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Ngunnawal Erotic

Homeland

Southern Tablelands of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, Australia: Canberra, Yass, Queanbeyan, Lake George and the upper Murrumbidgee valley

Language

Ngunnawal (Pama-Nyungan), closely related to Gundungurra and now under revival; English in everyday use

Religion

Traditional Aboriginal spiritual belief tied to country and ancestral law; many are Christian

Subgroups

Aboriginal Australians of the southeast; closest in language to the Gundungurra. Families identifying as Ngambri claim a separate identity in the Canberra area.

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Ngunnawal People

The Ngunnawal are the Aboriginal people of the cold, high grasslands where Australia built its national capital. Their country spreads across the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, from the Yass district and the shores of Lake George through the Molonglo and upper Murrumbidgee valleys to the granite ranges now inside Namadgi National Park. To be Ngunnawal today means descending from the families of that country and having the standing to speak for it. That is why Ngunnawal elders so often give the Welcome to Country at civic events in Canberra. Their language, also called Ngunnawal, belongs to the Pama-Nyungan family and is very close to Gundungurra, which was spoken to the northeast. The Wiradjuri lived to the west, the Ngarigo to the south on the Monaro, and Yuin peoples toward the coast. Ngunnawal stopped being spoken day to day under colonial pressure. Revival work is now rebuilding it from nineteenth-century word lists and from what families kept. Traditional belief ties people to country through ancestral law, and many Ngunnawal are also Christian.

The year followed the seasons. In early summer people climbed into the Brindabellas and the higher Alps, where Bogong moths pack into rock crevices by the million. There they met neighboring groups for weeks of feasting, ceremony, trade and marriage arrangements. Tidbinbilla, southwest of the city, takes its name from a word usually translated as the place where boys became men, and rock shelters in the region show that people have lived there for many thousands of years. British settlers took over the Limestone Plains in the 1820s, and within a generation disease and the loss of land had done deep damage. Survivors lived on the edges of pastoral stations and towns, and in the twentieth century many families were moved onto reserves, notably around Yass. In 1913 the Commonwealth named its new capital Canberra, a word generally traced to a local name for the area, and built the city on Ngunnawal country. One of its suburbs now carries the Ngunnawal name. Even the question of who the traditional custodians are is contested: families who identify as Ngambri dispute parts of the Ngunnawal claim to the Canberra plains, and the disagreement still plays out in public.

Related ethnic groups

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

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