The Lake Bolac stone arrangement, also known as the Kuyang stone arrangement, is an Aboriginal ceremonial site near the town of

Lake Bolac Lake Bolac is a town in the Western District region of Victoria, Australia. The town is on the shores of Lake Bolac, and the Glenelg Highway passes through the town. At the 2021 census, Lake Bolac and the surrounding area had a population of ...

in the Western District, north-east of

Hamilton, Victoria Hamilton is a large town in south-western Victoria, Australia, at the intersection of the Glenelg Highway and the Henty Highway. The Hamilton Highway connects it to Geelong. Hamilton is in the federal Division of Wannon, and is in the South ...

, Australia. It is one of several

Aboriginal stone arrangement __NOTOC__ Aboriginal stone arrangements are a form of rock art constructed by Aboriginal Australians. Typically, they consist of stones, each of which may be about in size, laid out in a pattern extending over several metres or tens of metres. ...

s scattered across Australia. It was registered on the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Register in 1975, and is protected by the Victorian ''

Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 The ''Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006'' (AHA) of the state of Victoria, Australia was enacted "to provide for the protection of Aboriginal cultural heritage in Victoria". It established Registered Aboriginal Parties to act as the "primary guardian ...

''. The

basalt Basalt (; ) is an aphanitic (fine-grained) extrusive igneous rock formed from the rapid cooling of low-viscosity lava rich in magnesium and iron (mafic lava) exposed at or very near the surface of a rocky planet or moon. More than 90 ...

stones are arranged in two lines and are said to resemble a giant

eel Eels are ray-finned fish belonging to the order Anguilliformes (), which consists of eight suborders, 19 families, 111 genera, and about 800 species. Eels undergo considerable development from the early larval stage to the eventual adult stage ...

. The stones vary in size from about to , with some possibly having been embedded in holes in the ground so as to make them stand upright. The Lake Bolac ceremonial site, and the similar

Wurdi Youang Wurdi Youang is the name attributed to an Aboriginal stone arrangement located off the Little River – Ripley Road at Mount Rothwell, near Little River, Victoria in Australia. The site was acquired by the Indigenous Land Corporation on 14 Janua ...

site, were identified as being Aboriginal structures on the basis that there was "no counterpart among colonial structures and there was no evidence that they ever formed part of any type of fence or building". Both arrangements are on land that had been owned by a single

European Australian European Australians are citizens or residents of Australia whose ancestry originates from the peoples of Europe. They form the largest panethnic group in the country. At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses categorised within Eu ...

family since first settlement, and there existed no tradition within those families of the arrangements having been built by Europeans. Massola utilised similar criteria to identify the Mount Franklin stone arrangement as a potential Aboriginal stone alignment. The importance of eels to the Aboriginal economy was recognised early in the site's history: "Lake Boloke is the most celebrated place in the Western District for the fine quality and abundance of its eels, and, when the autumn rains induce these fish to leave the lake and to go down the river to the sea, the Aborigines gather there from great distances". At some stage, some of the stones were removed to make way for a road (now the

Glenelg Highway Glenelg Highway is a rural highway in south-eastern Australia, linking Mount Gambier with Ballarat. Most of the highway is located within the Western part of the state of Victoria, though a short, 15 km stretch from the South Australia/V ...

Adelaide Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...

). In April 2021 the stone arrangement, which is on privately-owned land, was found to have been damaged. The

Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation The Eastern Maar people are a group of Aboriginal Australian peoples whose traditional lands are in the south-western part of state of Victoria, Australia. It is a name adopted by a number of Aboriginal Victorian groups who identify as Maar, inc ...

, after viewing the site from the road, said that up to of the stone arrangement may have been destroyed. The

Lake Bolac Eel Festival A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much larger ...

is a community music and art festival held each autumn on the foreshore of Lake Bolac since 2004, inspired by the fact that Lake Bolac was a traditional gathering place for

Indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

before white settlement. This festival has helped to make the site well-known to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.

External links

Lake Bolac Eel Festival

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lake bolac stone arrangement Pleistocene paleontological sites of Australia History of Victoria (Australia) Australian Aboriginal cultural history Stone circles in Australia