Wurundjeri Erotic

The Wurundjeri are the people of the Birrarung, the river colonists renamed the Yarra, and their country is the ground Melbourne stands on. The name is built from their own words: wurun, the manna gum along the river flats, and djeri, the grub that lives in it. Their land runs from the ranges north and east of the city down through the valley and its creeks toward the bay. Woiwurrung, their language, sits so close to the speech of the Boonwurrung to the south and the Taungurung over the divide that the three are often treated as dialects of a single Pama-Nyungan language, and those peoples together make up the alliance known as the Kulin. Every Wurundjeri person belongs to one of two moieties, Bunjil the wedge-tailed eagle or Waa the crow, and marriage has to cross that line. The rule sounds small. It is the thing that stitched five peoples into one another, generation after generation.

Wealth here was stone. The quarry at Wil-im-ee Moor-ring, Mount William, yielded a greenstone that made the best axe heads in the southeast, and the Wurundjeri family that held it traded blanks hundreds of kilometers into what is now New South Wales and South Australia. In 1835 John Batman produced a document he claimed had bought six hundred thousand acres from eight Kulin headmen. The colonial government voided it within months, but it remains the only occasion on which Europeans in Australia negotiated their arrival rather than simply taking. What followed was quick: sheep stripped out the murnong, the yam daisy that had been a staple root, within a few years. In 1863 Simon Wonga and William Barak walked their people onto land they had chosen themselves near Healesville and built Coranderrk into a farm that won prizes for its hops. When the authorities moved to carve it up, residents petitioned, walked to Melbourne and forced a parliamentary inquiry in 1881, then watched the 1886 legislation push people of mixed descent off the station and break the families that had made it work. Barak, the last traditional ngurungaeta, spent his final years drawing the old ceremonies in ocher and charcoal. His descendants and the other Wurundjeri families are still here, running the corporation that speaks for country across most of Melbourne, reviving Tanderrum, the ceremony that granted visitors safe passage, and sewing possum-skin cloaks again. The 2017 act protecting the Birrarung opens with a preamble in Woiwurrung, the first Victorian law to do so.