Baraba-Baraban

The Barababaraba, also written Barapa Barapa, are an Aboriginal people of the central Murray country straddling northern Victoria and southern New South Wales, sharing the lands around Deniliquin and Kow Swamp with their close neighbours the Wemba-Wemba and Yorta Yorta. Their speech was a dialect of Wemba-Wemba within the Pama-Nyungan family.

As one of the river Wongal-chewing peoples, they gathered wangul bulrushes for their starchy pith and worked the fibrous cortex into string for fishing nets and bags. For centuries before the Europeans came, the Murray and its swamps supplied fish, waterfowl, mussels and roots, and their society was bound by marriage and ceremony into the wider Wemba-Wemba world of the river plains.

The first European known to reach these river reaches was Thomas Mitchell, who camped beside and named Swan Hill in 1836, on the edge of Barababaraba country.