The last speaker of the language was Nora Boyd, who enabled Robert Dixon to supplement what little was known of the dialect before she died at age 95.
[2] Those on Hinchinbrook had a four-class marriage system: Biyaygiri furnished some of the major trade goods of the continental area adjacent to their island, and among those mainland tribes the nautilus necklaces, and melo shells they collected and worked came to be known by one of the Hinchinbrook tribal ethnonyms, bandjin.
In 1872, Sub-Inspector Robert Johnstone - who was convinced that there was only one real way to "teach the Aborigines a lesson" - led a party of police and troopers who beat a cordon across the island and cornered almost the whole tribe on a headland.
Fuller's mission was undertaken in 1874, two years later than Johnstone's cleansing of the area with the assistance of the Australian native police.
The Biyaygiri had been decimated before Fuller's arrival and he spent three weeks trying to turn up Aboriginal people on the island without finding a single native person there.