page_title: Hanging Rock, Victoria
section_title: Traditional owners and colonisation
hierarchical_section_title: Hanging Rock, Victoria / Traditional owners and colonisation
caption_attribution_description: English: Engraving depicting Hanging Rock or Ngannelong (formerly also known as Diogenes Monument) by moonlight with settler colonists in the foreground and traditional owners in the background
context_page_description: Hanging Rock is a distinctive geological formation in central Victoria, Australia. A former volcano, it lies 718m above sea level on the plain between the two small townships of Newham and Hesket, approximately 70 km north-west of Melbourne and a few kilometres north of Mount Macedon.
  In the middle of the 19th century, the traditional occupants of the place – tribes of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung – were forced from it. They had been its occupants for, potentially, thousands of years and, colonisation notwithstanding, have continued to maintain cultural and spiritual connections with the place.
  To the settler colonialist society, Hanging Rock became a place for recreation and tourism. It came alternately under private, government, and mixed public-private control.
  In the late 20th century, the area became very widely known as the setting of Joan Lindsay's novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.
context_section_description: At the time of colonisation, the traditional occupants had lived around Hanging Rock for more than 26,000 years. The Rock was woven into the fabric of the culture of the traditional owners. However, they were forcibly displaced from the area. Jason Tamiru has expressed a Yung Balug perspective on this history:
  The truth is my people were hit hard during the frontier wars. The Western region is known to us as the Killing Fields. The naming of the Rock is with all those that come in my dreams. Australia is starting to learn that there is a black history in this country that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated.
  Long before the 1967 novel, 1975 film and the naming of Hanging Rock, Tribes of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung would gather at that location for important Men’s Ceremony.
  This is a place where big business was held: Corrobborees, Initiation Ceremonies, Songline Ceremonies, trade and relationship building and a place where laws were made and passed.
  According to Tamiru, Ngannelong continues to play a role in Yung Balug culture:
  The mystique and spiritual essence of the rock has contributed to the story of our Dreaming which binds my people to our creator spirits and country.
  We Sing, Dance and Paint our Country forever.
  Settler colonialists dispossessed the Aboriginal owners and forced them out of the area. "One of the last initiation ceremonies may have been held there in November 1851 by a Wurundjeri elder from the Templestowe area" in the Yarra Valley. This ceremony was also attended by two young settlers' children, Willie Chivers, 11, and his younger brother Tom, 7, who were being cared for on a daily basis by the tribe after their mother had died. Their father went missing after looking for their mother.
  An engraving made by William Blandowski in 1855/56 shows a group of Aboriginal people camped on the hillside. Another engraving by Robert Bruce published in an 1865 edition of The Illustrated Melbourne Post shows three Aboriginal figures in the foreground with Hanging Rock rising up in the background.
caption: William Blandowski, Diogenes Monument "Anneyelong" looking Sth towards Mt Macedon, 1855/56.
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