TheKaiadilt are anAboriginal Australian people of theSouth Wellesley group in theGulf of Carpentaria,Queensland, Australia. They are native toBentinck Island, but also made nomadic fishing and hunting forays to bothSweers andAllen Islands.[1] Most Kaiadilt people now live onMornington Island.
TheKayardild language is anagglutinating, completelysuffixing member of theTangkic languages, but unlike most Australian languages, including others classified under Tangkic includingYukulta, Kayardild exhibits a case morphology that is accusative, rather thanergative.[2]Etymologically Kayardild is a compound formed fromka (ng) 'language' andyardild (a) 'strong', thus meaning 'strong language'.[3]
Analysis of the grammar of Kayardild revealed that it provided an empirical challenge to a theorem regarding putativelinguistic universals in natural languages.Steven Pinker andPaul Bloom asserted that "no language uses noun affixes to express tense",[4] a claim that reflected a tradition in Western thought going back toAristotle.[5][a]Nicholas Evans discovered a breach in the theory, for Kayardild happens to inflect not only verbs, but also nouns, fortense.[6]
Kayardild was spoken by no more than perhaps 150 people, and by 1982, whenNicholas Evans began to record it, the numbers had declined to approximately 40.[6] By 2005, only seven fluent speakers remained,[7] and the last speaker of classical Kayardild died in 2015,[8] though it is also reported that there was still one fluent female speaker as late as February 2017.[9]
The territory of Bentinck Island and its contiguousreefs amount to roughly 70 square miles (180 km2); the nation's western border lay atAllen Island.[10]
The Kaiadilt were mainly centred on Bentinck Island. Unlike many other northern Aboriginal groups, particularly those ofArnhem Land, they appear to have had little contact withSouthern Asian island traders such as the Makassans, something attested by the lack of loanwords from theMalay,Buginese andMakassarese languages, though some early records indicatetamarind andteak had been harvested by visitors who had axes, and earthenware pots have been uncovered.[1] They were generally diffident with strangers.[11] The first white man to have set foot on the island wasMatthew Flinders, captain ofHMSInvestigator in 1802.[citation needed]
Sometime around 1916, a man remembered only as McKenzie came to Bentinck Island and set up a sheep run, basing himself on a site at the mouth of the Kurumnbali estuary. He would ride over the island, accompanied by a pack of dogs, and shoot any Kaiadilt man who came within sight; in local memory, hemurdered at least 11 people. He also kidnapped and raped native girls. He then moved to Sweers Island, and set up alime kiln there. The Kaiadilt managed to return to Sweers only on McKenzie's departure.[11] The massacre was only recorded by researchers in the 1980s.[12]
Sweers Island was declared anAboriginal reserve in 1934. After acyclonic tidal surge swept the area in 1948, which followed fast on the severe drought that struck in 1946, the Kaiadilt were transferred by missionaries and theQueensland Government[13] to Mornington Island.[14] The uprooting effectively set in place the process of the destruction of both Kaiadilt culture and language since all children were restricted to dormitories, away from their parents and kin, and the transmission of the language and lore was lost.[6] On Mornington Island they lived in a separate zone, in beachhumpies facingBentinck Island.[15] They were looked down on by the IndigenousLardil people, who denied them access to the fishing grounds. Conditions were so severe that for several years all children were stillborn, creating a gap in the generations. From the late 1960s onwards, the Kaiadilt began to return to their own islands.[citation needed]
In 1994, aDeed of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) was given to the original inhabitants, represented by the Kaiadilt Aboriginal Land Trust, which made anative title claim in 1996. The application concerned all the area covered from Bentinck and Sweer Islands' high water line for "as far as the eye could see". InThe Lardil Peoples v State of Queensland [2004] FCA 298, theFederal Court accorded the owners rights to five nautical miles seaward.[14]
The Kaiadilt had the highestpopulation density of all known Aboriginal Australian peoples, at 1.7 persons per square mile.[10] They are characterised by having a high percentage, 43%, ofB-group blood carriers, which is very rare within the continental Australian Aboriginal population. A high incidence of blond hair occurs among their children. Another feature that marks them off is that the Kaiadilt allow women to join in the circumcision rites. Their society, according toNorman Tindale, lacked the classificatory system characteristic of most Aboriginal Australian societies,[16] though they were divided into eightkin groups (dolnoro).[10]
Source:Evans 1998, p. 166
The Kaiadilt once thrived on what has been called a "sterile shelf oflaterite covered flatland".[17] The general area is characterised by reef-building corals, predominantlyAcropora hyacinthus and the associated molluscs, some 400 varieties of which had been discovered by the early 1900s.[1] For the Kaiadilt, Bentinck island wasDulkawalnged (the land of all) while the outlying Sweers and Allen islands wereDangkawaridulk (lands void of men). Despite the poor soil, a wide variety of vegetables were noted by early travellers. The basic arboreal cover consisted of small varieties of eucalyptus,casuarina andpandanus. The Kaiadilt lived on a maritime seafood economy, with nomadic movements determined by weather and seasons. The division of labour meant women gathered on the littoral such foods as small rock oysters (tjilangind), mud cockles (kulpanda) and crabs, while the men, when not harvesting the catch from rock fish traps (ngurruwarra), which are found one every .9 kilometres around Bentinck's coastline,[18] but also along the shores of Sweers islands's calcareouspeneplain, foraged more broadly for sharks, turtle anddugong.[1] After the monsoonal rains, the rich silt flow from Queensland rivers into the Gulf lowered salinity allowing marine grasses on which the latter browsed to thrive.[17]
Kaiadilt mythology was first collected by the anthropologistNorman Tindale, who began field work on the island in 1942.[19] Their mythology evokes a mysterious being whose name means "he who walks behind" led the Kaiadilt to discover water, at Berumoi, by the northerly tip of Bentinck island.[20]
The construction of the rock traps for fishing is attributed to the mythical creaturesBujuku (black crane) andKaarrku (seagull).[18]
Source:Tindale 1974, p. 173