Boon-Wurrungi

The Boon-Wurrungi are the Bunurong, a Kulin people whose coast and hinterland ran from Werribee River around Port Phillip Bay to Wilsons Promontory, including the land where Melbourne now stands. Their speech is a Kulin Pama-Nyungan language, and their name joins words meaning no and lip or speech.

Their clans moved seasonally between fresh-water camps, spearing eels, fishing and gathering murnong yams, and paddled canoes to French Island for seals; dogs were buried with ceremony. They feuded with the Gunai of Gippsland, whose 1833 and 1834 raids may have killed sixty or seventy of them and nearly destroyed the Yowengerra clan.

European contact began in 1802, when John Murray's Lady Nelson exchanged shots with them in Port Phillip Bay, weeks before the French Baudin expedition reached Western Port. In 1835 elder Derrimut warned settlers of a planned night attack, when the Boon-Wurrungi were already thinned by feud and disease.