Birthing Trees

More than 260 Djab Wurrung trees that are 800 years old are slated to be bulldozed to make way for a highway between Buangor and Ararat in western Victoria. Some are "birthing trees", used by local Aboriginal women to give birth for an estimated 50 generations.

In 2020, a tree lovingly referred to as a 'directions tree' was cut down. The tree was a result of an ancient Djab Wurrung indigenous practice where a child's placenta is planted along with a seed to create a spiritual link to ancestors.

"[Settlers] can't understand what it means to be able to connect the blood coursing through your body to ancestors' blood soaked in ancient soil and ancient trees. To sit in a tree that saw your people birthed, your people massacred, and now your people's resistance is a feeling that the English language will never be able to capture ... this connection may be ... poetic but this connection is a threat. It is a feeling that reinforces our rights to this land. This connection must therefore, by the logic of the settler state, be destroyed."

Nayuka Gorrie

Image credit: Sean Paris