[5] As of 2020[update], there is a proposal for a 660,000-hectare (1,600,000-acre) marine park, which will cover the Indian Ocean surrounding the Dampier Peninsula, including the many islands of the Buccaneer Archipelago.
[11] Excavations on High Cliffy Island have uncovered extensive stone structures,[12] some consisting of dry-stone formwork only evidenced elsewhere on the other side of the continent at Lake Condah in Victoria.
[14] One possibility is that they are the remains of monsoonal refuges, where the Yawijibaya could retire to, to escape the mosquito and sandfly infestations that would have plagued their low-lying mangrove-fringed islands as the rains set in.
Source: Tindale 1974, p. 242 In the sparse ethnographic literature, remarks are to be found to the effect that the Yawijibaya were physically quite dissimilar to other Indigenous peoples of the region.
[1] The Yawijibaya ethnonym figured as part of the key linguistic evidence which Carl Georg von Brandenstein adduced in support of his claim that there was a secret Portuguese prehistory of colonisation of Australia, a theory he based on etymologies of words in East Kimberley place-names.
[20] In von Brandenstein's reconstruction, it followed that the Yawijibaya were descendants of Portuguese African slaves who had persisted in speaking their creole long after their masters had forsaken the island, and this deeply affected the language that was spoken there.
Aside from the fact that no such tribal opposition has been attested in the ethnographical literature, the phonetic distinction it was based on probably did not exist, the first term simply representing a mishearing of the second, yawiji-baya.