History
The Dja Dja Wurrung were bound to their land by their spiritual belief system deriving from the Dreaming, when mythic beings had created the world, the people and their culture. They were part of established trade networks which allowed goods and information to flow over substantial distances.
There is evidence that smallpox swept through the Dja Dja Wurrung in 1789 and 1825, which would have decimated the population at the time. The epidemics were incorporated into aboriginal mythology as a giant snake, the Mindye, sent by Bunjil, to blow magic dust over people to punish them for being bad.
The trade networks would have carried news of the strange white men settling on the Eora land in the early 1790s and progressively invading peoples further west and south-west of Sydney. Thomas Mitchell was probably the first white man to be seen in Dja Dja Wurrung country when he explored and surveyed central Victoria in 1836, reporting he had found large fertile plains. The invasion of the Goulburn and Loddon Districts began the following year by squatters eager to carve out a station and run.
Read more about this topic: Dja Dja Wurrung
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.”
—Eric Hoffer (19021983)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The history of literaturetake the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)