Bardi people
In an interview in 1938, a journalist writes of him and the Baardi/Jawi area informants as follows In a little stone house at Beagle Bay, with a creek running beside it and the sea only five miles away, he has been living and working with nine aborigines, studying their tongues.
Some further months at the round table, and they were dealing with phonetic symbols, explaining fine points of pronunciation, elucidating the differences between dialects that were generally similar, and even giving Dr. Nekes a hand with his job of finding the best written representation of the different tongues[3][c]The Bardi's traditional land, estimated by Norman Tindale to encompass about 300 square miles (780 km2), was in the Cape Leveque peninsula, extending eastwards from Cape Borda to Cygnet Bay and Cunningham Point.
Going into the bush he cut down a silver-blood tree, and split boards from it, which he fashioned into bullroarers that, as he went back at his campsite on the shore, he shoved into the stone-beds of the creek, forming a line of galaguru.
[13] He speared another fish at high tide and sang his way back to Ngamagun, collecting his galaguru and, on climbing the Burumar sandhill, swung it round while kneeling.
The hair-string broke as he did so, and the bullroarer shot skyward, to rest at a celestial zone called 'With the Fleshless' (baug-ara-njara), i.e., at the realm of the dead, in the Coalsack Nebula,[15] a dark spot near the Southern Cross.
[22] This Djamba, a prototypical figure in widespread Aboriginal lore characterized by crippled feet,[23] is associated with the introduction of guraṇara (ritual intercourse with exchanged women)[24] matters, tyuringa and instruments like the love bullroarer, mandagidgid; magic daggers and spindle-shaped sticks used as points (wadaṇara/durun), many associated with innovative sexually explicit corroborees and rites.
[29] Claire Bowern states that the Baardi, unlike many Kimberley groups, do not employ to this purpose the section and subsection names almost ubiquitous elsewhere in the region.
[30] Bowern states that the primary division, alluded to by Worms – djando and the (Y)nar, – now transcribed as jarndoo and inar(a) – refer to two generational moieties.
[37] The ceremony's first ritual phase is called kundaldja, in which, over several evenings the neminem novice or initiand has his body smeared with charcoal and turtle oil by his tribal sister's husband (alabel), who acts as his guardian and supporter.
Songs taught to the tribe by Minau are sung, to the rhythm of boomerang beating, as various dances are performed, and women joke and sometimes dress up, even as men.
Some male affines (relatives by marriage) visit the circumcision site and draw blood from their subincised penises, which must trickle down their thighs to the ground.
[39] The second stage consists of tooth avulsion, in which the corroboree ground is marked out by three parallel lines, 2 feet (0.61 m) apart, and a rug placed before the third, behind which is the djungagor (medicine man) and the boy's tribal mother's brother.
The hunched novice, each time a waddy (club) is thumped, must hop from one line to the next, and then sit, his arms bent from the elbow so the hands reach his shoulders, a position his guardian clasps him in.
At our first coming, before we were acquainted with them or they with us, a company of them who lived on the main came just against our ship, and, standing on a pretty high bank, threatened us with their swords and lances by shaking them at us: at last the captain ordered the drum to be beaten, which was done of a sudden with much vigour, purposely to scare the poor creatures.
[43]Metcalfe argued that, indisputably, the word repeated here, as transcribed as gurri was in fact ngaarri,[44] the "most feared and fickle" of the Bardi malevolent spirit-beings.
The Sunday Island mission was established in 1899 by two pearlers, Sidney Hadley and Harry Hunter, whose fleet of luggers worked out of Bulgin, east of Cape Leveque and just north of its lighthouse.
[47][48] This was later affiliated with the UAM, one of whose missionaries, Wilfrid Henry Douglas, settled there in 1946, learning the Bardi language and attempting to translate some passages in the New Testament into the local tongue.
When part of a pastoral lease of Lombardina was split off, the Bardi shifted back to take up residence at One Arm Point, where by the early 2000s, some 400 people dwell.
[47] After a landmark 2002 High Court decision confirmed the primacy of the Native Title Act 1993,[50] the Bardi and Jawi people managed to obtain recognition of their native title claim in 2005, when a Federal Court under Justice French ruled that they were entitled to exclusive rights over some areas of the roughly 1,000 square kilometres (400 sq mi) to which they had laid claim.
[52] Justice French ruled in June 2015 affirmed part of their claim, while adding they had non-exclusive native title rights over areas below the mean high water mark.
[55] As of 2020[update], there is a proposal for a 660,000-hectare (1,600,000-acre) marine park, which will cover the Indian Ocean surrounding the Dampier Peninsula, including the many islands of the Buccaneer Archipelago.
