Ngoorabuli

The Ngoorabuli are the Ngarabal, an Aboriginal people of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, whose country of some 2,600 square kilometres took in the Beardy River and Severn River catchments around Tenterfield and Ashford, running from Stonehenge north towards Bolivia.

Unusually for the region, they did not practise circumcision, subincision, nose piercing or tooth evulsion, though men and women might wear optional decorative scarring. They carried a detailed pharmacopoeia: angophora gum for diarrhoea, manna gum leaves for eye ailments, carpet-snake fat for burns and rheumatism, and wounds dressed with an eagle-hawk feather under tea-tree bark bound in kangaroo skin, while splints of paperbark set broken bones.

In 1827 the explorer Allan Cunningham crossed these tablelands on his way to the Darling Downs, the first European to pass through their region; grazing runs were taken up not long afterwards.