Five Peoples, One Confederacy

Kulin is not the name of a single people. It names a confederacy of five Aboriginal nations of central and southern Victoria whose languages were close enough to be partly mutually intelligible, who intermarried under a shared rule, and who came together for ceremony and for the settlement of disputes: the Wurundjeri of the Yarra, the Boonwurrung of the coast and the bay, the Taungurung of the Goulburn, the Dja Dja Wurrung of the central goldfields country, and the Wathaurong to the west around Geelong. Melbourne was founded in 1835 on Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung land, and the document by which John Batman claimed to have bought that land from Kulin elders is one of the more studied misunderstandings in Australian history: what the elders appear to have conducted was a tanderrum, a ceremony granting visitors temporary access and safe passage, and not a transfer of ownership, which was not a thing their law contained.

The confederacy is also a kinship structure. Kulin society is divided into two halves named for Bunjil the eaglehawk and Waa the crow, and a person belongs to one, inherits that affiliation through the father, and marries into the other. The two beings are therefore not only characters in narrative but the categories by which Kulin people are related to one another across the whole confederacy, which is why the atlas records the Kulin as a culture in their own right rather than treating Bunjil as belonging to Victoria in general.