Victorian Aborigines
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Victorian Aborigines
Aboriginal Victorians, the Aboriginal Australians of Victoria, Australia, occupied the land for tens of thousands of years prior to European settlement. Aboriginal people have lived a semi-nomadic existence of fishing, hunting and gathering, and farming eels in Victoria for at least 40,000 years. The Aboriginal people of Victoria had developed a varied and complex set of languages, tribal alliances, beliefs and social customs that involved totemism, superstition, initiation and burial rites, and tribal moieties. History Prehistory There is some evidence to show that people were living in the Maribyrnong River valley, near present-day Keilor, about 40,000 years ago, according to Gary Presland. At the Keilor archaeological site a human hearth excavated in 1971 was radiocarbon-dated to about 31,000 years BP, making Keilor one of the earliest sites of human habitation in Australia.Gary Presland, Keilor Archaeological Site', eMelbourne website. Accessed 3 November 2008 A craniu ...
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Map Victoria Aboriginal Tribes (colourmap)
A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes. Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or fictional, without regard to context or scale, such as in brain mapping, DNA mapping, or computer network topology mapping. The space being mapped may be two dimensional, such as the surface of the earth, three dimensional, such as the interior of the earth, or even more abstract spaces of any dimension, such as arise in modeling phenomena having many independent variables. Although the earliest maps known are of the heavens, geographic maps of territory have a very long tradition and exist from ancient times. The word "map" comes from the , wherein ''mappa'' meant 'napkin' or 'cloth' and ''mundi'' 'the world'. Thus, "map" became a shortened term referring t ...
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Port Phillip
Port Phillip (Kulin: ''Narm-Narm'') or Port Phillip Bay is a horsehead-shaped enclosed bay on the central coast of southern Victoria, Australia. The bay opens into the Bass Strait via a short, narrow channel known as The Rip, and is completely surrounded by localities of Victoria's two largest cities — metropolitan Greater Melbourne in the bay's main eastern portion north of the Mornington Peninsula, and the city of Greater Geelong in the much smaller western portion (known as the Corio Bay) north of the Bellarine Peninsula. Geographically, the bay covers and the shore stretches roughly , with the volume of water around . Most of the bay is navigable, although it is extremely shallow for its size — the deepest portion is only and half the bay is shallower than . Its waters and coast are home to seals, whales, dolphins, corals and many kinds of seabirds and migratory waders. Before European settlement, the area around Port Phillip was divided between the territories of ...
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National Heritage List
The Australian National Heritage List or National Heritage List (NHL) is a heritage register, a list of national heritage places deemed to be of outstanding heritage significance to Australia, established in 2003. The list includes natural and historic places, including those of cultural significance to Indigenous Australians such as Aboriginal Australian sacred sites. Having been assessed against a set list of criteria, once a place is put on the National Heritage List, the provisions of the ''Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999'' (''EPBC Act'') apply. All places on this list can be found on the online Australian Heritage Database, along with other places on other Australian and world heritage listings. History The National Heritage List was established in 2003 by an amendment to the ''Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999''. The National Heritage List, together with the Commonwealth Heritage List, replaced the former Regi ...
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Isabel McBryde
Isabel McBryde (born 16 July 1934) AO is an Australian archaeologist and professor emerita at the Australian National University (ANU) and School Fellow, in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts. McBryde is credited with training "at least three generations of Australian archaeologists" and is affectionately referred to as the "Mother of Australian Archaeology". McBryde had a "holistic" approach to studying the archaeology of Aboriginal Australia, which has been carried on by many of her students (and her students' students). McBryde has also made considerable contributions to the preservation and protection of Australian cultural heritage, particularly Aboriginal cultural heritage. Biography McBryde was born in Fremantle, Western Australia on 16 July 1934. Her family moved to Melbourne not long after her birth. McBryde completed honours and master's degrees, in Latin and history, at the University of Melbourne. She received her formal archaeological training at Ca ...
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Greenstone (archaeology)
Greenstone is a common generic term for valuable, green-hued minerals and metamorphosed igneous rocks and stones which early cultures used in the fashioning of hardstone carvings such as jewelry, statuettes, ritual tools, and various other artifacts. Greenstone artifacts may be made of greenschist, chlorastrolite, serpentine, omphacite, chrysoprase, olivine, nephrite, chloromelanite among other green-hued minerals. The term also includes jade and jadeite, although these are perhaps more frequently identified by these latter terms. The greenish hue of these rocks generally derives from the presence of minerals such as chlorite, hornblende, or epidote.Kipfer (2000, p.218) Greenstone minerals were presumably selected for their color rather than their chemical composition. In archaeology therefore, having a loosely applied general term is at least partially influenced by the observation that ancient cultures often used and considered these various green-hued materials as int ...
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Mount William Stone Axe Quarry
The Mount William stone axe quarry is an Aboriginal Australian archaeological site in Central Victoria, Australia. It is located northeast of Lancefield, off Powells Track, north of Romsey and from Melbourne. Known as ''Wil-im-ee Moor-ring'', meaning "axe place" in the Woiwurrung language, the greenstone quarry was an important source of raw material for the manufacture of greenstone ground-edge axes, which were traded over a wide area of south-east Australia. Description The Mount William Aboriginal stone axe quarry comprises the remains of hundreds of mining pits and the mounds of waste rock where Aboriginal people obtained greenstone (diabase), and manufactured stone blanks for axe heads. Chipped and ground stone axes or hatchets were an essential part of Aboriginal toolkits in southeast Australia, with the Mount William greenstone being one of the most prized and extensively traded materials. The stone was quarried from the source outcrops, and roughly flaked into b ...
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Diorite
Diorite ( ) is an intrusive igneous rock formed by the slow cooling underground of magma (molten rock) that has a moderate content of silica and a relatively low content of alkali metals. It is intermediate in composition between low-silica ( mafic) gabbro and high-silica ( felsic) granite. Diorite is found in mountain-building belts ('' orogens'') on the margins of continents. It has the same composition as the fine-grained volcanic rock, andesite, which is also common in orogens. Diorite has been used since prehistoric times as decorative stone. It was used by the Akkadian Empire of Sargon of Akkad for funerary sculptures, and by many later civilizations for sculptures and building stone. Description Diorite is an intrusive igneous rock composed principally of the silicate minerals plagioclase feldspar (typically andesine), biotite, hornblende, and sometimes pyroxene. The chemical composition of diorite is intermediate, between that of mafic gabbro and fe ...
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Wurundjeri
The Wurundjeri people are an Australian Aboriginal people of the Woiwurrung language group, in the Kulin nation. They are the Traditional Owners of the Birrarung (Yarra River) Valley, covering much of the present location of Narrm (Melbourne). They continue to live in this area and throughout Australia. They were called the Yarra tribe by early European colonists. The Wurundjeri Tribe Land and Compensation Cultural Heritage Council was established in 1985 by Wurundjeri people. Ethnonym According to the early Australian ethnographer Alfred William Howitt, the name Wurundjeri, in his transcription ''Urunjeri'', refers to a species of eucalypt, '' Eucalyptus viminalis'', otherwise known as the manna or white gum, which is common along Birrarung. Some modern reports of Wurundjeri traditional lore state that their ethnonym combines a word, ''wurun'', meaning ''Manna Gum'' and ''djeri'', a species of grub found in the tree, and take the word therefore to mean " Witchetty G ...
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Bunjil
Bunjil, also spelt Bundjil, is a creator deity, culture hero and ancestral being, often depicted as a wedge-tailed eagle in Australian Aboriginal mythology of some of the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria. Creation stories In the Kulin nation in central Victoria he was regarded as one of two moiety ancestors, the other being Waang the crow. Bunjil (or Bundjil) has two wives and a son, Binbeal the rainbow. His brother is Palian the bat. He is assisted by six ''wirmums'' or shamans who represent the clans of the Eaglehawk moiety: Djart-djart the nankeen kestrel, Thara the quail hawk, Yukope the parakeet, Lar-guk the parrot, Walert the brushtail possum and Yurran the gliding possum. According to one legend, after creating the mountains, rivers, flora, fauna, and laws for humans to live by, Bunjil gathered his wives and sons then asked Waang, who had charge of the winds, to open his bags and let out some wind. Waang opened a bag in which he kept his whirlwinds, creat ...
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Bunurong
The Boonwurrung people are an Aboriginal people of the Kulin nation, who are the traditional owners of the land from the Werribee River to Wilsons Promontory in the Australian state of Victoria. Their territory includes part of what is now the city and suburbs of Melbourne. 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. The Registered Aboriginal Party representing the Boonwurrung people is the Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation. Language Boonwurrung is one of the Kulin languages, and belongs to 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". This indicates that the Boonwurrung language may not be spoken outside of their Country ...
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Woiwurrung
The Woiwurrung, also spelt Woi Wurrung, Woiwurrong, Woiworung, Wuywurung, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Woiwurrung language group, in the Kulin alliance. The Woiwurrung people's territory in Central Victoria extended from north of the Great Dividing Range, east to Mount Baw Baw, south to Mordialloc Creek and to Mount Macedon, Sunbury and Gisborne in the west. Their lands bordered the Gunai/Kurnai people to the east in Gippsland, the Boon wurrung people to the south on the Mornington Peninsula, and the Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung to the north. Before colonisation, they lived predominantly as aquaculturists, swidden agriculturists (growing grasslands by fire-stick farming to create fenceless herbivore grazing, garden-farming murnong yam roots and various tuber lilies as major forms of starch and carbohydrates), and hunters and gatherers. Seasonal changes in the weather, availability of foods and other factors would determine where campsites were located, many n ...
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Wathaurong
The Wathaurong nation, also called the Wathaurung, Wadawurrung and Wadda Wurrung, are an Aboriginal Australian people living in the area near Melbourne, Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula in the state of Victoria. They are part of the Kulin alliance. The Wathaurong language was spoken by 25 clans south of the Werribee River and the Bellarine Peninsula to Streatham. The area they inhabit has been occupied for at least the last 25,000 years. Language Wathaurong is a Pama-Nyungan language, belonging to the Kulin sub-branch of the Kulinic language family. Country Wathaurong territory extended some . To the east of Geelong their land ran up to Queenscliff, and from the south of Geelong around the Bellarine Peninsula, towards the Otway forests. Its northwestern boundaries lay at Mount Emu and Mount Misery, and extended to Lake Burrumbeet Beaufort and the Ballarat goldfields. The area they inhabit has been occupied for at least the last 25,000 years, with 140 ar ...
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