The River is Our Blood
Stories from the Brewarrina Fish Traps
It was Bruce Pascoe’s book ‘Dark Emu’ that brought us to Brewarrina.
But it wasn’t the first time I had read about these ancient fish traps, claimed to be one of the oldest man-made structures on earth. We are making our way to The National Housing Conference in Darwin and have chosen to travel up the Matilda Highway. I hadn’t realised there was so much Aboriginal and Australian history along this highway and wish we had more time to meander. We had set up camp in Nullen, just outside Dubbo and I was reading the chapter on Aquaculture in Dark Emu. Curious as to its exact location, I Googled only to discover that not only was it within a day’s drive, it was exactly in the direction we were heading.
These serendipitous discoveries always excite me and have now become a fairly common feature in our nomadic lives.
Brewarrina sits on the banks of the Barwon River — the headwaters of the Darling River. Just downstream of this place, the Barwon and Culgoa Rivers flow into the Darling. As you can imagine, this area was of immense cultural, spiritual and economic significance to the Aboriginal people for…
