Boonwurrung

Bunurong

Total population
Pre contact - at least 500.
Regions with significant populations
Languages
Boonwurrung language, English
Religion
Australian Aboriginal mythology, Christianity
Related ethnic groups
see List of Indigenous Australian group names

The Boon wurrung, are Aboriginal Australians of the Kulin nation, who occupy from Werribee River to Wilsons Prom. Victoria, Australia. Before British colonisation, they lived as all people of the Kulin nation lived, sustainably on the land, for tens of thousands of years. They were called the Western Port or Port Philip tribe by the early settlers, and were in alliance with other tribes in the Kulin nation, having particularly strong ties to the Wurundjeri people.

Language

Boonwurrung was a dialect of Woiwurrung, a Kulin language of the Pama-Nyungan language family. The ethnonym occasionally used in early writings to refer to the Bunwurrung, namely Bunwurru, is derived from the word bu:n, meaning "no" and wur:u, signifying either "lip" or "speech".

Country

The Bunurong people are predominantly saltwater people whose lands, waters, and cosmos encompassed some 3,000 square miles (7,800 km²) of territory around Western Port Bay and the Mornington Peninsula. Its western boundary was set at Werribee. To the southeast, it extended from Mordialloc through to Anderson Inlet, as far as Wilson's Promontory. Inland its borders reached the Dandenong Ranges, and ran eastwards as far as the vicinity of Warragul.

Structure, borders, and land use

Communities consisted of six or more (depending on the extent of the territory) land-owning groups called clans that spoke a related language and were connected through cultural and mutual interests, totems, trading initiatives, and marriage ties. Access by other clans to land and resources (such as the Birrarung, or Yarra River) was sometimes restricted depending on the state of the resource in question. For example; if a river or creek had been fished regularly throughout the fishing season and fish supplies were down, fishing was limited or stopped entirely by the clan who owned that resource until fish were given a chance to recover. During this time, other resources were utilized for food. This ensured the sustained use of the resources available to them. As with most other Kulin territories, penalties such as spearings were enforced upon trespassers. Today, traditional clan locations, language groups, and borders are no longer in use and descendants of Wurundjeri people live within modern-day society.

Clans

It is generally considered that before European settlement, six separate clans existed, each with an Arweet, or clan headman.

• Yalukit-willam: East of Werribee River to St Kilda
• Mayone-bulluk: Carrum Carrum Swamp
• Ngaruk-Willam: Brighton, Mordialloc, Dandenong, and the area from Mount Martha to Mount Eliza.
• Yallock-Bullock: Bass River and Tooradin.
• Burinyung-Ballak: Point Nepean to Cape Schank.
• Yowenjerre: Tarwin River.

Marriage

The Bunurong social divisions consisted of moieties, classifying people either as Bunjil the Eaglehawk or Waang the raven.

History

First contact

The Bunurong clans would have been aware of the Europeans, as people of the coast who watched the explorers ships sail past, then enter Port Phillip and Western Port. Initial contact was made in February 1801, when Lieutenant Murray and his crew from the Lady Nelson came ashore for fresh water near present-day Sorrento. A wary exchange of spears and stone axes for shirts, mirrors and a steel axe, ended when the British panicked, resulting in spears flying, musket shots and the use of the ship's cannon, wounding several fleeing Bunurong people.

The following month, Captain Milius from the French ship Naturaliste, in the Baudin expedition, danced alone on a beach at Western Port for the natives, in a much more peaceful contact.

Just before and overlapping the period of British exploration and settlement, the Bunurong were involved in a long-running dispute with the Gunai/Kurnai people from Gippsland. According to William Barak, the last traditional elder of the Wurundjeri people, the conflict was a dispute over resources, which resulted in heavy casualties being suffered by the Bunurong. Many Gunnai raids occurred to abduct Bunurong women. The Yowengerra had almost been completely annihilated by 1836, largely as a result of attacks from the Gunai. During 1833–34, around 60–70 Bunurong people, if a report has been correctly interpreted, may have been killed in a raid by Gunai when they were camped to the north of Carrum Carrum Swamp.

Dispossession

The first British settlement occurred at Sullivan Bay in October 1803, near modern-day Sorrento, Victoria, under the command of Lieutenant David Collins. William Buckley, a convict, escaped from this abortive settlement and lived for more than 30 years with the Wathaurong people before approaching John Batman's party in 1835.

The Bunurong people, living primarily along the Port Phillip and Western Port coast, may have had their livelihoods affected by European seal hunters. The sealers' abduction of Bunurong women and taken to Bass Strait Islands and Tasmania may have caused inter-tribal conflicts, and by analogy, this may also apply to the Bunurong, whose coastlands were visited by sealers. A report by Jules Dumont d'Urville in 1830 attributed the absence of Bunurong on Phillip Island, which was a camp for sealers, as due to the latter's behavior. As late as 1833, nine Woiwurrung and Bunurong women, and a boy, Yonki Yonka, were kidnapped and ferried across to the sealers' Bass Strait island bases. Contact with sealers would have exposed the coastal tribes to European diseases, and this would have exercised a heavy impact on demographics, and the economic and social ties binding the Wurundjeri and Bunurong peoples, as would the possible effects of infectious diseases contracted from these sealers.

James Fleming, one of the party of surveyor Charles Grimes in HMS Cumberland who explored the Maribyrnong River and the Yarra River as far as Dights Falls in February 1803, reported smallpox scars on several aboriginal people he met, suggesting that a smallpox epidemic might have swept through the tribes around Port Philip before 1803, reducing the population. Broome puts forward that two epidemics of smallpox decimated the population of the Kulin tribes by perhaps killing half each time in the 1790s and again around 1830. This theory has been challenged, however, by modern historical diagnosticians, who argue that the observed symptoms in the early ethnographical literature are compatible with impetigo and ringworm.

One particularly notable person at the time of European settlement in Victoria was Derrimut, a Bunurong Elder, who informed early European settlers in October 1835 of an impending attack by clans from the Woiwurrung group. The colonists armed themselves, and the attack was averted. Benbow and Billibellary, from the Wurundjeri, also acted to protect the colonists as part of their duty of hospitality. Derrimut later became very disillusioned and died in the Benevolent Asylum at the age of about 54 years in 1864. A few colonists erected a tombstone to Derrimut in Melbourne General Cemetery in his honour.

By 1839, the Bunurong had been reduced to 80–90 people, with only 4 of 19 children under four years old, from a probable pre-contact population of greater than 500 people. By 1850 Protector William Thomas estimated just 28 Bunurong people living on Bunurong land.

In 1852, the Bunurong were allocated 340 hectares (840 acres) at Mordialloc Creek while the Woiworrung gained 782 hectares along the Yarra at Warrandyte. The Aboriginal reserves were never staffed by whites and were not permanent camps, but acted as distribution depots where rations and blankets were distributed, with the intention being to keep the tribes away from the growing settlement of Melbourne. The Aboriginal Protection Board revoked these two reserves in 1862–1863, considering them now too close to Melbourne.

In March 1863 after three years of upheaval, the surviving Kulin leaders, among them Simon Wonga and William Barak, led forty Wurundjeri, Taungurong (Goulburn River) and Bunurong people over the Black Spur and squatted on a traditional camping site on Badger Creek near Healesville and requested ownership of the site. This became Coranderrk Station, named after the Woiwurrung word for the Victorian Christmas bush. Coranderrk was closed in 1924 and its occupants were moved to Lake Tyers in Gippsland.

Territory

In Bunurong belief, their territory was carved out by the creator Lohan as he moved from Yarra Flats down to his final resting place at Wa-mung and, as custodians of this marine-bek country, they required outsiders to observe certain ritual prohibitions and to learn their language if the newcomers were to enter their land without harm.

Law and war

Great enmity existed in particular between the Bunurong and the eastern Gunai, who were later deemed responsible for playing a role in the drastic reduction of the tribe's population.

Injury or death to a tribal member usually resulted in a conference to assess the facts, and, where thought unlawful, revenge was taken. In 1839, after one or two Bunurong/Woiwurrung were killed, a party of 15 men left for Geelong in order to retaliate against the malefactors, the Wathaurong. In 1840, the Bunurong became convinced that a man from a tribe in Echuca had used sorcery to ordain the death of one of their warriors, whose name had been sung while a possum bone discarded after a Bunurong meal, and encased in a kangaroo's leg bone, was roasted. Shortly afterward the named Bunurong man died, and the tribe revenged itself on the first Echuca tribesman who then came to visit their territory. It was arranged by word of mouth, passing from Echuca through the Nirababaluk and Wurundjeri, for a meeting to have justice done at Merri Creek. Nine or ten of the killed Echuca tribesman's kinsmen threw spears and boomerangs at the Bunurong warrior, armed with a shield, until he was wounded in the flank by a reed-spear. An elder of another, observing tribe, the Barapa Barapa, called it a day, the ordeal ended, and all celebrated a grand corroboree.

Bunurong creation stories

Dreamtime stories

• Bunjil & Pallian Creation Story: Bunjil is the Creator spirit of the Kulin People.
• Birrarung Creation Story: formation of the Birrarung River.

Notable Bunurong people

• Jack Charles (1943– ), actor.
• Louisa Briggs – Matron of Correnderrk Aboriginal Reserve at the time of European occupation. She was the "daughter of John Strugnell, a sealer, and Mary (Polly) Munro...Polly was probably the daughter of James Munro, another sealer, and Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke (Margery Munro), a Woirorung woman kidnapped from Port Phillip," and was described by a contemporary newspaper as 'matron of the establishment, on a salary of 10s. a week, and manages the affairs of the children and young people "in school" with the utmost vigilance and much success. Nander Gorooke (Elizabeth Maynard wife of Derrimut, kidnapped and taken to Bass Strait Islands, namely Preservation and Cape Barren Islands)
• Derrimut (c. 1810 – 28 May 1864), Arweet – headman of the Bunurong, associated with the Wurundjeri.
• Linda Lovett, barrister
• Bruce Pascoe (1947– ), writer.

Alternative names

• Bunuron
• Bunurong, Bunwurrung, Boonwerung, Boon Wurrung, Boonoorong and Bururong
• Bunwurru
• Putnaroo, Putmaroo
• Thurung (an eastern tribal exonym for the Bunjurong, meaning tiger snakes, a metaphor indicating the sneaky way they set up ambushes against the eastern tribes.)
• Toturin (a Gunai term for 'black snake, used for several western Boon wurrung tribes.)

See also

• Australian Aboriginal enumeration
• Possum-skin cloak

Sources

• Barwick, Diane E. (1984). McBryde, Isabel (ed.). "Mapping the past: an atlas of Victorian clans 1835–1904". Aboriginal History. 8 (2): 100–131. JSTOR 24045800.
• Barwick, Laura (2005). "Briggs, Louisa (1836–1925)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Melbourne University Press.
• Blainey, Geoffrey (2013). A History of Victoria (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-29277-2.
• Broome, Richard (2005). Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800. Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978-1-74114-569-4.
• Canning, Shaun; Thiele, Frances (February 2010). Indigenous Cultural Heritage and History within the Metropolitan Melbourne Investigation Area: A report to the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (PDF). Australian Cultural Heritage Management. pp. 1–48.
• Chadwick, Vince (28 January 2013). "Action plan to support Victoria's indigenous barristers". The Age. Retrieved 3 January 2019.
• Clark, Ian D (1990). Aboriginal languages and clans: an historical atlas of western and central Victoria, 1800–1900. Dept. of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University. ISBN 978-0-909685-41-6.
• Clark, Ian D. (1995). Scars in the Landscape: a register of massacre sites in western Victoria, 1803–1859 (PDF). AIATSIS. pp. 135–139. ISBN 0 85575 281 5.
• Clark, Ian D. (2015). A Peep at the Blacks': A History of Tourism at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 1863–1924. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-110-46824-3.
• Clark, Ian D.; Heydon, Toby (2004). A Bend in the Yarra: A History of the Merri Creek Protectorate Station and Merri Creek Aboriginal School 1841–1851. Aboriginal Studies Press. ISBN 978-0-855-75469-3.
• "Conversations with Richard Fidler". ABC Radio. 1 February 2016.
• "The Coranderrk Aboriginal Station". The Argus. No. 9, 428. Melbourne. 1 September 1876. p. 7. Retrieved 28 August 2017 – via National Library of Australia.
• Dixon, Robert M. W. (2002). Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development. Vol. Volume 1. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47378-1. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help)
• Gaughwin, Denise; Sullivan, Hilary (1984). McBryde, Isabel (ed.). "Aboriginal boundaries and movement in Western Port, Victoria" (PDF). Aboriginal History. 8 (1): 80–98. ISSN 0314-8769.
• Gunson, Niel (1968). The Good Country: Cranbourne Shire. F. W. Cheshire.
• Howitt, Alfred William (2010) [First published 1904]. The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-00632-3.
• McGaw, Janet; Pieris, Anoma (2014). Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures: Australia and Beyond. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-59894-7.
• Munro, Kate (14 August 2014). "Actor Jack Charles: the tumultuous life of a stolen child". The Guardian.
• Presland, Gary (1994) [First published 1985]. Aboriginal Melbourne. The lost land of the Kulin people. McPhee Gribble. ISBN 978-0-869-14346-9.
• Presland, Gary (1997). The First Residents of Melbourne's Western Region. Harriland Press.
• Shaw, A. G. L. (2003). A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria Before Separation. Melbourne University Press. ISBN 978-0-522-85064-2.
• Shillinglaw, John Joseph (1879). Historical records of Port Phillip: the first annals of the colony of Victoria (PDF). Melbourne: J. Ferres. pp. 15–30.
• Thomas, William (1898). "Letter 14. Account of the Aborigines" (PDF). In Bride, Thomas Francis (ed.). Letters from Victorian Pioneers. Melbourne: Robert S Brain Government Printer. pp. 84–100.
• Tindale, Norman Barnett (1974). "Bunurong (VIC)". Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names. Australian National University Press. ISBN 978-0-708-10741-6.

External links

• Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation