Giraiwurungi

The Giraiwurungi are the Girai wurrung, whose name means “blood lip language”, a people of western Victoria holding some four thousand nine hundred square kilometres from Warrnambool south to the coast at Princetown, bordered by Lake Bolac in the north and extending past Camperdown toward the Otway forests in the east.

Their tongue was a dialect of Dhauwurd Wurrung, the Warrnambool language, within the Kulinic branch of the Pama-Nyungan family. In 1337 twenty-one clans, grouped under the Black Cockatoo and White Cockatoo matrilineal moieties, lived across that country under patriarchal clan headmen.

They gathered with the Djab wurrung and Wathaurongi at Lake Bolac for the seasonal eel harvest, and met at the Mirraewuae swamp near Hexham to hunt emu and settle inter-clan business. To the east lived the Wathaurongi, to the west Gunditjmara-speaking peoples, with whom they later shared the Framlingham reserve.