The Kurung were identified as an
indigenous Australian group of the
State of Victoria by
Norman Tindale. The theory that they constituted an independent tribe has been challenged with modern scholarship generally considering them a clan, associated to one of two major tribes. Their language is unconfirmed.
Name
Tindale, prefacing his remarks with an admission that '(t)he triangle between
Melbourne,
Echuca and
Albury remains one of the problem areas,'[1] cited in support of treating the Kurung as a distinct tribal entity the material given in 1856 for the deliberation of the
Legislative Council of Victoria. According to this early documentation, the Kurung were one of 5 distinct tribes in and around Melbourne, the others being the
Taungurong, the
Wurundjeri, the
Bunurong and the
Wathaurung.[2]
Diane Barwick notes that Tindale's distinction of Kurung and Wurundjeri (Woiworrung) where the former is now subsumed under the latter, raised a Wurundjeri clan to full autonomous tribal status. He did so, she suggests, from inferences drawn on the basis of a single manuscript,[3] the handiwork of a
Protector of AboriginesWilliam Thomas (1793-1867) This mixed vocabulary[a] was gleaned at
Bacchus Marsh on the
Wathaurung Marpeang-bulluk clans's territory, adjacent to the lands of the Wurundjeri Kurung-jang-baluk and Gunung-William-baluk [5]
Country
Tindale assigned to the Kurung an estimated 1,300 square miles (3,400 km2) of land extending from the western side of
Port Phillip Bay, between the
Werribee River and
Geelong and running inland up the
Moorabool River as far as the
Great Dividing Range. He states that inland they inhabited areas west as far as
Ballarat, and
Ballan. Canning and Thiele have them no further north than
Sunbury.[6]
Alternative names
Kurunjang.
Kurung-jang-baluk.
Coorong.
Jibberin (a language for the horde speaking the
Bacchus Marsh dialect)
Barabal (though used of the Kurung, according to Tindale it was used of the dominant clan et Werribee and
Indented Head)
Barrabool, Barabull.
Yawangi (referring to an endonym for the Ja:wang located in the
You Yangs).[7]
Notes
^'The 'Bacchus Marsh' list is Wathawurrung, but the list labelled ' Melbourne' has 57% agreement with Wathawurrung and only 49% agreement with the other sources for the Melbourne language. On morphological grounds it is clearly Melbourne, i.e. Woiwurrung.'[4]
Barwick, Diane E. (1984). McBryde, Isabel (ed.). "Mapping the past: an atlas of Victorian clans 1835-1904". Aboriginal History. 8 (2): 100–131.
JSTOR24045800.
Thomas, William (1862). Lexicon of the Australian aboriginal language in the six dialects of Ballaarat, Bacchus Marsh, Melbourne, Gippsland, Mount Gambier, and Wonnin.
La Trobe University manuscript collection.