Wiradjuri peoples’ History
The Wiradjuri people occupied the lands around the upper Lachlan River for tens of thousands of years. The Wiradjuri nation is the largest cultural footprint in NSW – from the Blue Mountains in the east, to Hay in the west, north to Nyngan and south to Albury in the South Western slopes region. The Wiradjuri people were a hunter-gatherer society made up of small clans or close family groups whose movements followed seasonal food gathering and ritual patterns.
The first officially recorded contact between the Wiradjuri and the Europeans occurred in 1815 when the explorer George Evans travelled overland from Bathurst and reached the Lachlan River (or “Kalare” as some indigenous people referred to it). The initial relations between the new settlers and the Wiradjuri people were reported to be peaceful, with the Wiradjuri sharing their food and resources with the new arrivals. However a misunderstanding over a potato harvest tipped the squatters and Wiradjuri into all-out war – a struggle for control over land and women raged between European and Wiradjuri men.
By the 1840s most of the eastern communities had been dispossessed of their land. Settlements moved progressively more and more westwards, mainly following the river systems – the same systems used by the Aboriginal people. Small pox decimated the Wiradjuri population, with many forced to flee the disease by escaping over the mountains, and massacres became commonplace. As pastoralism spread throughout the west there were fewer and fewer places for Aboriginal people to live.
After the main period of frontier violence had ended, Aboriginal culture had been decimated. This was further exacerbated when the Aboriginal Protection Boards were set up in 1883. Aboriginal people would end up camping on properties of pastoralists who were a little bit more sympathetic. Also, local Aboriginal populations were removed from their traditional country and consolidated at other locations, under the control of the Board.
Intermarriage occurred during this period as pastoralists, convicts and settlers took Aboriginal wives and raised their children, which furthered the complex nature of frontier relationships. In particular, the Irish convicts were being treated by the British as badly as the Wiradjuri, so there was a commonality there. The Irish males married the Aboriginal women and that’s how there are so many crossed marriages in a lot of families.