Bendigo Aboriginal Men’s Shed members took a bus trip to Uncle Barry Farry’s original homeplace and Country at Portland. The long road trip provided some spectacular scenery and entertainment for the members on the way. The trip was for a three day and two nights stay. A good time was enjoyed by all the fellas from the Men’s Shed who attended.

Country

The Gunditjmara tribal territories extends over an estimated 2,700 square miles (7,000 km²). The western boundaries are around Cape Bridgewater and Lake Condah. Northwards they reach Caramut and Hamilton. Their eastern boundaries lay around the Hopkins River. Their neighbours to the west are the Buandig people, to the north the Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung peoples, and in the east the Girai wurrung people. Early settlers remarked on the richness of the game to be found from the Eumerella Creek down to the coast.

Dreaming

The Gunditjmara believe that the landscape’s features mark out the traces of a creator, Budj Bim (lit.’High Head’), who emerged in the form of the volcano now called Mt Eccles. In a spate of eruption, the lava flows, constituting his blood and teeth, spilled over the landscape, fashioning its wetlands. ‘High Head’ still refers to the crater’s brow, which can be accessed only by Gunditjmara men wearing special emu-feather footwear. Opposite, beyond the coastline, on the island they call Deen Maar/Dhinmar held special value for its burial associations. A cave there, known as Tarn wirrung (‘road of the spirits’), is thought of as the mouth of a passage linking the mainland and the island. In Gunditjmara funeral rites, bodies are enfolded in grass bundles and interred with their heads pointing to the island, with an apotropaic firebrand of native cherry wood. If grass was thereafter found outside the mouth of Tarn wirrung, it was regarded as evidence that the good spirit Puit puit chepetch had conveyed the corpse via the subterranean passage to the island, while guiding its spirit to the realm of the clouds. If the burial coincided with the appearance of a meteor, this was read as proof that the being in transit to the heavens had been furnished with fire. If grass was found at the cave when no one had been buried, then it was thought it showed someone had been murdered, and the cave could not be approached until the grass had been dispersed^.

Social organisation

The Gunditmara are divided into 59 clans, each with its headmen (wungit), a role passed on by hereditrary transmission. They speak dialects, not all of them mutually intelligible, with the three main hordes located around Lake Condah, Port Fairy and Woolsthorpe respectively. The Gunditmara groups are divided into two moieties, respectively the grugidj (sulphur-crested cockatoo or Long-billed corella) and the gabadj (Red-tailed black cockatoo, the latter once thriving in buloke woodlands, now mainly cleared. According to Alfred William Howitt, they had 4 sections, which however did not affect marriage rules, :

• kerup (water)
• boom (mountain)
• direk (swamp)
• gilger (river)

However these terms refer to 4 of the 58 clans Descent was matrilineal.