it's formed naturally,

they've kind of extended that natural formation to trap eels.

They're domesticating the landscape.

You can talk about Western farming,

domesticating, you know, sheep and cows and stuff like that.

They've domesticated a whole landscape and waterway here.

The whole lake's basically a big trap with little traps inside it.

So, you know, it takes real ingenuity for that.

While the complexity of the system is remarkable,

it has long been thought

that the largest and oldest aquaculture systems in the world

originated in China 6,000 to 7,000 years ago.

But new evidence now points to Budj Bim being just as old.

Hey, Unc. How are you going? Not bad, Ty.

Uncle Daryl, this is, uh, Chris.

Hey, Chrisso. How you going? Good thanks.

Gunditjmara Elder Uncle Daryl Rose is advising archaeologists

on how to uncover the ancient origins of Budj Bim.

So we're in the channel now? Yes.

It just doesn't stop at one spot.

It goes through and this system here's hundreds of metres long.

So we just crossed another channel, didn't we?

We just crossed that channel.

We've got stories and what we know about this place here,

we probably know it's going to be here a long time

but we need a scientist to come along and, you know, prove it.

Since 2008, Ian McNevin has been using carbon dating

to establish the age of these ancient earthworks.

Based on Darryl's advice we did an excavation through here

and that was a pretty damn good recommendation.

Gunditjmara were pulling out blocks of lava

to go down deeper into the stone to create the very first channel.

And we went down very carefully,

just digging down, sort of, 2 centimetres at a time.

And luckily there was charcoal -

the magical charcoal was inside those sediments.

So we sent off a whole series of pieces of charcoal

for radiocarbon dating

and the very bottom ones, about half a metre down,

the radiocarbon dates came back

around 6,600 years.

And we...we couldn't believe it.

That's quite extraordinary.

But the other interesting thing is

there's stone tools at the bottom of the channel.

So whoever dug it out

left some stone artefacts behind 6,600 years ago

and there's one.

Yeah. That's amazing.

So what we have there is a small stone tool

and I know it's a tool

because it's been chipped along the edge to shape it.

We call that retouching. Mm-hm.

So, what would've they been using this for?

That's a very good question. It could be woodworking.

And you certainly would probably need wooden levers

to get the blocks of stone out.

This incredible discovery shows

that aquaculture was in use here

for as long as anywhere else on the planet.

That channel that we dated to 6,600 years ago,

that channel was also being used, like, 150 years ago.

So we're talking about nearly 7,000 years

of a fishing facility being used.

I don't know anywhere in the world

where you have, basically,

a machine that has been used for 7,000 years.

Until recently,

the system's scale and sophistication remained a mystery,

hidden beneath 150 years of growth.

So, these fish traps are pretty amazing

in terms of the way that people utilise the landscape.

So what I'm wondering now is how big is this system?

How many canals are here

and how many fish traps are actually part of this bigger system?

For several months, the Gunditjmara have been working

with a crack team of mappers from Melbourne University

to uncover the true size of this system.

Martin. Oh, hey, Tyson.

How are ya? Yeah. Very well.

Good to see you again. Yeah.

I am a geomatics engineer,

uh, or a spatial information scientist, if you want,

and I spend my days analysing spatial data.

I create maps and analyse what is happening in the landscape.

Laser technology can cut through the overgrown vegetation

to reveal handmade channels

and other long-hidden features of the system.

Lidar is shooting this very dense array of laser beams

that come all the way to the object or to the ground surface.

So what we're hoping is that we'll get data that avoid that vegetation.

The Lidar scans will create a digital model,

hopefully revealing the complete picture of this ancient site.

The data that we have are of extremely high detail

and what that has allowed us to do is to fill in the...

..the missing pieces of puzzle about how this landscape worked

and how the community would have lived here.

Many Australians believe all First Nations people were nomadic

but what lies beneath Gunditjmara country

may tell a very different story.

A team of scientists have been scanning Gunditjmara country

for several months.

Most Australians believe all First Nations people were nomadic.

These scans could reveal a system

that proves seasonal dwellings were established here at Budj Bim.

If we measured this whole system,

the whole complex would have been really long.

About 2 kilometres.

OK.

We used to think it was, like, 300 metres long.

Yeah, that's amazing.

So it's...wow. It's huge, in other words.

So what we've been looking at is only the...the tip of the iceberg.

To me, it's mind-blowing.

It's really, really extensive, isn't it?

So this has revealed, like, a lost world.

Yeah, it's massive.

ROB COLLINS: In just one corner of the lake,

the Lidar has revealed a complex web

of not hundreds but thousands of metres of canals,

feeding into dozens of strategically placed storage ponds.

It's impressive. It's an incredible engineering feat.

Mm-hm.

The scans also reveal something else.

Stone huts.

So we see, uh, that looks very much like a stone house.

These are the foundations of Gunditjmara huts.

Around 350 were previously known.

Today, Lidar scans are revealing many more.

I still can't believe what I'm looking at.

For elders like Uncle Daryl,

this is confirmation

of the Gunditjmara's extensive traditional knowledge

on this country.

They've found hundreds of stone house remains or hut remains, right,

on this lava flow.

Hundreds of them.

So this whole place is housing that went along with this.

So what you're talking about here -

that's why we could stay here longer.

We didn't have to be nomadic, as some people think we are.

It's also part of the whole story of the Gunditjmara people

and it's a story of these rocks.

Incredibly, Gunditjmara traditional owners like Aaron Morgan

still have the ancient knowledge to build these traditional huts.

So, is that alright, to have a look inside?

Yeah, go in. I've just done a renovation.

Alright. No worries.

Oh, yeah.

So I can imagine possum-skin cloaks down here

and it would be a bit softer to lay on.

Can imagine the fires out there.

(FIRES CRACKLE, PEOPLE CHATTER)

I'm just imagining the community out here.

So, yeah, it's a pretty amazing structure.

This system represents an astonishing transformation

of the natural landscape...

Good size.

..that guaranteed an industrial-scale food supply

across thousands of years.

Let's go cook 'em up, eh? Let's go.

Ranger Braden Saunders continues to cook eels here

the way they would've been cooked thousands of years ago.

Ooh, yes.

Cheers. Cheers.

Here's to eel.

What do you reckon? Yum, yeah.

Mmm. Like fish. It is.

Well, it is. Well, yeah.

(ALL LAUGH)

Tens of thousands of years ago,

intrepid humans began venturing across new continents

for the first time.

Some of the most adventurous of all

were those who made the first footprints

on the Australian landscape.

But just how did they get here?

For First Nations Australians, including my mob,

our origins are etched in our creation stories,

that tell of us being here since the beginning of time.

Others believe a great migration

brought the First Australians to the continent

at least 65,000 years ago.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of people

making the leap into the unknown.

The possible arrival point has been debated for decades.

A land bridge from Papua New Guinea before sea levels rose?

Or perhaps a sea crossing from Asia?

But 65,000 years ago, no humans had ever crossed open sea,

making this southern route seem extremely unlikely.

Now, from where we are here,

mainland Australia is about 70km away,

which isn't far by modern standards

but it's far enough to be hidden, from the curvature of the earth,

and even with modern equipment - life vests and a motorboat -

I still wouldn't be keen on making this trip,

let alone thousands of years ago in a raft or canoe.

In fact, evidence of a great sea crossing has been scarce...

..until now.

Journalist Ben Abbatangelo is examining ground-breaking data

modelled by global ecologist Corey Bradshaw.

Corey, this is some sort of set-up.

I'm a certified nerd just from walking in.

Join the club. Yeah, yeah.

But I'm intrigued.

How can computer sciences give us an insight

into such an ancient past?

We can't go back in time.

So, what we can do, though,

is we can take models of what the landscape would've been like

by knowing what the climate did.

Corey plugs in data

based on what Australia would've been like some 65,000 years ago -

terrain,

drinkable water

and areas where there would have been abundant plant and animal life

for food.

This is then matched

to the oldest known archaeological sites in Australia.

It's not just archaeological data.

We can add in traditional trading routes

or dreaming relationships

or linguistic relationships.

From this data set we can say, from each of these points,

when's the first evidence of human occupation?

Using the rules of probability,

different migration scenarios

are modelled by a supercomputer.

OK. Let's see what we've got.

We start the simulation off at a certain point

and then those populations grow and retract and then move,

according to the environmental conditions

that we've predicted from other models.

Over 120,000 simulations are set in motion

to identify the dominant route of entry into Australia.

You're gonna need to put some flavour on what I'm seeing here.

Talk to me. Yeah. OK.

So, this is, believe it or not,

a small sample of different combinations

of the dominant routes of entry.

One by one,

the supercomputer eliminates the least-likely migration paths.

So, I've noticed, Corey,

that a few of these are starting to, like, cancel themselves out

or be shaded with grey.

Yeah.

So, what we're doing here

is we're sort of almost throwing out the information

from models that aren't performing up to scratch

relative to the other ones.

591. Jackpot.

Of the 120,000 possible scenarios,

only one simulation survives.

If my geography serves me right,

we're looking at the north-west part of the continent.

Exactly.

So, we used to think

that the north through New Guinea would've been the easiest

because there's the shortest distance between islands.

But the models seem to suggest

that this, in fact, was probably the dominant route.

The route is the one

once considered all but impossible some 65,000 years ago -

the 70-kilometre sea crossing from Asia.

Is that 70-kilometre venture quite a significant feat?

Well, if we're right,

it would've probably been the first major ocean crossing

in human history.

And it would've required really advanced technology,

navigational skills and a lot of planning.

Just imagine what it took

to look out to nothing but blue ocean

and decide to venture forth to a world unknown.

Corey's modelling reveals not only

that the Southern Sea crossing, despite all its hazards,

was far more likely

but also tells of the tenacity and skill of Australia's first peoples.

Human survival.

Nothing matters more to you or to me.

To live, we all need water, warmth, rest and food.

In modern Australia, the story goes

that as Aboriginal people weren't farmers,

able to transform wilderness into crops,

food supplies must have been unreliable.

But it's now clear...

Australia's first people possessed the skills and the knowledge

to remake entire landscapes,

dramatically transforming wilderness

into highly productive and predictable sources of food...

..all through the use...

..of fire.

MAN: Fire was always about food.

Whether it's about animals or whether it's about plants.

The fire was a friend and not seen as an enemy.

Victor Steffenson is an expert in the ancient traditions

of cultural burning.

He is one of Australia's great fire masters.

Today in North Queensland,

Victor has been invited onto Buluwai country

to work with five clans,

rekindling their traditional knowledge of fire.

Good trip? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, good trip.

So, it's all about skilling up the rangers

and helping communities build their capacity

to manage their lands again.

Yeah. Alright. Let's do the burn.

Yeah, let's do it.

Knowing where we are and what type of country

is crucial to lighting the fire.

If you don't know the country, then you shouldn't be lighting it.

So we're going to burn here today.

You can see we haven't burned here yet, properly yet,

and that's why a lot of the weeds...

Or, see, all the bladey grass - see all the bladey grass?

So that's why, now, we'll get rid of all them things.

Traditional fire masters select undesirable plants.

Like weeds, they're eradicated.

In their place, useful plants are encouraged to grow -

plants that can be eaten or used for medicine.

It's known as fire-stick farming

and remarkably, it was used to transform dense country

into open hunting grounds.

Species of plants which were attractive to animals

were encouraged to grow in strategic spots.

Hunters could then position themselves nearby.

Instead of going after food, food would come to them.

Before any fire is lit,

traditional owners need to read the country.

Do you remember all the indicators for this year, you fellas?

The grasses - you see the grass here half dry and half green.

Be perfect to burn.

Yeah. You can see that moisture there, hey?

Yeah, yeah.

Ah, lovely. Nice and sweet.

If it was really dry, it'd be no good to burn

but it...that's an indicator, with the moisture.

This is a good one.

Fire Masters read the soil

to decide which plants and trees belong here.

Soils are the skin for mother nature, you know? For country.

We're looking for all the characteristics in the soil

that bring the identity of that landscape

and what trees live in that soil.

So if we're here and I see the... the dark, that's the gumtree.

And I can see the sandy quality.

That's the bloodwood.

And I can see the stone in there, the rocky parts -

that's the iron bark.

So if the trees weren't here,

then I'd know when to burn this particular soil

just by looking at it.

Right time to go and, yeah, put a match down, eh?

Yeah, yeah. Right. Let's do it.

Losing sunlight.

You know, we'll just light here first.

So, we want to light one place

and we wait a while, you know?

And let that smoke travel around so everything can smell it

and they start to move, all the insects, all the animals.

When we're burning, we got to put a lot of time

and burn it a lot slower than a lot of other burns that used to.

In the wrong hands,

fire in the Australian bush can be catastrophic.

But fire masters

rely on tens of thousands of years of expertise.

So, you see that beautiful circle.

Traditional burning uses a mosaic pattern.

Burning in the circle allows animals to get away...

..allows the fire to move slowly through the country

and not put too much fire in.

You know, just like you would walk into someone's house,

you wouldn't barge down the front door

and just, you know, barge into the house and help yourself.

You'll knock on the door and you ask to come in

and then you come in gently and...

and then the...you know, the host responds politely.

See a praying mantis here.

Another one right up the top,

another one above him.

There's three or four there, walking up.

And they all know that it's safe when you walk up a tree,

because thousands of years, the people never burnt the canopies

and had all that law attached to the fire.

So the animals, over thousands of years,

developed the instinct with fire

and know where to go when it's safe.

So the animals know the same knowledge as I do.

Over tens of thousands of years,

traditional burning has transformed Australia's landscapes.

Aerial photos taken of the Western Desert in 1945

accidentally captured these incredible burn patterns.

Highly deliberate, they're like calligraphy on the landscape.

It was strict,

that there were fire masters that had to be there to do the burning

and not people who didn't know what they were doing.

As Victor intended, unwanted plants are removed.

So, you can see that it's hit the bladey grass in places.

Over there is the grasses that don't belong here.

Useful plants are left untouched.

You can see down there where the fire's lower,

that's the native grasses that belong here.

Fire masters also know which species of plants will thrive

after this cool burn.

And that's why we want the right grasses and right vegetation

and the right soils,

so they're putting that right heat in the soil

and that fire will behave the right way.

Unlike wildfires,

which burn at extreme temperatures

and destroy everything in their path, including soil quality,

traditional burning creates a cool heat

that has less impact on microbes in the soil.

Look at this one here.

Once you scrape that top layer off

and you get that bit of soil underneath,

you can feel how cool it is - there's still that bit of moisture.

Yeah. The gentle fire. Yeah. Real gentle.

People get fooled.

They think, oh, what you learn from Aboriginal people,

you know, walking around in the bush, all naked in the scrub,

you know, rubbing two sticks together.

"Wow. What is that?"

That is amazing.

People don't understand the really deepness of all that

and that complexity and all that knowledge,

because rubbing those two sticks together, making that fire,

that's the only tool needed today, still,

to manage this land the right way.

Today, more than ever,

humans have extraordinary power over nature.

Rivers are redirected, enormous structures built

and entire landscapes changed.

In 1788, when the First Fleet arrived,

they saw Australia as a vast wilderness,

inhabited by people who barely made a mark on it.

Now it's becoming clear that this notion was utterly false.

It now appears that Australia

may once have had the most heavily manipulated landscapes on earth.

In Tasmania,

the Palawa people have used fire for tens of thousands of years

to transform country.

Today, in the north of Tasmania,

curator Tui Raven is examining these famous woodlands.

Are they really old-growth forests, as widely believed?

Or was this landscape entirely different not so long ago?

When most of us think about Lutruwita, also known as Tasmania,

we just think of the wilderness.

Yet this landscape is far from untouched.

Hi. Tui? Hi. Yep.

Michael. How are you? Good. Nice to meet you.

You too. Welcome to, uh, chilly Tasmania.

Leading the research on Palawa country

is Wiradjuri man Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher.

So, where have you brought me today?

So, we're in what's called the Surrey Hills,

in the north-west of Tasmania.

Yeah.

And this area here is one of the most pivotal places

in the understanding of how Aboriginal people use fire

to manage country.

In 1827, this was mapped by a man named Henry Hellier,

on behalf of the British government.

For...they were looking for areas of land to annex for sheep and cattle.

And he'd made very detailed notes

and a very detailed map, which I'll show you now, of this landscape.

Um...which you can see here,

maps an area of 10,000 hectares.

It's a huge area.

And in he's very detailed notes he describes the open forest

as being pretty much mostly grass, with the occasional tree

and evidence of Aboriginal huts and Aboriginal people

and fresh burning

and this sort of language around

and the language that surveyors were using around Tasmania,

in these parts of Tasmania,

was that this looked like a curated and managed landscape

and that this was called the Surrey Hills

in reference to the Surrey Hills in England, which are a grassy plain.

Arriving in Australia,

Europeans remarked on the seemingly manicured-garden-like conditions.

Captain James Cook wrote in 1770,

"The woods are free from underwood of any kind

"and are at such distance from one another."

It was believed that these estate-like meadows

must have been an accident of nature.

So, we're around about here in this,

what was mapped as an open forest,

yet it's anything but an open forest now.

If the maps are accurate,

all these trees must have grown since the arrival of Europeans.

There's a conflict between what we see now, which is rainforest,

and what was described by early Europeans

who were mapping the landscape

and this is a big mystery.

What was it like under Aboriginal management?

We're going to wander in there and, uh, drill into the soils

and see what secrets lie underneath.

Sounds fun. Yeah.

So, what we're looking for here are wet spots.

So this looks like a perfect spot.

Waterlogged, so it means it's oxygen-free,

so there's no... nothing can decompose

and take away the record that we're looking at.

So it's nice and preserved.

It can be preserved for millions of years in this kind of environment.

So, natural archives are places that store information.

OK. Now we need to rotate that.

Do you want to turn it this way?

Is it easy? It's easy.

Are you sure? Yep.

Oh, it actually is.

It's essentially like a library

but you need special tools to read the book.

So, Tui, what do you notice about the core?

There's two quite different-looking groups of soil.

They're two different colours. Mm-hm. Yeah.

Almost two completely different parts here.

It's so obvious.

It's like...almost a demarcation line right in the middle of it.

Yes. It's really quite stark, yeah. It's really interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's about the environment.

Rainforests are productive - they're producing a lot of organic matter.

In less biomass-rich landscapes, such as grasslands,

they produce less.

So, what are we looking for in this sample?

Uh, all sorts of things.

What we mainly look at is pollen - so, pollen will be being stored here

by the plants living around at the time -

and charcoal, which tells us about whether or not there's fire.

Michael wants to change, forever,

popular beliefs about the way Aboriginal people managed country.

To prove it, he must date the age of these trees

as evidence this is not old-growth forest.

Oh, wow. Look at this tree!

Well, yeah, it's a beauty.

This is myrtle beech, one of the main rainforest plants in Tasmania.

Yeah. So, this tree lives for more than 500 years.

So we'll drill into it, pull out a column of wood -

we can count the rings and know when it started growing.

Oh, wow. Look at that!

Oh, that's amazing! Oh!

And that's the tree core.

Yeah.

It needs to be dried and then we can sand it

and that'll expose the rings.

And I'll show you, from this very forest,

some examples of polished trees.

Oh, wow. Yep.

So you can really see the rings stand out.

Yeah, they really do. You can see the centre of the tree.

Yeah. Out through to the bark.

So, this is...123 years, I think it is, this particular tree.

Wow.

So, what's the oldest tree you've found in this area?

In this forest the oldest tree we've found is 160 years old.

And they grow to 500. They grow to 500 years.

We've sampled more than 60 in this location

and more than 400 across the entire Surrey Hills.

Yeah.

And 95% of them are younger than 160, 170 years.

So how does that work with the soil samples?

Yeah, so, this can tell us how old this stand is.

The soil samples tell us what was there -

what was there now and in the past.

If Henry Hellier's maps are right,

then this landscape was a grassland.

And these 160-year-old, 120-year-old trees

have invaded that grassland in the removal of Aboriginal management.

Only microscopic analysis can confirm Michael's theory.

So, we'll analyse this back at the lab and see what the story is.

Tasmania is renowned for its vast wilderness areas

but researchers are questioning

whether this is actually old-growth forest,

as is widely believed.

At the University of Melbourne,

Wiradjuri man Michael-Shawn Fletcher is out to prove

that much of Australia's landscapes, until recently,

were open, meadow-like hunting grounds,

carefully curated under inventive Aboriginal land management.

The work that I do is very much like detective work or forensic work.

It's getting glimpses of the past

and understanding what must have been occurring

to give you that particular moment in time.

So, this is where we keep all of our cores.

After taking the cores, we'll store them in a coolroom

to stop them breaking down.

So, in here, there's over a million years of history.

I'll show you the core from the Surrey Hills.

Yep.

Michael and his team use radiocarbon dating

to establish the age of the sample.

By analysing the old sediments,

we can kind of use that as a clock, if you like, to rewind time

and know when the organic thing that you had, the carbon-based thing,

when it died and when it was buried.

So, for this 7-metre core, we've looked at the geochemistry,

we've looked at the charcoal and we've looked at the pollen

and this requires really methodical and deliberate lab work

that allows us to travel through time.

So, these are the cores that we took from Surrey Hills.

So, this is 6,000 years ago. We have an open forest.

You can see some evidence of trees.

Round about 5,000 years ago, more trees, some leaves here.

4,000 years ago, still an open forest.

3,000 years ago, still an open forest,

more leaves and bits of wood.

2,000 years ago, open forest.

1,000. 500.

200 - bang. There's a big change.

We see here a shift from an open forest with eucalypts

to a closed rainforest.

So just this little bit here?

Just that little bit there, just that upper few centimetres.

Why is it so different? Changing burning.

You're here -

you have the deliberate application of fire in a controlled way,

burning at cool temperatures -

essentially mowing the lawn, holding trees back.

That was switched off.

Aboriginal people were removed off country

and there was no cultural burning happening.

And then within a few decades, you see radical changes.

You see eucalypts bounce out,

then followed immediately by rainforest,

spreading across and capturing this landscape.

(SOFTLY) Wow.

You can't overstate the importance of the Surrey Hills record.

I know of no other evidence on Earth

that unequivocally proves that people were managing landscapes

for 12,000 years, for that length of time.

And this data, this empirical data

builds up an empirical understanding of what country looked like.

We don't have to imagine the landscape

as it might have been under the management of the Palawa people,

because it's still possible to see it today.

I want to show you what's left of the Palawa hunting grounds

on the Surrey Hills -

and here they are.

Oh, that's spectacular.

Never expected them to be so big.

Yeah. And it's only a fraction of what they used to be.

There used to 10,000 hectares

and we have a few pockets like this left.

Spectacular. Mmm.

We're right at the foot of St Valentine's Peak,

the point where Henry Hellier, in 1827, stood

and first laid eyes on the Surrey Hills.

And I've got some actual paintings

of elsewhere in the landscape around,

uh, painted by one of the early colonial painters,

a man called John Glover.

And you can see that these are constant depictions of...

of grassy landscapes, with tall eucalypts.

Along the creeks and gullies there would've been shrubbery,

maybe the odd rainforest plant.

That's...they're the seeds of the rainforests that have come out now

and this would've extended for 10,000 hectares,

which is a huge, huge area.

So I can't even imagine that this is the kind of landscape

that he would have come to.

I imagine this, what we're looking at now,

as being introduced when white settlers came.

Yeah - that's the narrative

that we've been woven about this continent,

is that the bush is what was here and the bush has always been here.

But it was...in actual fact, it was a curated landscape.

The farmlands that people have today are on Aboriginal lands.

Yeah.

These were already open and curated landscapes

that were managed and maintained by people.

Cultural burning is the way

that Aboriginal people manage country on this continent.

I hope that what comes

out of the research we've done here on the Surrey Hills

is that it repositions us within country.

It shows we have a role to play in managing healthy country.

Australia is home to a vast array of plants,

at least 20,000 different species.

8% of them don't exist anywhere else on earth.

The first Australians needed a highly sophisticated system

to identify which were safe and useful

and to protect themselves from those that were not.

An extraordinary body of knowledge,

which remains alive today.

Aunty Fran!

Yes. Hello.

How are you? I'm Benny.

Hi, Benny.

Aunty Fran Bodkin knows the traditional uses

of thousands of plant species.

So, Aunty Fran, we've stepped into your supermarket.

Yeah.

What's this - aisle six?

Yeah. This one here has multiple uses.

Rub it between your hands until your hands get warm.

It's a cure for frostbite.

Really? Yeah.

Put it over your face. Breathe in deeply.

(INHALES) Memory enhancer.

Most of the native bushes of Australia

have multiple uses.

We've got the paperbark.

Now, if you peel it off carefully...

..between each layer is a layer of powder.

Now, that powder is a highly effective antibiotic

and so you put it on the wounds and that and they don't get infected.

And it was used mainly for spear wounds.

You just put it over a wound like that,

the blood sticks to the skin

and if you leave it there, it'll heal beautifully

and then the bark will just fall off and float away.

What have we got here? It's a native raspberry.

Wow.

That is like a thousand times better

than you get in a punnet in the shop.

Yeah. And there they are, growing wild.

And do they grow only certain times a year?

No. All year round.

They are amazing. They are beautiful.

Aunty Fran's book, the D'harawal Pharmacopeia,

has over 11,000 entries.

It guarantees traditional knowledge is available

for future generations of all Australians.

How did this come about?

I got annoyed,

because oftentimes, when I was looking up...

..or trying to look up descriptions of and uses of plants,

I couldn't find what I wanted.

So I thought, "Oh, well - I'll bloody well write it myself."

Aboriginal knowledge is the beginning.

It is the groundwork

that we should be basing our present knowledge on today.

When I said on the way in here today

that I'm going to spend some time with a human encyclopedia,

I wasn't wrong.

I'm sharing my knowledge

and hopefully, you know, other people will follow.

Innovation is in the spirit of First Australians.

I mean, the fact that we're here at all

is proof of our daring and curious nature.

We're survivors in this land

and custodians of this amazing, diverse,

complicated, sometimes harsh

but always beautiful land.

In the next episode, we reveal how Australia's First Nations people

may have invented

the most sophisticated memory system on the planet...

..a system which not only allowed them

to store encyclopedias worth of information in the mind...

We know how to use this tool.

We know how to make this tool today.

..also to hand down accounts of ancient events

for hundreds of generations.

Captions by Red Bee Media