71 BEHIND THE WHEEL

ROADSIDE WONDERS

If you know what to look for, you’ll find them on a bend that looks like a million others, on a river that often struggles to flow, behind a tiny town that’s had its problems, on a road that beelines for the back of Bourke. Many people in this north-western New South Wales town, and plenty of others besides, sincerely believe that the Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps are among the oldest, if not the oldest, human-made structures on Earth.

So far, science is yet to categorically agree or disagree that this half-kilometre network of stone walls and holding ponds across the Barwon River has been in use for 40,000 years: roughly eight-times-and-change older than Stonehenge.

Ngunnhu, as the Ngemba people named them, are not grand Stonehenge-style structures, nor tributes to long-dead tyrants or bygone deities. No, they are simply an unpretentious snapshot of everyday life as it was lived on this part of the Murray-Darling for millennia before settlement (the Barwon turns into the Darling River 80 kilometres downstream).

Brewarrina locals know the significance of what they have within their realm, the story surviving despite the turmoils of the recent past, but they simply don’t feel the need to brag about it. “We never compete with people, with tribes, by saying that the fish traps are the oldest because the Old People didn’t like us doing that,” says Bradley Hardy from Brewarrina Aboriginal Cultural Museum.

The traps’ U-shaped design is simple yet shrewd; their openings face against