Yitha-Yithan

The Yitha Yitha are an Aboriginal people of the lower Murray and lower Lachlan river country of south-western New South Wales. Their speech belongs with Kureinji and Dadi Dadi to the Lower Murray group of Pama-Nyungan, and their name is a reduplication of their word for no, jita, like the names of many Riverine tribes.

Each community kept a gnalla wattow, or postman, who understood every dialect within a hundred and fifty miles and whose person was sacred even among feuding tribes; these envoys arranged trade between the river peoples.

Charles Sturt's whaleboat expedition of 1830, descending the Murrumbidgee and following the Murray to the sea, passed through this country, opening it to the overlanders and squatters who came after.