INDIGENOUS HERITAGE
April 13, 2024The Indigenous custodians of the land that makes up the Otway Ranges is believed to be the Gadubanud people. Their connection to land stretches back thousands of years as evidenced by the aboriginal middens around Lorne.
It is hard in the twenty first century to agree on ‘the facts’ about life in what is called the Otways before the arrival of Europeans, and during the period after 1835 when British sovereignty was introduced. Very little evidence today exists in the public arena to say precisely how life was for the Aboriginal people who have lived here for at least 60,000 years. One way of looking at our shared history is to understand that Aboriginal culture has existed here for at least 3000 generations; and new Australians have been here for eleven generations. [Based on Rachel Perkins, quoting Mulvaney, see p 81 of Quarterly Essay 56, Black in. 2014.]
