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The Brabiralung are an Indigenous Australian people, one of the five clans of Gippsland, in the state of Victoria, Australia, belonging to a wider regional grouping known as the Kurnai.

Name

The name Brabiralung is thought to derive from the reduplication of their word for man, namely "bra".^[1] Thus doubled, it gives the sense of 'manly.' The suffix -(g)alung denotes 'of' or 'belonging to'.^[2]

Language

The Brabiralung language is a dialect of Gunai.

Country

The Brabiralung tribal lands extended over an estimated 6,200 square kilometres (2,400 sq mi) of territory embracing Mitchell, Nicholson, and Tambo rivers. Its southern borders ran as far south as the area around Bairnsdale and Bruthen.^[3] Their western borders ran west of the Mitchell to Providence Ponds and along the edges of the Gippsland Lakes.^[4]

People

A Brabiralung man, Tulaba, who later became an important informant for one of the founding fathers of Australian ethnography.^[a] He generally stayed clear of missions such as those at Lake Tyers and Ramahyuck missions, the reserves where many remnants of the Victorian tribes were herded into. He encountered Alfred William Howitt near Bairnsdale around 1866 when the latter established a hops farm, and was engaged as overseer for the indigenous hops pickers employed there. In his two employers, the MacLeods and Howitt, Tulaba found people who either did not meddle in native ways, or positively encouraged their retention,^[5] and Howitt assumed a tribal kinship role in his relationship with Tulaba, overcoming the latter's reluctance to have him observe the initiation rites, and placing them in a (jerra-eil) relationship.^[6])^[7] The information Tulaba provided in exchange for food and clothing, using a match-stick system Howitt deployed^[b] to delineate genealogical structures, played a seminal function in Howitt's thinking about the aboriginal kinship systems. Tulaba died due to cancer at the Lake Tyers Mission in 1886 and was buried according to Anglican rites.^[8]

Alternative names

Brabirrawulung, Brabriwoolong
Brabrolong
Brabrolung
Bundah Wark Kani (i.e., kanai = man)
Bundhul Wark Kani (horde name)
Muk-thang (language name),^[c]
Wakeruk

Notes

^ He was given a nickname, Taenjill', meaning 'incessant talker'. He also had a comfortably familiarity with English (Mulvaney 2005)
^ The method had been previously devised by a Methodist minister, Edward Fuller, a Primitive Methodist missionary, for working with the indigenous people on Fraser Island (Gardner & McConvell 2015, p. 133).
^ kani' here reflects the wordkanai, signifying man (Tindale 1974, p. 203)