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Jagera Erotic

Homeland

Brisbane River valley in southeast Queensland, Australia, from Moreton Bay inland through Ipswich and the Lockyer Valley to the Great Dividing Range

Language

Yagara, also written Jagera or Yuggera (Durubalic, Pama-Nyungan), no fluent first-language speakers and under revival; English

Religion

Mostly Christian, alongside traditional Aboriginal beliefs tied to country, kin and ancestral sites

Subgroups

Aboriginal Australians of southeast Queensland; closely related to the Turrbal and Ugarapul, and sometimes grouped with them under the broader Yuggera name

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Jagera People

The Jagera are the Aboriginal people of the Brisbane River valley. Their country runs from the shores of Moreton Bay inland past Ipswich and up the Lockyer Valley to the foot of the Great Dividing Range. The name also appears as Yagara, Jagara and Yuggera, all attempts by colonial writers to spell one word. Like the names of several other peoples in southeast Queensland, it is built on the local word for no. Clans moved through the creeks, lagoons and scrub of the valley on a seasonal round. They met neighbors for initiation at bora grounds, and when the bunya pines fruited heavily they traveled northwest to the big bunya nut gatherings in the ranges.

Their language, Yagara, belongs to the Durubalic branch of the Pama-Nyungan family. It is so close to Turrbal, spoken around the river mouth, that people still argue over where one ends and the other begins. It has no fluent first-language speakers today. It is being rebuilt from nineteenth-century wordlists and what families remember, and pieces of it are said every day by people who have never heard of it, in place names across Brisbane and Ipswich. The river itself is more and more often called by its Aboriginal name, Maiwar.

Colonization arrived early and hard. The Moreton Bay penal settlement of the 1820s gave way after 1842 to free settlers and squatters driving sheep into the Lockyer, and the Jagera and their allies fought back. In 1843 warriors ambushed drays climbing the range road at One Tree Hill. The attack is credited to the leader Multuggerah and is remembered as a rare Aboriginal victory on the Queensland frontier. Reprisals, disease and later removals to missions and reserves broke families apart, though many stayed close to their country.

Most Jagera descendants now live in the Brisbane and Ipswich metropolitan area. Christianity is the common faith, but the duties people owe to kin, ancestral sites and country have not gone away. Those duties are public and sometimes contested. Jagera and Turrbal families have at times disputed who has the right to give Welcome to Country in central Brisbane. In 2015 the Federal Court found that native title could not be established over the city, a ruling that depended on proof of unbroken traditional law and custom, the very continuity the frontier years had disrupted. Elders and cultural groups keep working on language revival, heritage work and dance, and they make sure the valley's first people stay visible inside Australia's third largest city.

Related ethnic groups

Groups that share Jagera's homeland, region, language, or religious tradition — likely candidates for comparative phenotype reference.

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