Iwaidja people
indigenous Australian people of the Northern Territory
The Iwaidja are an Indigenous Australian people of the Cobourg Peninsula in the Northern Territory. In the modern day, they have also become known as the Arrarrkbi or Warrkbi people, reflecting their amalgamation since British colonisation with the neighbouring survivors of the Garig, Ilgar, Marrgu and Wurrugu people, as well as having various non-Indigenous ancestry.
Name
Norman Tindale states that the name is based on their word for 'no' (ii).
Alternative names include Eaewardja, Eiwaja, Juwadja, Limba-Karadjee, Limbakaraja, Tarula (Tiwi language exonym meaning 'riflemen'), Unalla, and Uwaidja.
Language
Iwaidja is one of the Iwaidjan languages of the Cobourg Peninsula, all of which are non-Pama–Nyungan languages. It is still spoken by some 150 speakers, at Minjilang on Croker Island.
Some words
allun (path)
anaborro (buffalo)
ayir (stone spear)
corambal (hut)
eboro (didgeridoo)
ekolpen (fish spear)
illpoogee (kangaroo)
imberbi (edible root)
kamoomoo (mother)
limbo cardja (Port Essington)
looloot (tame dog)
lurkakie (wild dog)
murnatt (edible yam)
nowajuk (father)
obert (water)
warranganababoo (white man)
Country
In Tindale's estimation the Iwaidja possessed some 100 square miles (260 km2) of tribal lands. Their centre was at Mountnorris Bay, in the eastern area of the Cobourg Peninsula. Tindale interprets Paul Foelsche's Unalla as a reference to the Iwaidja. Foelsche informed Edward Micklethwaite Curr that:
The country frequented by this tribe extends from Raffles Bay to Port Essington Harbour and thence midway up the Cobourg Peninsula to Popham Bay.
The public source identifies “Iwaidja people” as indigenous Australian people of the Northern Territory. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Iwaidja, people and indigenous.
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This entry incorporates text from “Iwaidja people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.