Barunggami

The Barunggam are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Western Downs of south-eastern Queensland, whose tribal lands covered some 20,000 square kilometres from the headwaters of the Condamine River near Jackson east to the neighbourhood of Dalby.

Their alternative name Gogai was also applied to the languages of their western neighbours, and their own Barunggam speech was recorded in a wordlist taken down at Warkon Station on the Balonne River. The country they hunted was open, park-like grassland.

After the British founded the Moreton Bay penal settlement in 1824 it drew greedy eyes: little more than fifteen years later, well-connected Scots settlers, armed and accompanied by convict servants, drove in roughly a hundred thousand sheep and five thousand cattle, overwhelming the Barunggam and their neighbours in a campaign of occupation that lasted barely eighteen months.