The Wiradjuri are usually described, including by Wiradjuri people, as the people of the three rivers, and the three are the Wambuul, which colonial maps call the Macquarie, the Kalari, which they call the Lachlan, and the Murrumbidgee, which kept its Wiradjuri name. That is a large country, most of the inland slopes and plains of central New South Wales, and it made the Wiradjuri one of the largest Aboriginal nations on the continent both by territory and by number of speakers. Being large and being inland mattered in a particular way in the nineteenth century. The pastoral frontier reached Wiradjuri country early, through the 1820s and 1830s, and the fighting there was among the first sustained frontier conflict in the Australian interior; Windradyne, a Wiradjuri leader whose resistance around Bathurst in 1824 was met with a declaration of martial law, is remembered by name.
What followed was mission and reserve settlement, the removal of children, and the near silencing of the language, which by the middle of the twentieth century had no fluent speakers using it daily. The revival since the 1990s has been deliberate and documented: a grammar and dictionary compiled with Wiradjuri elders, the language taught in New South Wales schools and at university, and place names returned to public use. The atlas records the nation under its own name for that reason. Wiradjuri is not a historical label for a people who ended. It is the name of a nation with a living language programme and a continuing relationship to country.