Criterion

Values

(f)

the place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place's importance in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical achievement at a particular period.

The technical achievements that allowed rainforest Aboriginal people to utilise toxic plants are of outstanding heritage value to the nation. They used at least 14 toxic plants as foods, an unusually large number in the Australian context. While most of these plants are distributed throughout the rainforest, each tribal group used toxic plants found within their own country. Evidence of the diverse and complex range of techniques used to process these plants remain, including ground ovens to soften toxic nuts and certain streams to leach out the toxins.

These technical achievements were based on a unique material culture that made it possible to live year round in the rainforest of the Wet Tropics. Rainforest Aboriginal people developed a specialised and unique material culture to process toxic and other plants including bicornual baskets made from lawyer vine, grooved grinding slabs, crushing stones, anvils pitted with small hollows, hammerstones and polished waisted stone axes called ooyurkas. They also developed specific uses of fire to manage and alter their rainforest home, including the purposeful use of fire to alter vegetation communities and plant-specific techniques to control the lawyer vine. These cultural practices are the expression of the technical achievements that made it possible for Aboriginal people to live year-round in the rainforest of the Wet Tropics.

(i)

the place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place's importance as part of Indigenous tradition

Traditions established by creation beings about the toxicity of plants and the techniques used to process toxic plants are unusual in an Australian context and are of outstanding heritage value to the nation. There are a number of traditions that describe how creation beings created and instructed rainforest Aboriginal people about the foods found in the rainforest and how to make them edible. These traditions are inscribed in the landscape at particular named places. These places and traditional law provide the conceptual framework that underpins the rainforest Aboriginal people's technical achievement in processing toxic plants.