Kaiadilt
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The Kaiadilt are an Aboriginal Australian people of the South Wellesley group in the
Gulf of Carpentaria The Gulf of Carpentaria is a sea off the northern coast of Australia. It is enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the eastern Arafura Sea, which separates Australia and New Guinea. The northern boundary ...
,
Queensland Queensland ( , commonly abbreviated as Qld) is a States and territories of Australia, state in northeastern Australia, and is the second-largest and third-most populous state in Australia. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Austr ...
, Australia. They are native to Bentinck Island, but also made nomadic fishing and hunting forays to both Sweers and Allen Islands. Most Kaiadilt people now live on Mornington Island.


Language

The Kayardild language is an
agglutinating An agglutinative language is a type of language that primarily forms words by stringing together morphemes (word parts)—each typically representing a single grammatical meaning—without significant modification to their forms ( agglutinations) ...
, completely
suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...
ing member of the Tangkic languages, but unlike most Australian languages, including others classified under Tangkic including Yukulta, Kayardild exhibits a case morphology that is accusative, rather than ergative. Etymologically Kayardild is a compound formed from ''ka'' (''ng'') 'language' and ''yardild'' (''a'') 'strong', thus meaning 'strong language'. Analysis of the grammar of Kayardild revealed that it provided an empirical challenge to a theorem regarding putative linguistic universals in natural languages.
Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychology, cognitive psychologist, psycholinguistics, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psycholo ...
and Paul Bloom asserted that "no language uses noun affixes to express tense", a claim that reflected a tradition in Western thought going back to
Aristotle Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...
.
Nicholas Evans Nicholas Benbow Evans (26 July 1950 – 9 August 2022) was a British journalist, screenwriter, television and film producer and novelist. He was best known for his 1995 debut novel, ''The Horse Whisperer (novel), The Horse Whisperer''. It has s ...
discovered a breach in the theory, for Kayardild happens to inflect not only verbs, but also nouns, for tense. Kayardild was spoken by no more than perhaps 150 people, and by 1982, when
Nicholas Evans Nicholas Benbow Evans (26 July 1950 – 9 August 2022) was a British journalist, screenwriter, television and film producer and novelist. He was best known for his 1995 debut novel, ''The Horse Whisperer (novel), The Horse Whisperer''. It has s ...
began to record it, the numbers had declined to approximately 40. By 2005, only seven fluent speakers remained, and the last speaker of classical Kayardild died in 2015, though it is also reported that there was still one fluent female speaker as late as February 2017.


Country

The territory of Bentinck Island and its contiguous
reef A reef is a ridge or shoal of rock, coral, or similar relatively stable material lying beneath the surface of a natural body of water. Many reefs result from natural, abiotic component, abiotic (non-living) processes such as deposition (geol ...
s amount to roughly ; the nation's western border lay at Allen Island.


History

The Kaiadilt were mainly centred on Bentinck Island. Unlike many other northern Aboriginal groups, particularly those of
Arnhem Land Arnhem Land is a historical region of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around from the territorial capital, Darwin, Northern Territory, Darwin. In 1623, Dutch East India Compa ...
, they appear to have had little contact with Southern Asian island traders such as the Makassans, something attested by the lack of loanwords from the Malay, Buginese and Makassarese languages, though some early records indicate
tamarind Tamarind (''Tamarindus indica'') is a Legume, leguminous tree bearing edible fruit that is indigenous to tropical Africa and naturalized in Asia. The genus ''Tamarindus'' is monotypic taxon, monotypic, meaning that it contains only this spe ...
and
teak Teak (''Tectona grandis'') is a tropical hardwood tree species in the family Lamiaceae. It is a large, deciduous tree that occurs in mixed hardwood forests. ''Tectona grandis'' has small, fragrant white flowers arranged in dense clusters (panic ...
had been harvested by visitors who had axes, and earthenware pots have been uncovered. They were generally diffident with strangers. The first white man to have set foot on the island was
Matthew Flinders Captain (Royal Navy), Captain Matthew Flinders (16 March 1774 – 19 July 1814) was a British Royal Navy officer, navigator and cartographer who led the first littoral zone, inshore circumnavigate, circumnavigation of mainland Australia, then ...
, captain of HMS ''Investigator'' in 1802. Sometime around 1916, a man remembered only as McKenzie came to Bentinck Island and set up a sheep run, basing himself on a site at the mouth of the Kurumnbali estuary. He would ride over the island, accompanied by a pack of dogs, and shoot any Kaiadilt man who came within sight; in local memory, he murdered at least 11 people. He also kidnapped and raped native girls. He then moved to Sweers Island, and set up a
lime kiln A lime kiln is a kiln used for the calcination of limestone (calcium carbonate) to produce the form of lime called ''quicklime'' (calcium oxide). The chemical equation for this reaction is: CaCO3 + heat → CaO + CO2 This reaction can tak ...
there. The Kaiadilt managed to return to Sweers only on McKenzie's departure. The massacre was only recorded by researchers in the 1980s. Sweers Island was declared an
Aboriginal reserve An Aboriginal reserve, also called simply reserve, was a government-sanctioned settlement for Aboriginal Australians, created under various state and federal legislation. Along with missions and other institutions, they were used from the 19th ...
in 1934. After a cyclonic tidal surge swept the area in 1948, which followed fast on the severe drought that struck in 1946, the Kaiadilt were transferred by missionaries and the
Queensland Government The Queensland Government is the state government of Queensland, Australia, a Parliament, parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Government is formed by the party or coalition that has gained a majority in the Queensland Legislative Assembly, ...
to Mornington Island. The uprooting effectively set in place the process of the destruction of both Kaiadilt culture and language since all children were restricted to dormitories, away from their parents and kin, and the transmission of the language and lore was lost. On Mornington Island they lived in a separate zone, in beach humpies facing Bentinck Island. They were looked down on by the Indigenous Lardil people, who denied them access to the fishing grounds. Conditions were so severe that for several years all children were stillborn, creating a gap in the generations. From the late 1960s onwards, the Kaiadilt began to return to their own islands.


Native title

In 1994, a Deed of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) was given to the original inhabitants, represented by the Kaiadilt Aboriginal Land Trust, which made a native title claim in 1996. The application concerned all the area covered from Bentinck and Sweer Islands' high water line for "as far as the eye could see". In ''The Lardil Peoples v State of Queensland 004FCA 298'', the Federal Court accorded the owners rights to five nautical miles seaward.


People and society

The Kaiadilt had the highest
population density Population density (in agriculture: Standing stock (disambiguation), standing stock or plant density) is a measurement of population per unit land area. It is mostly applied to humans, but sometimes to other living organisms too. It is a key geog ...
of all known Aboriginal Australian peoples, at 1.7 persons per square mile. They are characterised by having a high percentage, 43%, of B-group blood carriers, which is very rare within the continental Australian Aboriginal population. A high incidence of blond hair occurs among their children. Another feature that marks them off is that the Kaiadilt allow women to join in the circumcision rites. Their society, according to Norman Tindale, lacked the classificatory system characteristic of most Aboriginal Australian societies, though they were divided into eight kin groups (''dolnoro'').


Some words

* ''duljawinda'' ('car') literally 'ground-runner' * ''wadubayiinda'' ('tobacco') form by combining ''wadu'' (smoke) with the root ''bayii-'' (be bitten); literal meaning is 'that by means of which the smoke is bitten' Source:


Ecology and lifestyle

The Kaiadilt once thrived on what has been called a "sterile shelf of
laterite Laterite is a soil type rich in iron and aluminium and is commonly considered to have formed in hot and wet tropical areas. Nearly all laterites are of rusty-red coloration, because of high iron oxide content. They develop by intensive and prolo ...
covered flatland". The general area is characterised by reef-building corals, predominantly Acropora hyacinthus and the associated molluscs, some 400 varieties of which had been discovered by the early 1900s. For the Kaiadilt, Bentinck island was ''Dulkawalnged'' (the land of all) while the outlying Sweers and Allen islands were ''Dangkawaridulk'' (lands void of men). Despite the poor soil, a wide variety of vegetables were noted by early travellers. The basic arboreal cover consisted of small varieties of eucalyptus,
casuarina ''Casuarina'', also known as she-oak, Australian pine and native pine, is a genus of flowering plants in the family Casuarinaceae, and is native to Australia, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, islands of the western Pacific Ocean, and e ...
and
pandanus ''Pandanus'' is a genus of monocots with about 578 accepted species. They are palm-like, dioecious trees and shrubs native to the Old World tropics and subtropics. Common names include pandan, screw palm and screw pine. The genus is classified ...
. The Kaiadilt lived on a maritime seafood economy, with nomadic movements determined by weather and seasons. The division of labour meant women gathered on the littoral such foods as small rock oysters (''tjilangind''), mud cockles (''kulpanda'') and crabs, while the men, when not harvesting the catch from rock fish traps (''ngurruwarra''), which are found one every .9 kilometres around Bentinck's coastline, but also along the shores of Sweers islands's calcareous peneplain, foraged more broadly for sharks, turtle and
dugong The dugong (; ''Dugong dugon'') is a marine mammal. It is one of four living species of the order Sirenia, which also includes three species of manatees. It is the only living representative of the once-diverse family Dugongidae; its closest ...
. After the monsoonal rains, the rich silt flow from Queensland rivers into the Gulf lowered salinity allowing marine grasses on which the latter browsed to thrive.


Mythology

Kaiadilt mythology was first collected by the anthropologist Norman Tindale, who began field work on the island in 1942. Their mythology evokes a mysterious being whose name means "he who walks behind" led the Kaiadilt to discover water, at Berumoi, by the northerly tip of Bentinck island. The construction of the rock traps for fishing is attributed to the mythical creatures ''Bujuku'' (black crane) and ''Kaarrku'' (seagull).


Alternative names

* ''Bentinck Islanders'' * ''Gaiardilt'' * ''Gajadild'' * ''Kaiadil'' * ''Maldanunda (from'' mala/malda'', 'sea') * ''Malununde, Malununda'' (a Lardil
toponym Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of ''wikt:toponym, toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage, and types. ''Toponym'' is the general term for ...
for Bentinck Island) * ''Mardunung, Madunun'' * ''Marlanunda'' Source:


Notable people

* Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, artist.


Notes


Citations


Sources

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * {{Authority control Aboriginal peoples of Queensland Gulf of Carpentaria