TheNauo people, also speltNawu andNhawu, are anAboriginal Australian people of the south-westernEyre Peninsula inSouth Australia. TheNauo language becameextinct by the twentieth century, but efforts are being made to revive it.
Before the officialBritish colonisation of South Australia in 1836, the Nauo people fell victim to raids bywhalers andsealers who worked the southern coast of the continent, and European settlement on the Eyre Peninsula encroached on the land of the Indigenous peoples. By the time that anthropologistNorman Tindale was documenting the territories of the various people in the 1930s, he was not able to find any Nauo people, so obtained his information mainly fromWirangu andBarngarla people.[1]
According to Tindale, the traditional lands of the Nauo people were on theEyre peninsula, with their principal centres around thescrub gum forest areas of the south-western coast. Their combined territory covered approximately 21,000 square kilometres (8,000 sq mi), with the western frontiers aroundCape Radstock, northwards to beyondMinnipa. Their eastern extension ran close toDarke Peak, and took in the areas west ofCleve and halfway betweenCarrow andFranklin Harbor.Port Lincoln,Mount Hope,Coffin Bay, andElliston were all part of Nauo territory.[2]
It is thought that, before the advent ofwhite colonisation, the Nauo had a more northern boundary extension from theGawler Ranges toPort Augusta. They were pressed to move further south by the time white settlement began, as theBarngarla's relocation brought pressure to bear on them from the north.[2] At the same time, devastation came in from the south with the establishment ofsealing stations along their southern coastal frontiers, whose men, together with escapees fromTasmanian prisons, kidnapped many Nauo women, beginning with raids from their bases onKangaroo Island in the first decades of the 19th century.[b][3] The violence of these early encounters may explain the hostility of the Nauo to later settlers.[4] TheWaterloo Bay Massacre, near Elliston, which is said to have taken place around 1846, is still a contentious historical issue. Tindale summarised the rumour as follows:
Following the killing of a shepherd named Hamp, and the wife of another immediately afterward, it is claimed that 160 well-armed men drove a large group of aborigines, said to have numbered 260, over a cliff into the sea. According to this entirely unconfirmed report, only two aborigines survived.[5]
Whatever the truth, some Nauo were still in that area years afterwards.
As late as 2017, agreement between the successorWirangu community and the Elliston municipal council on the terms to be used to describe what happened were still stalled, with representatives of the latter stating that "massacre" was too strong a word to describe what has been traditionally called the "Elliston incident", where "something happened" but the details are unknown.[6]
In May 2018, a group of seven Nauoelders, along with two localanthropologists, presented a talk on the Aboriginal history of the Coffin Bay area at the Coffin Bay Yacht Club. Elder Jody Miller thought it was possibly the first time in South Australia that aNative Title claim group had been asked by a local non-Indigenous community to share their culture andsonglines.[7]
TheNauo language is extinct; there have been no recorded speakers since before 1975. It had some similarities with theWirangu language.[8]
TheMobile Language Team (MLT) from theUniversity of Adelaide has started work on the reconstruction of the language, based on the 10 words recorded by German missionaryC.W. Schürmann, increasing the wordlist to 300 words. MLT is preparing a website for online learning site of the language.[1]
According to Nauo beliefs, the spirits of the departed are thought to dwell on the islands inSpencer Gulf.[9]
George French Angas wrote in 1847 the following legend:
They affirm that the Nauo tribe was once entirely cut off by a great and powerful warrior, styledWilloo (eaglehawk). This formidable individual attempted to possess himself of all the women, and destroyed every man except two, who escaped by climbing into thick trees. Their names were,Karkantya andPoona (two smaller species of hawk). Willoo climbed after them, but they broke off the branch upon which he sat, and he fell to the ground; that instant a dog deprived him of his virility, when he immediately died, and was transformed into an eagle-hawk. A small lizard is supposed to be the originator of the sexes. The men distinguish it by the name ofibirri, the women call itwaka: the men destroy the male lizards, and the women the females.[10]
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