page_title: Ngunnawal
section_title: Country
hierarchical_section_title: Ngunnawal / Country
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of the traditional lands of the Ngunawal peoples of New South Wales
context_page_description: The Ngunnawal are an indigenous Australian people of southern New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.
context_section_description: When first encountered by European settlers in the 1820s, the Ngunnawal speaking indigenous people were called the Yass Blacks, and lived around there around and to its north.
  Their tribal country according to the early ethnographer, R. H. Mathews stated their country extended from Goulburn to Yass and Burrowa southwards as far as Lake George to the east and Goodradigbee to the west. To the south of Lake George was the county of the Nyamudy speaking a Ngarigo dialect. Recent research by Harold Koch (2011) and others shows that the Ngunnawal country was primarily the land surrounding the Yass River extending between Lake George to the east and the Murrumbidgee to the west, while the southern boundary of the Ngunnawal people was north of Canberra, approximately on a line from Gundaroo to Wee Jasper. Sometimes the whole of the Burragorang language speaking area as far north as near Young is included as Ngunnawal, giving them a population in the 1830s of well over a thousand people.
  A major battle for ownership of the country was fought at Sutton between an invading Ngunnawal band and the Nyamudy inhabitants, which the latter won, establishing the Ngunnawal country, which did not extend further south along the Yass River than Gundaroo.
caption: Map of the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal peoples of New South Wales.[a]
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