A version of Nyamal became the basis of a pidgin used among workers on pearling luggers in the late 19th century, and was spoken several hundred miles away,[1] as was Ngarluma One Nyamal word has entered English, kaluta, the common term now used to refer to a distinct species of marsupial Dasukaluta rosamondae, mistakenly classified as an antechinus before it was correctly identified in 1982.
[7] Part of the traditional Nyamal lands around the de Grey river were taken up by the pastoralist Walter Padbury in 1963, and, after conditions proved too arduous for his foreman Nairn, the station changed hands, and was managed by McKenzie Grant, A.W.
[9] Vast flocks of sheep ate up the grasses and bush tucker resources that had been one of the staples of people like the Nyamal, forcing them into more dependence on the stations.
Born near Yarrie Station with the birth-name Karriwarna in 1920, he avoided the fate of many other half-caste (mardamarda or 'red-red' in Nyamal[4]) children in the region, of being kidnapped by the then so-called Protector of Aborigines, a certain Mitchell, and relative of Sir James Mitchell, who, apart from fathering many children on Aboriginal women in the locality, would round up those of mixed descent and take them to the Moore River Native Settlement.
[11] His mother shifted him to the Warralong station run by the Hardie brothers, and where the aborigines grew up to be, according to his memory of their repute, the best stockmen in the world.