Wiradjuri

The Wiradjuri are usually described, including by Wiradjuri people, as the people of the three rivers, and the three are the Wambuul, which colonial maps call the Macquarie, the Kalari, which they call the Lachlan, and the Murrumbidgee, which kept its Wiradjuri name. That is a large country, most of the inland slopes and plains of central New South Wales, and it made the Wiradjuri one of the largest Aboriginal nations on the continent both by territory and by number of speakers. Being large and being inland mattered in a particular way in the nineteenth century. The pastoral frontier reached Wiradjuri country early, through the 1820s and 1830s, and the fighting there was among the first sustained frontier conflict in the Australian interior; Windradyne, a Wiradjuri leader whose resistance around Bathurst in 1824 was met with a declaration of martial law, is remembered by name.

What followed was mission and reserve settlement, the removal of children, and the near silencing of the language, which by the middle of the twentieth century had no fluent speakers using it daily. The revival since the 1990s has been deliberate and documented: a grammar and dictionary compiled with Wiradjuri elders, the language taught in New South Wales schools and at university, and place names returned to public use. The atlas records the nation under its own name for that reason. Wiradjuri is not a historical label for a people who ended. It is the name of a nation with a living language programme and a continuing relationship to country.

Baiame, the sky being who made the country, gave the law and then withdrew upward, is recorded across a wide band of south eastern Australia, and Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi are the two nations most often named as holding him. He is not a distant abstraction in the record. A. W. Howitt, collecting in the 1880s and 1890s, was told of Baiame in connection with the bora, the ground on which young men were brought into the law, and of the earthen figures and carved trees made for those grounds; bora rings survive as raised circles of earth in Wiradjuri and neighbouring country and a number are now protected sites. Howitt, and the missionaries and settlers he drew on, are the reason any of this is in writing, and they are also the reason the writing needs handling with care.

What was told to a nineteenth century collector was told selectively, sometimes by men under considerable pressure, sometimes in terms shaped to what the collector was expected to understand, and the comparison with a Christian creator that runs through the early literature is at least partly the collectors' own contribution rather than a report. The initiation itself is restricted knowledge. The atlas holds that Baiame is Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi, that his law was taught at the bora, and that the bora grounds are in this country, and it does not set out what happened on them. Wiradjuri people hold that, and it is absent here because they have not published it, which is a different thing from its being unknown.