Middlemarsh: The Hopkins River, Kindred Wetlands and Remarkable People

Rod Giblett

Apr 2023 · Environmental Humanities Book 2 · Transnational Press London

About this ebook

“One book leads to another; one book grows out of another; one book flows out of others. Flowing is a fitting figure for a book about a river, creeks, wetlands and water. The present volume grew out of a brief discussion of two paintings of wetlands in mid-western Victoria by the nineteenth-century colonial landscape painter Eugene von Guérard. This discussion was part of a chapter on wetlands in Australian painting and photography (Giblett 2020a). It was included in John Ryan’s and Li Chen’s edited collection Australian Wetland Cultures (Ryan and Chen, eds 2020). I also contributed a chapter to this volume on Aboriginal wetland cultures, their sacral water beings and their refraction in Rainbow Serpent anthropology and Rainbow Spirit theology (Giblett 2020e). I take up and develop this discussion in the present volume in relation to particular Aboriginal peoples and places in mid-western Victoria, their practices of wetland cultures and their stories about and images of them, including the Rainbow Serpent."

Contents

Introduction to the Hopkins River, Its Basin, People and Places 13

Chapter 1. The Cast of Characters and A Companion of A Captain of Conservation. 35

Chapter 2. Where The River Rises: The Upper Hopkins, Its Creeks and Lake Bolac. 57

Chapter 3. Wetlands of ‘Australia Felix’: Between ‘The Grampians’ and The Upper Hopkins 77

Chapter 4. A Ramble Along The River: Through Colonial Places On The Middle Hopkins 103

Chapter 5. People and Place of Hissing Swan: Wetlands On The Middle Hopkins 125

Chapter 6. Framlingham and Hopkins Falls: Aboriginal Places and People On The Lower Hopkins 147

Chapter 7. Where The River Meets The Sea: The Hopkins Estuary 167

About the author

Rod Giblett is the author of 30 books of fiction and faction (‘non-fiction’). He lived by a wetland in Western Australia for 28 years that he called ‘Black Swan Lake’ and wrote several books about it. He now lives in Melbourne and wrote about it, its wetlands and the Yarra River in Modern Melbourne: City and Site of Nature and Culture (Intellect Books, 2020). He is Honorary Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Writing and Literature Program of the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University.