Ngunawali

The Ngunawal, also spelt Ngunnawal, are an Aboriginal people of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, whose country centred on the Yass River between Lake George and the Murrumbidgee. Their language was close to Gundungurra, the two being treated as dialects of one tongue.

To their south lived the Nyamudy of the Limestone Plains; tradition recalls a battle at Sutton in which an invading Ngunawal band defeated the Nyamudy and fixed the frontier at Gundaroo. A rock shelter at Birrigai attested to at least twenty-five thousand years of human activity.

Graziers began taking up the Yass district in the 1820s. In 1826 Aboriginal people gathered at Lake George to protest an incident between a shepherd and an Aboriginal woman, dispersing without bloodshed. Displacement followed, though many Ngunawal stayed on by working on pastoral properties, and their numbers were still reckoned at well over a thousand in the 1830s.