Kuku Yalanji

Their land ran east from Palmerville station to Mount Lukin, and stretched over the southern and western areas of the Dividing Range as far as the upper Mitchell River.

[3] One of the oldest living cultures,[4] dating back to the earliest human occupation of the continent around 50,000 years ago,[5] the Kuku Yalanji began to have their homeland occupied extensively by European colonisers in 1877, after the Australian government opened up this area to selection,[6] and as miners crowded into the area, where the Palmer River Gold Rush had been underway since news leaked out of a discovery of that mineral in June 1873.

Within a year, over 5,000 Europeans and 2,000 Chinese, mainly from Guangdong, crammed into the Palmer River site, until then the sole preserve of the Kuku Yalanji people, to work its riches.

According to contemporary European observers appointed as Protectors of Aborigines, such as Walter Roth and Archibald Meston, consumption of this drug in the form of opium ash mixed with water accounted for thousands of native deaths, far more than those due to other introduced maladies such as venereal disease.

[10] Modern historians now consider that these early reports, like the tales of the Kuku Yalanji hunting Chinese for cannibalistic feasting, whatever partial truth they contain, functioned to assuage any guilt European settlers may have felt for their key role in the decimation of northern Queensland Aboriginal communities.

[14] Early reports often wrote that the Kuku Yalanji were devoted to cannibalism, targeting in particular Chinese immigrants, whom they called kubara[a] or miran bilin (tight eyes).

The vivid narrations of their killing their own women and children for eating to allay their hunger or of "feasting" on Chinese like "manna from heaven" in popular works like that of Hector Holthouse,[15][16] are now considered wild exaggerations, since the actual evidence is skimpy.

[18] They are reputedly closely related to the Wulpura rain forest dwellers on the plateau in the modern day Mount Windsor National Park.

[23] In an agreement signed on 28 September 2021, the eastern Kuku Yalanji were handed back 160,108 hectares (395,640 acres) of land encompassing the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Daintree Rainforest, together with Ngalba Bulal, Kalkajaka and Hope Islands National Park.