Nestled beneath the foothills of the
Great Dividing Range on the east coast
of Australia is a spectacular river gorge.
For 2 kilometres of majestic canyons and waterfalls,
the Clarence River tumbles towards the sea.
Robyne Bancroft, is a Goorie woman of
Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr descent,
who grew up north of The Gorge in the Clarence Valley.
She's also an archaeologist, historian and a
custodian of the ancient legends
inspired by this landscape.
They are always stories about the rivers,
the waterways, the animals, the landscape.
Durrangan and Birragan was one of them.
And the story that we go by is
there was this old woman.
Most people refer to her as an old witch
but a lot of people now are
reconsidering that old witch story,
and saying that she was just
a protector of the water.
Our understanding is that
Birragan came to Durrangan and said,
"We haven't got enough water and we know
you have the water, and we want it".
And, she said: 'Go away'.
So, he went away and he spied on her
to see where she was getting her water from.
[He] saw that she dammed up the water
and Birragan, he broke it open.
And the water started rushing down a small river
and the small river became larger and larger.
And Durrangan ran ahead
and tried to block it up again,
with rocks, and mountains and hills.
And The Gorge is one of those places
and if you see The Gorge, The Gorge is a
beautiful place and it would seem logical
to people that that would be where
she could block the water.
But the water had picked up
so much speed by this time,
and the water rushed through again.
Our story says that she lost
control of stopping the water,
and the water flowed out to sea.
There's many different legends because
on the Clarence River we have
many different Aboriginal groups,
and they have their own story of Durrangan.
The Durrangan legend of the Clarence River
is one of two fascinating creation stories,
where The Gorge is a character in dramatic events.
The second story happened
around 290 million years ago.
This flat surface here could well be
the original sea bed.
The sea bed has moved through 90 degrees
and it's sitting on its end.
Dr John Jackson is known as the rock doctor.
He's a geologist and an artist
who has become obsessed about a theory
that this river once flowed
in the opposite direction.
He believes the evidence is embedded
in the rocks here at The Gorge.
This story started 1911, 1920
explorers coming through this country
and they noticed the rivers
weren't going directly to the sea.
The rivers that flow into the Clarence,
they're going in one direction
until they hit the Clarence
and then they turn almost 270 degrees
and flow in the opposite direction.
Now that to the early explorers,
was pretty extraordinary.
They expected a sort of fishbone, herringbone pattern,
where the rivers all flowed into the main river
and flowed the same way.
I painted it here.
They call it the barbs of the Clarence.
You see it on the south-western side.
The rivers flow to the north east,
and then they turn around
and flow to the south east.
They all do that.
If you go to the Condamine they seem to be
flowing in the direction you would expect.
They're all flowing into the Condamine
in the same direction.
This is where it all started
on these rocks 300 million years ago.
The rocks I'm standing on
were at the bottom of the ocean.
And of course, being a geo artist,
I wanted to paint them.
So in this first painting here,
I have painted the rocks that I'm standing on
before they were squashed up into a mountain range.
When they get squashed into a
mountain range at 290 million years,
in those big folds, is a big valley,
which turns out to be the start of the
very river that we love — the Clarence River.
And it flowed down that big valley
and bent its way all the way in to the
central inland sea in Australia.
For 200 million years it did that.
It's only in the last 60 million years
that it's gone this way,
after the Tasman Sea opened.
The last painting is what we see today,
instead of the river going all the way inland,
as it did for 200 million years.
The last 60 only this part of the Clarence
then starts to flow in the opposite direction
and out to the new Tasman Sea,
and the other part, the Condamine,
goes off into the Darling and the Murray system.
Love this story.
We are convinced that the Clarence
and the Condamine were once one river,
flowing westwards into the great Australian basin.
And it was the Tasman Sea opening
that made this part of the Clarence
flow backwards into its current position
where it comes out at Yamba.
For Elder Robyne Bancroft,
the stories inspired by this country
just add to the richness of her experience
of living with this wild river.
The mighty Clarence, it's a beautiful place.
You can feel the spirituality of the land.
You can feel at one with where you are.