Highlights from this year’s muttonbirding
This year, like every year for tens of thousands of years, our people went birdin.
Muttonbirding is a cultural practice that is deeply important to the pakana/palawa community. Many of our guides and staff joined their families and friends over on tayaritja/Furneaux Islands this year from late March to share in some of the hardest physical work you could just about ever imagine choosing to do.
“I love eating them but it’s just an absolute shit of a job,” says Hank Horton. This Aboriginal community member and highly valued wukalina Walk lead guide has gladly left his birdin days behind him.
“You work your bum off for eight weeks and you come home with a little bit of money in your pocket. You don’t go for the money. You’re really going for the experience and connection to your community and Country and actually just being able to do that cultural practice, that’s where the value comes in.”
In the last couple of hundred years, since invasion led to pakana being forcibly removed from their homelands, a whole vocabulary developed on Bass Strait Islands around muttonbirding. Words like scun, gurrie, spit and, or course, birdin.
Guide Carleeta Thomas tries to never misses birdin season, clocking off with wukalina Walk and flying straight over to the islands to get into it. “When I’m birdin that’s my main relax time just being with the family” and then laughs at the fact she could even consider birdin is relaxing. Carleeta was born and raised on Cape Barren Island and has a lot of muttonbirding knowledge and stories. She also an uncle who can pluck a bird in three seconds.
Our general manager intern, Warena Burgess, has a family shed and joined her sister on Big Dog Island this year. Guide Jam Graham-Blair went muttonbirding for the first time since he was a kid. If you ask him what muttonbird tastes like he’ll say “it tastes like the ocean”.
When you go on wukalina Walk, and meet at the Elders Council on the morning of the first day for scones and a cuppa, look for the beautiful Cape Barren muttonbirding quilt on the wall above the stage.
During the Walk you’ll notice the subject keeps coming up. It’s not just because it’s interesting to talk about the physical and historical aspects of this cultural practice but because so many good stories – many of them hilarious and you didn’t even have to be there – come from birdin season.
The most common way for people to travel from mainland Tasmania to the islands is in a light plane from Bridport. Here’s a video by Carleeta Thomas of the crew heading off at the end of March.
