Budj Bim Giants

This entry is different from the others in the codex, because most of it is verifiable.

Gunditjmara tradition holds that Budj Bim is a creation being who revealed himself, and the surrounding landscape records that revelation. The name is commonly translated as "high head". The volcano erupted, and the lava flow it produced is the ground everything else sits on.

The eruption is dated by geological methods to roughly thirty-seven thousand years ago. Gunditjmara people were present. That makes the tradition, in the reading now widely accepted by geologists and archaeologists working with the community, one of the oldest continuously held accounts of an actual event anywhere on earth.

What the Gunditjmara built on that lava is the other half. Across the wetlands they constructed an extensive system of channels, weirs and holding ponds to trap, store and harvest kooyang: short-finned eel. Parts of it are dated to around six thousand five hundred years old. It supported permanent stone dwellings and a settled population, which comprehensively contradicts the long-standing colonial claim that Aboriginal Australians were universally nomadic and built nothing.

The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2019, on cultural criteria, nominated with and managed by the Gunditjmara.

So the "giant" here is a mountain that is a person, remembered accurately across an interval that beggars comparison, by people who then engineered the country around it. Almost nothing else in this collection is that solid.