Boon wurrung

The Boon wurrung, commonly written as Bunurong, are Aboriginal Australians of the Kulin nation, who occupy South-Central 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
Boon wurrung was a dialect of Wuy-wurrung, 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 Boon wurrung are predominantly saltwater people whose lands, waters, and cosmos encompassed some  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 Boon wurrung social divisions consisted of moieties, classifying people either as Bunjil the Eaglehawk or Waang the raven.

History

First contact
The Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung. Many Gunnai raids occurred to abduct Boon wurrung women. The Yowengerra had almost been completely annihilated by 1836, largely as a result of attacks from the Gunai. During 1833-1834 around 60-70 Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung 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 Tasmanian native women may have caused inter-tribal conflicts, and by analogy, this may also apply to the Boon wurrung, whose coastlands were visited by sealers. A report by Jules Dumont d'Urville in 1830 attributed the absence of Boon wurrung on Phillip Island, which was a camp for sealers, as due to the latter's behavior. As late as 1833, nine Woiwurrung and Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung had been reduced to 83 people, with only 4 of 19 children under four years old, from a probable pre-contact population of greater than 300 people. By 1850 Protector William Thomas estimated just 28 Boon wurrung people.

In 1852, the Boon wurrung were allocated  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 Boon wurrung thought, 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 Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung/Woiwurrung were killed, a party of 15 men left for Geelong in order to retaliate against the malefactors, the Wathaurong.
In 1840, the Boon wurrung 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 Boon wurrung meal, and encased in a kangaroo's legbone, was roasted. Shortly afterwards the named Boon wurrung 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. 9 or 10 of the killed Echuca tribesman's kinsmen threw spears and boomerangs at the Boon wurrung warrior, armed with a shield, until he was wounded in the flank by a reed-speer. An elder of another, observing tribe, the Barapa Barapa, called it a day, the ordeal ended, and all celebrated a grand corroboree.

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

Notable Boon wurrung people
 Jack Charles (1943– ), actor.
 Derrimut (c.1810 – 28 May 1864), Arweet – headman of the Boonwurrung, associated with the Wurundjeri.
 Linda Lovett, barrister
 Bruce Pascoe (1947– ), writer.
 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.

Alternative names
 Bunurong, Bunwurrung, Boonwerung, Boon Wurrung, Boonoorong and Bururong
 Bunwurru
 Bunuron
 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

Notes

Citations

Sources

External links 
 Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation

Category:Aboriginal peoples of Victoria (Australia)
Category:History of Victoria (Australia)
Category:Kulin
Category:Port Phillip