Bunurong Erotic

The Bunurong are saltwater people of the Kulin nation, the traditional owners of the coast that curls from the Werribee River around the eastern shore of Port Phillip Bay, down the Mornington Peninsula, across Western Port and out toward Wilsons Promontory in what is now Victoria, Australia. A good share of Melbourne's southern suburbs sits on their country. You will also see the name written Boonwurrung or Boon Wurrung, which is the name of the language, one of the closely related eastern Kulin tongues alongside Woiwurrung and Taungurung. The three were similar enough that neighbors could talk across boundaries, and they did: the Kulin peoples shared a social order split between two moieties, Bunjil the wedge-tailed eagle and Waa the crow, and a person married into the opposite one, so marriage tied clans to distant country. Six clans made up the Bunurong, each headed by a senior man called an arweet, and each holding its own stretch of shoreline, swamp and hinterland. Shell middens still line the cliffs and dunes of the peninsula, and the old economy ran on shellfish, fish, eels, waterbirds and the yam daisy, murnong, dug by women with long sticks. Their oral tradition holds that Port Phillip Bay was once a dry plain and hunting ground before the sea broke in, a story researchers have tied to real episodes of flooding in the bay's past.

Contact came early and hard. Sealers working Bass Strait abducted Bunurong women before Melbourne existed, a short-lived British convict settlement went up near Sorrento in 1803, and after settlement began in 1835 disease, dispossession and violence cut the population to a small fraction within a generation. Derrimut, an arweet of the Yalukit-willam clan, warned the first settlers of a planned attack in 1835 and later protested the loss of his country. Assistant Protector William Thomas lived alongside them through those decades, and his journals remain the fullest written record of their lives. Survivors held on at a reserve at Mordialloc or were moved to Coranderrk, the station opened near Healesville in 1863. Some of today's families trace descent through the women taken by sealers, whose children grew up on the Bass Strait islands and in Tasmania. The Bunurong are very much present. The Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation holds statutory responsibility for cultural heritage over much of the country, with a boundary against Wurundjeri land formally drawn through Melbourne in 2021. Language revival work is under way from wordlists gathered in the nineteenth century, possum skin cloak making has returned, and the tanderrum, the Kulin ceremony granting visitors safe passage, is again performed in public in Melbourne.