Ngadjuri

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The Ngadjuri people are a group of Indigenous Australians whose traditional lands lie in the mid north of South Australia with a territory extending from Gawler in the south to Orroroo in the north. As with other indigenous groups in South Australia, the Ngadjuri lead nomadic lives that were decimated by introduced European diseases, beginning with the spread of smallpox prior to European colonisation. ^[1] Although the lands of the Ngadjuri where extensive they principle camping and burial grounds are believed to have been at Clare, Auburn, Macaw Creek and near Kapunda.

When settlers first arrived settlers in 1836 at Holdfast Bay (now Glenelg), the land was considered to be terra nullius, with the enactment of the 1834 South Australia Act by the British Parliament, and the native inhabitants assumed to have become British citizens. By the 1870s few of the Ngadjuri remained on their traditional lands and most of those left had become dependent upon the white population. Although there were some late attempts to arrest their decline, by the end of the nineteenth century the tribe, as it had been, had ceased to exist.

[edit] People and culture

The Ngadjuri practiced formalised burial practices with bodies sometimes smoked or dried before burial and many buried skeletons were uncovered during the construction of the Clare railway line. Large groups of up to a hundred men would hold mass possum hunts through the timbered hills. Although corroborees were usually male-only private events, by the 1860’s they had begun to commercialise them with spectators accepted and donations solicited. ^[1]