Jardwadjalian

The Jardwadjalian are the Jardwadjali people of the upper Wimmera River country in western Victoria, their lands reaching east to the Gariwerd ranges. Human occupation at Gariwerd goes back more than twenty thousand years, and for the Jardwadjali and their Djab Wurrung neighbours the mountains are the heart of the Dreaming of the creator Bunjil and the two Bram brothers, who shaped western Victoria's landforms.

Their language shared roughly ninety percent of its vocabulary with Djab Wurrung and was mutually intelligible with it, and was itself divided into several sub-dialects.

Epidemics came before settlers: smallpox brought by the First Fleet in 1788 travelled along Aboriginal trade routes and down the Murray, called thinba micka by the Wotjobaluk. In 1836 Thomas Mitchell crossed their country and renamed Gariwerd after Scotland's Grampian hills; his Australia Felix reports drew the first squatters.