The Ngunnawal people (alternatively Ngunawal tribe) are the Indigenous Australian inhabitants whose traditional lands encompass much of the area now occupied by the city of Canberra, Australia and the surrounding Australian Capital Territory. They speak the Ngunawal language.
When first encountered by European settlers in the 1820s, the Ngunawal people lived in an area roughly bounded by what is now the towns of Queanbeyan, Tumut, Boorowa and Goulburn. The Ngunnawal people were neighbours of the Yuin (on the coast), Ngarigo (who lived south east of Canberra), Wiradjuri (to the west) and Gundungurra (to the north) peoples.
Some Indigenous people claim to be part of the Ngamberri nation located inside the Ngunawal country border. However, the claim of the nation status is disputed by other Aboriginal Australians, who state that the Ngamberri are a just a small family clan of the Wiradjuri nation.[1]
The earliest direct evidence for Indigenous occupation in the area comes from a rock shelter near the area of Birrigai near Tharwa, which has been dated to approximately 20,000 years ago. However, it is likely (based on older sites known from the surrounding regions) that human occupation of the region goes back considerably further. Whether the original occupants of these early sites were ancestral to the Ngunnawal is not directly known, however Ngunnawal lore and tradition identify strongly with these sites and the surrounding lands, indicating a lengthy association.
They were gradually displaced from the Canberra area beginning in the 1820s when graziers began to occupy the land there. In 1826 a thousand Aborigines at Lake George protested an incident involving a shepherd and Aboriginal woman, though the protesters moved away peacefully. Some Ngunnawal people worked at properties in the region.
Some histories of Australia record the last full-blooded Ngunnawal person, Nellie Hamilton, dying in 1897. However, it has been regarded by some Indigenous Australians as a biased attempt to claim that they were wiped out when there are many Ngunnawal people still around today.[2]
The Ngunnawal people had no part in the founding of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972.
The opening speech by the chairman at the constitutional convention at Old Parliament House held on 2 February 1998 included
In October 2002, some Ngunnawal members wanted to evict the residents of the tent embassy who had "lost their way".[3]
The ACT Planning and Land Authority's annual report in 2004 called for research into the Ngunnawal language to name beaches at Lake Tuggeranong and Lake Ginninderra, and to agree to recognise traditional names of geographic features.
In 2007, Ngambri/Ngunnawal woman Matilda House became the first Indigenous person to welcome to country an Australian Prime Minister, at the request of new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.[4]