Bunuba

The Bunuba (also known as Bunaba, Punapa, Punuba) are a group of Indigenous Australians and are one of the traditional owners of the southern West Kimberley, in Western Australia.

The Bunuba were also masters of the eastern part of the Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges, at least until the Ngarinjin managed to expel them from that territory, sometime before the advent of white settlement.

[1] As white penetration and appropriation of their lands advanced, the pastoralists began to press the government to take strong measures against the presence of "blacks" on their property, some of whom they would nonetheless employ during the dry season.

A resistance movement eventually emerged, in the mid 1890s, when the Bunuba leader Jandamarra, nicknamed "Pigeon", from a base in Tunnel Creek in the Oscar Ranges, organized guerrilla warfare forays against the intruding cattle- and sheepmen.

[2] Jandamarra was killed in 1897, but sporadic attacks continued on livestock, and massacres of the indigenous population persisted, one being said to have taken place as late as the 1930s.