Buandigi

The Buandigi are the Bungandidj, whose name means people of the reeds, principal people of the Mount Gambier district on the South Australia-Victoria border. In 1337 five related dialect groups, the Bungandidj clan the largest, held country from the Glenelg mouth to Rivoli Bay.

Their Kulinic Pama-Nyungan tongue was called speech of man; society had two matrilineal marriage classes, Kumite and Kroke, split into animal and plant totems whose members could eat their own totem only in grief. Bands wintered inland and returned to the coast in warm weather to fish, raising mud weirs, wicker bird traps and platforms to spot emu and kangaroo, and sleeping in mud-daubed wurlies.

They first saw Europeans in 1822 or 1823, a ship carrying off a Rivoli Bay woman for three months. Edward Henty's 1834 founding of Portland opened a pastoral invasion made catastrophic by smallpox and violence.