Kurnai

The Kurnai, also written Gunai or Gunaikurnai, are the Aboriginal nation of most of Gippsland and the southern slopes of the Victorian Alps. Five major clans made up the nation, each with its own dialect.

Their founding story tells of Borun the pelican, who carried a canoe from the north-western mountains and found within it Tuk the musk duck, who became his wife and the mother of the Kurnai. Cloggs Cave has yielded ritual hearths and fat-smeared casuarina sticks showing continuous ceremony across more than twenty thousand years.

Relations with neighbours were often warlike: Kurnai raiders once wiped out a Boonwurrung clan near Wilsons Promontory. The first Europeans known to cross their country were survivors of the Sydney Cove, wrecked in 1797, who straggled along the Ninety Mile Beach toward Sydney; sealing boats followed, but no pastoralists entered the Gippsland interior until the end of the 1830s.