Similarly, they also regularly visited the Australian mainland of Cape York Peninsula, and retained ceremonial, marriage and trading alliances with several Aboriginal groups there.
Subject to reprisals after being blamed for an incident in which a Western schooner and its crew were destroyed in 1869, their numbers rapidly diminished with the onset of white colonisation and administration.
After World War II, descendants of the Kaurareg began to return to their traditional islands, and lay claim to native title over several of them.
the narratives collected by Gunnar Landtman, classified the Kaurareg as descendants of the ancient Hiamu people of the island of Daru off the southern Papuan coast.
[7][8] The Kaurareg people were extensively documented before their decimation and the destruction of their traditional life, by O. W. Brierly, an artist who took part in an Admiralty survey of the York Peninsula by HMS Rattlesnake.
[9] In particular he took many notes based on interviews with Barbara Thompson, a castaway who, the lone survivor of a shipwreck off Ngurupai (Horn Island) in 1844, was cared for by the Kaurareg, who treated her as the markai ("ancestral spirit" ) of an elder (Peaqui)'s deceased daughter (Giom) for 5 years until Owen Stanley's expedition retrieved her at Evans Bay on 16 October 1849.
[12] In mid-April 1869 a schooner, the Sperwer, while trading and trawling for trepang off Muralag, was attacked and its captain, James Gascoyne, and his crew of two whites and five Malays were killed.
His successor, pastoralist Frank Jardine, set out on a punitive expedition seconded by a Captain McAusland of the Melanie and his crew of kanakas (native police[a]).
According to Jardine's son, the armed kanakas ran amok, and a great slaughter of Kaurareg on Muralag is thought to have taken place, though accounts differ.
[17] In April 1870 Chester again set forth in HMS Blanche with 25 royal marines and eight Australian native police, five of whom were recently released from St Helena's prison where they had served time for rape and armed robbery.
[18][19][20] Kaurareg survivors were encountered in the 1880s at Yata (Port Lihou) and at Kiwain (Blue Fish Point) opposite Thursday Island, and at the close of the century their numbers were reduced to a hundred or so.
[22] Historical records indicate that the Kaurareg Aboriginal people are the traditional owners for Thursday Island; however there are (as of 2018[update]) no active native title claims over this area.
For thousands of years the Kaurareg followed traditional patterns of hunting, fishing and agriculture and maintained close cultural and trading ties with the Aboriginal groups of the Northern Peninsula Area of Cape York.
[30] Kaurareg men were long-haired and went naked, save for as belt, while the women, apart from periods of mourning when it was removed, and replaced by a soger (long fringed skirt)[31] wore a leaf petticoat (zazi), and had closely cropped hair.