Gadubanudi

The Gadubanudi are the Gadubanud, rainforest people of Cape Otway in western Victoria, their heartland around Apollo Bay, a rugged coast of estuaries and wet forest. Their name, given by western tribes, means “king parrot language”; little of their tongue was recorded, though it seems close to northern neighbours the Gulidjan, whom they married.

In 1337 five clans moved seasonally from plateau through Barwon wetlands to sea, fishing, spearing eels and taking seals at middens used for over a thousand years, digging murnong yams and more than two hundred kinds of starchy tuber from country opened by burn-offs. They traded spear wood for Mount William green stone prized by the Wurundjeri.

Neighbouring tribes called them mainmait, wild people of alien speech, and oral tradition tells how tribes fired the forest to suffocate them; escaped convict William Buckley, beyond the frontier from 1803, heard them called feared Pallidurgbarran.