Correcting
the Records Project
2020 – 2030

This project started in 2016 to research and record historical Aboriginal information about the tribes of the greater Cairns area, including Kuranda.

Unfortunately there has been misinformation over the last 30 years which has exacerbated Aboriginal community issues.  This project aims to ‘correct the records’ to avoid future publishing of incorrect information in printed materials and on websites.

Hard copies of the research document sets below are available on loan.  Please contact us.

Aboriginal Groups of the Cairns Area – 2 pages

Click here to open / download PDF version

This page (A) shows the map, top left, of 3 groups in the Cairns area as documented by the pictured academics over the last 115 years.
The table left are the different spellings used in their documents to describe the groups (tribes).

This page (B) shows the map with “Djabugay Nation” over the entire area. “Djabugay Nation” is deliberately inside quote marks because it is misinformation (an invented term).
PATZ proposed in 1980 that these neighbouring tribes were dialects of Djabugay. PATZ 2002 publication she quotes DIXON to explain (see RED text below) “It is necessary…”. That is, PATZ arbitrarily chose ‘Djabugay’ however, she could have equally chosen ‘Buluwai’ or ‘Yirrgay’ to coin the term to describe language similarities between these neighbouring tribes. PATZ also describes that pre-colonisation these tribes saw themselves with their own languages and did not group themselves according to linguistic dialect theory.

REFERENCE MAPPING

BAMA BULMBA TRIBES : RAINFOREST PEOPLE OF KURANDA REGION in relation to Bulway, Buluwai, Bulwai, Buluwandji (PDF, 100 pages)

REFERENCE DOCUMENTS (2020 – 2023)

REFERENCE DOCUMENTS (2025 – 2030)

REQUESTED CONTENT CHANGES SERIES

Professor of Linguistics R.M.W. Dixon says

[R.M.W. Dixon, Words of Our Country, St. Lucia, UQP, 1991, pp.6-7.]

To summarize, names like Yirrganydji, Buluwanyji, and Gunganji break down into three components: stem yirr-/bulu-/gung-, then suffix GAY ‘language,’ then nyji ‘having,’ and their literal meaning is people having the Yirrgay, Buluway, and Gunggay, languages respectively. In Wood’s opinion, the linguistically unanalyzable stems and archaic nature of the GAY suffix imply that these are very old names, and form an old and longstable nomenclature.

In other words, the tribe names are very old names and are the names of the languages spoken by each tribe.

Linguist Dr Elizabeth Patz / Professor of Linguistics R.M.W. Dixon says

[A grammar of the Kuku Yalanji language of North Queensland By Elisabeth Patz 2002, sourcing R.M.W. Dixon 1980]

1.1.2 Kuku Yalanji and its dialects

The concept of “own language” as distinct from “other languages” is an important aspect of tribal identity in Australia (as indeed it is for any nation in the world). Thus Aborigines distinguish their own language from that of another tribal group, even if the differences are only slight, sometimes represented by just a few different lexical items. Accordingly, a tribal name is often derived from the language name in Australia, whereas the reverse is seldom encountered (cf. Dixon 1980:33-43).

Where the self-termed “languages” of several tribes are mutually understandable, the linguist may recognise these as dialects of one superordinate language. But “there was not usually any name for a group of tribes whose speech was mutually intelligible, nor for the language^ [the superordinate language] that we can – on linguistic criteria – assign to them. It is necessary to choose some label for each language^, and this usually has to be done fairly arbitrarily by the linguist” (Dixon 1980:43).

In other words, the linguists chose, by chance, a name to represent neighbouring tribes with similiar languages.