Bidjaran

The Bidjara, also spelt Pitjara or Bidyara, are an Aboriginal Australian people of inland eastern Queensland, distinct from the Bidjara of the Bulloo River and the Badjiri further south. Norman Tindale reckoned their tribal lands at some 17,000 square kilometres around the headwaters of the Nogoa and Warrego rivers.

He also suggested that the Bidjara and the Badjiri had once been one people, splitting before European settlement under pressure from tribes pushing east. Their language, Bidjara, was a Maric tongue of the Pama-Nyungan family with dialects including Gayiri and Gunggari, while the nearby Wadjigu speech was closely related.

James Cook had charted the distant Queensland coast in 1770, but the first Europeans did not enter this inland country until the mid-nineteenth-century pastoral expansion, when sheep and cattle stations spread along the Warrego.