Biripian

The Birrbay, also spelt Birpai or Biripi, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the New South Wales coast, their country centred on Port Macquarie and the Manning and Hastings river valleys, where the town of Taree now stands. Their language is Gathang, a tongue shared with the neighbouring Worimi and once used as a common speech when the tribes gathered.

Contact was violent from the start: Birrbay oral history remembers the killing of many of their people at Blackmans Point around 1826, as convict settlements pushed up the coast.

In 1831 the naval settler William Wynter took land at Taree and kept notably friendly relations, his son growing up among the Birrbay and learning their language, and by 1834 cedar cutters had laid camps along the Manning River.