Wurundjeri
Aboriginal Australian people who inhabited the Melbourne area before colonisation
The Wurundjeri people are an Aboriginal people of the Woiwurrung language group, in the Kulin nation. Together with the Boonwurrung people they are the traditional owners of the Yarra River Valley, covering much of the present location of Melbourne, or, in their language, Naarm. They continue to live in this area and throughout Australia. They were called the Yarra tribe by early European colonists.
The Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation was established in 1985 by people of Wurundjeri descent.
Ethnonym
According to the early Australian ethnographer Alfred William Howitt, the name Wurundjeri is composed to wurun, referring to a species of eucalypt, Eucalyptus viminalis, otherwise known as the manna or white gum common along the Yarra River, and jerri, a variety of grub found in the tree,. Nowadays, Wurundjeri take their ethnonym as meaning "Witchetty Grub People". The morpheme transcribed as 'jerri/'djeri' however might simply reflect rather the plural marker djirra. Barry Blake faulted Howitt's identification, and suggested that the eucalypt in question was the black peppermint. Ian Clark translates the term to mean 'white gum tree people'.
The public source identifies “Wurundjeri” as aboriginal Australian people who inhabited the Melbourne area before colonisation. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wurundjeri, Aboriginal and Australian.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1492906. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wurundjeri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.