The Conran Community/First Australians

Adapted from the Bataluk Cultural Trail website:

Krowathunkooloong people (lived) around the Snowy River, Cape Everard (Point Hicks) to Lakes Entrance and Lake Tyers and encompassing the Bemm, Buchan and Snowy Rivers, inland to about Black Mountain and Mount Nowa Nowa.

Around Conran:

This part of the coast contained an abundance of food for the Gunaikurnai, with many important sites all along the beaches of the Cape Conran area.

West Cape

Shell Middens are the remains of marine life such as the shells of pippies, oysters, mussels, crayfish and fish bones which eventually build up into large mounds.

Middens have been dated at over 10,000 years old. The Salmon Rocks lookout at West Cape is built above an Aboriginal shell midden; the top layer is visible. A midden indicates a significant site or meeting place where people gathered regularly for many generations to feast, celebrate and perform ceremonies.

East Cape

This part of the coast is near the traditional border of the lands of the Gunnaikurnai people and the Bidawal and Monero people. The picturesque nature of the cape here, along with an abundance of food and the availability of ochre for ceremonies made it an ideal meeting place for these groups.

Possible Indigenous names suggested for Cape Conran include:

Murrow-gunnie (Alfred Howitt, 1878. Native names of places in Gippsland, [in] R.B. Smythm The Aborigines of Victoria vol 2 pp. 188-190

Krauatungalung: According to Howitt (1904), Krauatungalung is derived from ‘Krauat’ meaning ‘east’, and ‘galung’ meaning ‘of’ or ‘belonging to’. From: Aboriginal Language Areas In Victoria: A Report to the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation For Languages by Ian D. Clark14 July 1996.

From Green, O. S. (1984) Marlo: The Town, the Plains, the Cape. Acacia Press, Melbourne.

THE MARLO PLAINS

p89. When Europeans first appeared in that area of East Gippsland extending from Lakes Entrance to the border point at Cape Hicks they came into a territory that had been a paradise for the aboriginal inhabitants whose ancestors who had migrated from island to island and had eventually arrived on the shores of northern Australia continent 40,000—50,000 years ago.

At the time of the coming of the whites to far East Gippsland the climate was sub-tropical, as it still is. Native fruits and edible plants grew in profusion; kangaroos and other native game were in abundance; the swamps and lakes teemed with wildfowl and fish. When a change of diet was required shell fish could easily be gathered from the rocks of Ricardo and Conran, and from the beach sands. There were possums to provide cloaks and food, and trees from which could be stripped bark for canoes and gunyah shelters.

Not for these natives the rigorous life of the tribes inhabiting the high mountain valleys; the harsh life of the tribes of the island plains. Life for Krautungalung clan of the Kurnai tribe was one of comparative luxury. For them the Marlo Plains were rewarding hunting grounds.

Within a short time of the arrival of the new invaders the clans and tribes had been decimated; their members, except for a few, were become a memory, and now their only memorials are their middens of fire blackened black sand and white pippie shells, with an occasional small quartzite tool nearby: the middens of the western bluff of Conran and in a blowout in the hummocks behind Ricardo. Even these are endangered by the trampling feet of tourists...

...The aboriginal inhabitants, using observation and trial and error methods, had become wise in the ways of Nature and lived in harmony with their surroundings. Not so the Europeans who supplanted them. The early settlers sought to compel the Plains to respond to their alien demands and for years were thwarted.