Gadubanud

The Gadubanud (Katubanut), also known as the Pallidurgbarran, Yarro waetch or Cape Otway tribe (Tindale[1]), are an Aboriginal Australian people of the state of Victoria.

[4][5] The Katubanut inhabited the rainforest plateau and rugged coastline of the Cape Otway peninsula, and the centre of their land is thought to have probably been at Apollo Bay.

[11] From notes made by the chief Protector of Aborigines, George Robinson, who came across three members of the tribe at the mouth of the Hopkins River in 1842, some 50 miles (80 km) beyond their traditional lands, in Djagurd territory, it has been surmised that they had some linguistic affiliation with this group.

[12] That year they appear to have robbed an outstation for food and blankets[5] In March 1846, on his third attempt to penetrate the Otway area, the district superintendent for Port Philip Bay, Charles La Trobe, encountered seven Gadubanud men and women in the Aire Valley.

On the Gellibrand River a month later, Henry Allan found one of their camps, full of implements,[a] and in mid-winter of the same year, the surveyor George D Smythe came across eight: a man, four women and three boys.

[14] Notwithstanding distortions in these reports, which fuse apparently distinct actions, it would appear that a second attack took place near the Aire River in the following year, 1847, when a detachment of Native Police Corps, led by Foster Fyans, slaughtered another group, while kidnapping two surviving children, a girl and a boy.

[22] In 1848, a report in the Geelong Advertiser, commenting on a tribal fight that took place near Port Fairy, describing one of the two blacks killed as "a man who belonged to the Cape Otway tribe, the last of his race".

William Roadknight, who had formerly mustered a posse to help Smythe in hunting the Gadubanud, cut a track through the valley of Wild Dog Creek and set up the first cattle station in the Otway peninsula.

[5] Niewójt states that the links to the latter were both linguistic and familial, from intermarriage,[9] and is skeptical of the low population estimates that would follow from the 26 individuals mentioned in the ethnographic records for the 1840s, given the rich wetland and coastal food resources such as shellfish and abalone available to a people living along and inland from the 100 kilometres (62 mi) of coastland within their territorial boundaries.

[18] Nutriment was readily available by harvesting the over 200 species of local starchy tubers, such as water-ribbons (Triglochin procera) and the club-rush (Scirpus maritimus), together with tall spike rush (Eleocharis sphacelata) rhizomes.

[39] The local Lorne Historical Society states that the Gadubanud people traded spear wood for Mount William green stone mined by the Wurundjeri.

In touching on the topic he related that: 'In my wanderings about, I met with the Pallidurgbarrans, a tribe notorious for their cannibal practices; not only eating human flesh greedily after a fight, but on all occasions when it was possible.

The belief is, that the last of the race was turned into a stone, or rock, at a place where a figure was found resembling a man, and exceedingly well executed; probably the figure-head of some unfortunate ship'.

[47]The charge that Australian natives practised cannibalism in the usual acceptance of the word — consuming human flesh for nutriment or to strike terror into one's enemies — is now broadly dismissed as a misinterpretation of a custom restricted to funerary rites.