Guugu Yimithirr people
[3] David Horton's 1996 representation of Tindale's map shows the lands of the Guugu Yimithirr people extending from south of Hope Vale to an area which covers Lizard Island.
[4] The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority states on their website that the traditional lands of the "Guugu Yimidhirr Warra Nation" extend from Lizard Island to the Hopevale region.
[7] According to the Cairns Institute[8] and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, the Dingaal people are the traditional owners of the Lizard Island group.
The day after, things deteriorated quickly when, while visiting the Endeavour they found a catch of local turtles, and expected a share of the harvest, which Cook, already strained to feed his own, declined to do.
[12] The tribes of the area around Cooktown were decimated, the Guugu Yimithirr being "substantially exterminated",[1] by a variety of factors: large-scale massacres, the kidnapping of women for rape and the abduction of their children, together with the lethal impact of consuming the opium that Chinese contractors paid to them for their work as hired labourers, and alcohol abuse.
Cooktown-based Native Police Sub-inspector Stanhope O'Connor with his troopers hunted down and trapped in a narrow gorge, a group of 28 Guugu-Yimidhirr men and 13 women.
In the same year, while delayed on his journey to Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (German New Guinea), the Lutheran missionary Johann Flierl founded the Elim Aboriginal Mission some 230 miles (370 km) to the north of Cooktown, at Cape Bedford, and the following year the governance of the mission was assumed by the G. H. Schwartz, who renamed it Hope Vale.
Schwartz, who had been there since the age of 19 and who had forgotten to take naturalisation, had mastered the language, contributing greatly to the retention of traditional knowledge,[15] was interned as an enemy alien at 74.
[19] Cook reported sighting on Sunday 24 June 1770 an animal which was: of a light mouse Colour and the full size of a Grey Hound, and shaped in every respect like one, with a long tail, which it carried like a Grey hound; in short, I should have taken it for a wild dog but for its walking or running, in which it jumpd like a Hare or Deer.
There arose an urban legend that in fact what the word "kangaroo" must have meant, when the Indigenous people of the Endeavour River responded to the incomprehensible English query, was "I don't know".
Light was shed on the point by the American anthropologist John Haviland, who studied the Guugu Yimithirr language intensively from 1971 onwards.
In Guugu Yimidhirr, as in Kayardild space is rendered in absolute terms,[28] like the cardinal points, north, south, east, west, independent of whether something is in front of, behind, to the left or right of a person.
