Women's grinding stone for making
food and medicines, from the northern
rivers district of NSW. Lent by the
Australian Museum.
Traditional birth control methods
Indigenous Australian peoples have used a great variety of traditional forms of birth control. Although we cannot generalise about all Aboriginal communities, we know that some controlled birth rates through social rules, such as forbidding men to have sex with their wives for many months after a baby was born. Some relied on breastfeeding their babies for up to three years to delay pregnancy. Women also knew how to make medicines that could act as contraceptives, bring on an abortion or make a woman sterile.
Anthropologists have published snippets of information about these practices, and others have made lists of plants that are supposed to be contraceptives. We cannot be sure how much of this information has been accurately recorded, and whether the women who told it gave permission for it to be to published. It is the kind of knowledge that is shared only between women. In some communities, women elders still hold knowledge about traditional birth-control methods.
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Germaine Greer, Australian feminist writer, Sex and destiny, 1984.