The Worimi (also spelt Warrimay) people are Aboriginal Australians from the eastern Port Stephens and Great Lakes regions of coastal New South Wales, Australia. Before contact with settlers, their people extended from Port Stephens in the south to Forster/Tuncurry in the north and as far west as Gloucester. Country The Worimi's lands extended over according to Norman Tindale, who specified that the tribal area encompassed the Hunter River to the coastal town of Forster near Cape Hawke. It reached Port Stephens and ran inland as far as roughly Gresford and in proximity of Glendon Brook, Dungog, and the upper Myall Creek. To the south, their territory extended to Maitland. Social organization The Worimi were divided into 4 bands. Garuagal. (the country adjoining Teleghery Creek and along the lower Hunter. Maiangal. (sea-shore south of Port Stephens, inland to Teleghery Creek.) Gamipingal. (northern side of Port Stephens, left bank of Karuah.) Buraigal. (right bank of the Karuah up to Stroud) History of contact with British colonists The Australian Agricultural Company was established upon an act of the British Parliament in 1824. The aim of the legislation was to further the cultivation and improvement of what it termed 'waste land' in the colony of New South Wales. In January 1826, a company agent, Robert Dawson (1782–1866), set up camp near the shoreline at Port Stephens. He confined his settlement activities to the coast, with farms on Stroud creek, outposts on the Manning River, stock-mistering in Gloucester Vale. Despite good reports, according to a modern historian, Dawson's numerous improvements, were judged inadequate and the area around Port Stephen was seen as disappointing, with useless outskirts, the central zone rocky, steep and the Gloucester flats water-logged: sheep suffered from foot-rot. The Company wanted to push beyond the hills that hemmed the settlement in, and Dawson was dismissed for mismanagement and replaced by the Arctic explorer, William Parry. Dawson himself soon after published a vindication, and then a glowing account of the area, together with an account of the Worimi. He found the Worimi a 'mild and harmless race', and attributed any harm they might cause to the maltreatment they received from settlers, who elsewhere had been shooting them like dogs. Of the situation around Port Stephens, he wrote: There has, perhaps, been more of this done near to this settlement, and on the banks of the two rivers which empty themselves into this harbor, than