By Catherine Watson

WHEN I heard that Bunurong Land Corporation ranger Ross Henry was leading a walk in The Gurdies, I signed up quickly. I wasn’t the only one. Around 25 people turned up for the walk, organised by Bass Coast Landcare Network. Clearly there is a hunger within the community to find out more about Bunurong perspectives on our local environment. 

Ross originally trained with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Cranbourne. He brings botanical and ecological knowledge in the western sense but he also brings a distinctly indigenous perspective. 

When we stop at a patch of Nodding Greenhood orchids, he explains that what looks like dozens of plants may actually be one plant connected through sister tubers, and that each orchid species depends on particular pollinators and soil fungi. 

“For Bunurong people, all of your lilies and orchids are food. As we walk around, you'll start to notice it's like being in a supermarket. Everything you see around you has a use. 

“All these milkmaids, all those orchids, if you dig them up at the right time of year, you can cook up those bulbs like potatoes, like onions, and they would've been a really prominent food source.”

The cherry ballart, he explains, is high in vitamin C and one of the main plants used in the Bunurong smoking ceremony. 

“You can use the patersonia for weaving, so that's what you use to make your baskets. The kunzea over there was used to make spears. All the eucalypts, that's your medicines, your old-style vapour rub.”

Accompanying us on the walk is Josh Van de Ven, a Bunurong language team leader and linguist, who explains that, after not being spoken fluently for about 150 years, the Bunurong language is being reconstructed from early records of colonial settlers and surviving oral knowledge. 

“That ecological name is embedded in the language in a way that the English name cherry is not. You think about trying to get kids involved in caring for country, that's a much deeper and richer way of learning. It’s a much better connection, not just connection for Aboriginal people, but for everyone.”

I went expecting to learn more about the plants but I’m also learning that this landscape is about relationships – between plants and insects, people and the plants they depend on, language and Country, plants and fungi. 

There’s another crucial relationship, between fire and seed. In December 2024, bushfire razed much of the Gurdies reserve. Many of the old eucalypts were so badly burnt they won’t recover. 

But fire is also crucial in regeneration of the bush. Now we walk up the track into the Gurdies foothills, to see what’s happening on the site of a mosaic burn conducted about four months ago by a team from Bunurong Land Council, the first cultural burn in the area for almost two centuries. 

The burn was very slow and cool, Ross says, just small patches at a time. When the team visited the following day they were amazed at the number of skinks and lizards and frogs on the burn site.

He explains that four months later, while this patch of bush still looks burnt, there’s a lot happening underground. The seeds respond to heat, smoke and chemical changes, and the landscape begins its next cycle.

“It’s a perfect time to direct seed as well now. When these eucalypts finish flowering this year and seed hits the ground, this is going to explode. You've had the heat and the smoke to open the pods, but it's the chemical reaction with the potash on the ground that's going to do the propagation. 

Learn to say some words in Bunurong