Walk down to the sand dunes and find a comfortable spot. The sand dunes that you’re sitting on right now were used as campsites by the Kabi Kabi people before Europeans arrived in this area in the 1840s (Jackson 1939, p.289; McConville 2009). Camping in open sand dunes like these was safer than camping amongst the trees behind you as it was easier to spot intruders walking across the white sand, and also there were less mosquitos in the summer (Jackson 1939, p. 289)! Can you imagine sleeping out here, night after night?
Good weather and great fishing made this part of the coast much easier to live in for long periods of time compared to other parts of Queensland that were very dry and didn’t provide food easily (Hand 2011a). For the Kabi Kabi people, this area was house, shopping centre, school and playground! Fish, kangaroo, possum, mussels and dugong were some of the main foods here (Hand 2011a; Wood 1988, p. 53). Archaeologists know about the diet of Aboriginal people here partly due to the large shell middens that were found at Point Cartwright in the 1930s (Jackson 1939, p. 289). The photograph you can see on your screen is an example of a shell midden. Basically, middens are places where people used to put all their food waste!
Bev Hands, a Kabi Kabi woman, explains that Aboriginal people followed the traditional lore of ‘mimburi’ which means the continual flow of every living thing (Hand 2011a). Following ‘mimburi’ meant that people only ate certain animals and plants at certain times of the year and had other rules that meant those plants and animals didn’t die out from over-use (Hand 2011a).
You might think of this idea today as ‘sustainability’ which is incredibly important. Do you think that people on the Sunshine Coast today practice ‘mimburi’? We will think about this idea again soon when we hear some stories about fishing.
