The coolamon (tarnuk in Victoria) is a wooden container, useful in foraging for nuts, seeds, fruit, roots and small game. A pointy vessel strong enough for digging, if need be, it was also used in food preparation, for example, winnowing grains in bread-making and even heating water and cooking all sorts of ‘bush tucker’. Most amazing of all, it has served on occasion to carry sacred fire from one place to another.

This wonderful multipurpose technology also produced cradles for young babies (lined with the magically soft and papery bark of the melaleuca tree), warriors’ shields and streamlined canoes (any inconvenient holes being stopped with clay) for use on rivers and streams. Aboriginal technologies were complex, well organised, sustainable and often multifunctional, used not only for everyday, but also for ceremonial practice.

Usually crafted from hard woods, such as the manna gum, red gum or box (species of Eucalyptus), large sections of bark were carefully removed, with a stone axe or perhaps a quartz knife, in a single piece and further shaped over a hot fire. When the bark was taken in this manner, the tree didn’t die but formed a scar, marking it forever, and opportunely providing good habitat for all sorts of birds and wildlife.

This particular tarnuk is about 50 cm long and 17 cm across. I found it at a ‘thrift store’ in the small town of Colac in 1978 for 50 cents. I was told it was a ‘shield’ but think of it now as a food bowl, lightly ornamented on the outside with kangaroo tracks and other symbolic designs.

Nungali people, from around the upper Daly river in the north, tell of how a new Rainbow came after the first Rainbow left with the water. There was only a little bit of water left in one waterhole, the rest was under ground. Rain was needed to fill the rivers, so there would be water for everyone. So Brolga took the water up in the sky in a big coolamon while the little left-handed frog that burrows in the sand, Murrujurlman, made a spear with the grass that grows by the river. Murrujurlman used a spear thrower, Gamanggirr, to throw the spear at the coolamon. When the spear hit the coolamon, rain fell out of the coolamon and filled the rivers.

Reference: http://www.rbg.vic.gov.au/documents/Connecting_to_Country_Kit_2013.pdf