The secret language reinscribed in what looks like an indigenous form of semantic analysis the entire Lardil vocabulary into 200 words and has been described by Hale as a "monument to the human intellect".
[7] People raised within the mission, once detached from the hunter and gatherer lifestyle of the traditional community, were considered good workers to recruit for the pastoral stations, where they were employed as drovers and ringers.
However the Lardil people who had spent their mature years on the mainland as farm workers had no traditional background for raising children to draw on.
[11] Hall was speared and killed in 1917 by a Lardil man, "Burketown Peter/Bad Peter"[11] a respected drover based in Burketown, who ran into trouble, often standing up for his rights, and wanted to kill a cattle station owner with whom he fell out, but was dissuaded from doing so and told by Ganggalida people to return to his home country[10] after refusing to obey local demands that he move back to the mainland.
Wilson, who imposed a dormitory system, segregating children from their elders and thus breaking the chain of tradition through which tribal lore and law was transmitted.
[8] Few of the Lardil girls brought up in the dormitory married according to the traditional kinship rules, given that the mission head played an influential role as intermediary.
[14] The Shire council in the 1970s introduced a beer canteen, government developmental funds were seen as allowing one to dispense with the necessity to work, and, as alcoholism spread, the Mornington Island peoples began to rank among the communities with the highest rate of suicide in Australia.