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The Bardi, also spelt Baada or Baardi and other variations, [lower-alpha 2] are an Indigenous Australian people, living north of Broome and inhabiting parts of the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They are ethnically close to the Jawi people, and several organisations refer to the Bardi Jawa grouping, such as the Bardi Jawi Niimidiman Aboriginal Corporation Registered Native Title Body (RNTBC) and the Bardi Jawa Rangers.
Broome is a coastal, pearling and tourist town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, 1,681 km (1,045 mi) north of Perth. The urban population was 14,445 in June 2018 growing to over 45,000 per month during the peak tourist season.
The Dampier Peninsula is a peninsula located north of Broome and Roebuck Bay in Western Australia. It is surrounded by the Indian Ocean to the west and north, and King Sound to the east. It is named after the mariner and explorer William Dampier who visited it. The northernmost part of the peninsula is Cape Leveque.
Western Australia is a state occupying the entire western third of Australia. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, and the Southern Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east, and South Australia to the south-east. Western Australia is Australia's largest state, with a total land area of 2,529,875 square kilometres, and the second-largest country subdivision in the world, surpassed only by Russia's Sakha Republic. The state has about 2.6 million inhabitants – around 11 percent of the national total – of whom the vast majority live in the south-west corner, 79 per cent of the population living in the Perth area, leaving the remainder of the state sparsely populated.
Bardi is an endangered Australian Aboriginal language in the Nyulnyulan family. It is spoken in Northwestern Australia, on the Dampier peninsula and neighboring islands. Fewer than 10 speakers of Bardi remain alive today. Before European settlement at the end of the nineteenth century, the population size is estimated to have been ~1500 people, with essentially the entire community speaking Bardi. Since then, the ethnic population has increased in number, but is essentially monolingual in English today. That said, many middle-aged people can still understand the language, and some of them can speak it to a limited degree.
Claire Bowern is a linguist who works with Australian indigenous languages. She is currently Professor of Linguistics at Yale University.
The Pallotine priest and linguist, Father Hermann Nekes, who worked with Ernst Alfred Worms in compiling dictionaries of Baardi and related languages, found his informants to be extremely linguistically astute. In an interview in 1938, a journalist writes of him and the Baardi/Jawi area informants as follows
The Society of the Catholic Apostolate, better known as the Pallottines, are a Society of Apostolic Life within the Roman Catholic Church, founded in 1835 by the Roman priest Saint Vincent Pallotti. Pallottines are part of the Union of Catholic Apostolate and are present in 45 countries on six continents. The Pallottines administer one of the largest churches in the world, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro in Côte d'Ivoire.
In a little stone house at Beagle Bay, with a creek running beside it and the sea only five miles away, he has been living and working with nine aborigines, studying their tongues. Every day he and the aborigines sat in a circle round the one big table in the house. Dr. Nekes asked them questions, and from their replies was able to compare their answers on the spot. The strangest feature of these linguistic knights of the round table was that no two of them spoke the same tongue. As the days became weeks and the weeks months, Dr. Nekes became the central figure in one of the oddest language experiments in scientific history. The aborigines began to understand every word that every other aborigine said. At first some of them had used what Dr. Nekes calls a kind of 'pidgin-black.' Now they were all coming to terms. At this stage, some of the brightest of them gave Dr. Nekes a shock. They began to use grammatical terms and hold almost scientific discussions on syntax. Some further months at the round table, and they were dealing with phonetic symbols, explaining fine points of pronunciation, elucidating the differences between dialects that were generally similar, and even giving Dr. Nekes a hand with his job of finding the best written representation of the different tongues[4][lower-alpha 3]
Country
The Bardi's traditional land, estimated by Norman Tindale to encompass about 300 square miles (780km2), was in the Cape Leveque peninsula, extending eastwards from Cape Borda to Cygnet Bay and Cunningham Point.[6] There are problems with this estimate, in particular with the southern borders assigned to the Bardi.[7] The Kooljaman resort at Cape Leveque is run by Bardi people.[8]
Norman Barnett Tindale AO was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist.
Cape Leveque is at the northernmost tip of the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Cape Leveque is 240 kilometres (150 mi) north of Broome, and is remote with few facilities. Nevertheless, the Cape's sandy beaches are attracting an increasing number of visitors.
Social organization and economy
The Bardi were a maritime, coastal people, composed of 5 groups. They crafted pegged mangrove logs from a light buoyant variety which they got in trade from the Djaui people of Sunday Island to form rafts[9] to venture out to the sea to hunt, and to visit the outlying islands.[10]
A mangrove is a shrub or small tree that grows in coastal saline or brackish water. The term is also used for tropical coastal vegetation consisting of such species. Mangroves occur worldwide in the tropics and subtropics, mainly between latitudes 25° N and 25° S. The total mangrove forest area of the world in 2000 was 137,800 square kilometres (53,200 sq mi), spanning 118 countries and territories.
The Jawi, also spelt Djaui and other alternative spellings, are an indigenous Australian people of the Kimberley coast of Western Australia, who speak the Jawi dialect.
Sunday Island is an island off the coast in the Kimberley of Western Australia.
As with the Djaui, the Bardi defined land rights in terms of 4 kinds of relationship:
Ownership of a patrilineal estate (booroo) by virtue of patrilineal descent
A right of access to the patrilineal estate of one's mother (ningalmoo)
Rights stemming from the site associated with one's conception totem (raya)
Rights that derive from customary usage and intermarriage[11]
Dreamtime
The heartland of Baardi (and Jawi) religious thought and practice lies in an area some 3 miles southwest of Cape Leveque, called Ngamagun (At the water)/Urgu (water).[12] It is there that many of the key moments of the primordial creation of their world, in what they call būar or the dreaming, are grounded.[13]
Long ago, Djamar emerged from the sea at Bulgin and, after resting against a paperbark tree for three days, struck out, whirling his bullroarer, for the south, then dived back into the sea after turning west, only to emerge at Ngamagun creek. Going into the bush he cut down a bilāl (silver-blood tree), and split boards from it, which he fashioned into bullroarers that, as he went back at his campsite on the shore, he shoved into the stone-beds of the creek, forming a line of galaguru. He then walked on to Djarindjin where, while seated on a rock, his hand was stung by a rock-fish he had caught underneath it. He found the blood tasty as he licked the wound, and stopped it with a wooden plug (banan).[lower-alpha 4] Returning to Ngamagun, he let the blood from his arm drip into a trough of stone. This blood became his food (warb) and the ritual drink of Baardi men to this day.[15]
He speared another fish at high tide and sang his way back to Ngamagun, collecting his galaguru and, on climbing the Burumar sandhill, swung it round while kneeling. The hair-string broke as he did so, and the bullroarer shot skyward, to rest at a celestial zone called 'With the Fleshless' (baug-ara-njara), i.e., at the realm of the dead, a dark spot near the Southern Cross.[16]
History of contact
Norman Tindale thought that the Bardi were probably those described by William Dampier.[6] Dampier arrived in the privateer Cygnet off this coast on 5 January 1688, and remained there doing repairs until 12 March, This has been identified as, in all probability, Karakatta Bay in King Sound, now One Arm Point. The ancestors of the Bardi were thus probably the first native Australian people described by Western explorers.[6][17][18] A degree of confirmation of this inference emerged when Toby Metcalfe, a linguist who has studied the Bardi language, suggested that Dampier's report of his encounter with the natives of the bay contained a word which was still recognizable from the Bardi lexicon.
At our first coming, before we were acquainted with them or they with us, a company of them who lived on the main came just against our ship, and, standing on a pretty high bank, threatened us with their swords and lances by shaking them at us: at last the captain ordered the drum to be beaten, which was done of a sudden with much vigour, purposely to scare the poor creatures. They hearing the noise ran away as fast as they could drive; and when they ran away in haste they would cry Gurry, gurry, speaking deep in the throat.[19]
Metcalfe argued that, indisputably, the word repeated here, as transcribed as gurri was in fact gnaarri, the "most feared and fickle" of the Bardi malevolent spirit-beings.[20] Thus, by an historical irony, it emerged that Dampier, who wrote down notoriously in his journal that the inhabitants of Bardi territory were "the miserablest people in the world", was considered in turn by the Bardi as the "miserablest" and "nastiest" of evil spirits.[21][20]
Several missions were set up on the Dampier Peninsula in the late 19th. century. The Sunday Island mission was established in 1899 by two pearlers, Sidney Hadley and Harry Hunter, whose fleet of luggers worked out of Bulgin, east of Cape Leveque.[22] This was later affiliated with the UAM, one of whose missionaries, Wilfrid Henry Douglas, settled there in 1946, learning the Bardi language and attempting to translate some passages in the New Testament into the local tongue.[23]
After the mission was dismantled in 1962 the Bardi were shifted to Derby and Lombadina. When part of a pastoral lease of Lombardina was split off, the Bardi shifted back to take up residence at One Arm Point, where by the early 2000s, some 400 people dwell.[22]
After a landmark 2002 High Court decision confirmed the primacy of the Native Title Act of 1993,[25] the Bardi and Jawi people managed to obtain recognition of their native title claim in 2005, when a Federal Court under Justice French ruled that they were entitled to exclusive rights over some areas of the roughly 400 square miles (1,000km2) to which they had laid claim.[26] They also sought to claim a small section of Brue Reef, 31miles north of Cape Leveque.[27] Justice French ruled in June 2015 affirmed part of their claim, while adding they had non-exclusive native title rights over areas below the mean high water mark. The Brue Reef claim was dismissed.[28]
Notable people
Jimmy Chi. A playwright was of Bardi descent on his mother's side (Scottish-Bardi). His father was of mixed Chinese and Japanese descent.[29]
Alternative names
There are several alternative spellings in the literature on Bardi:
↑ The first ethnographer who spoke their language and described their life anjd traditions in great detail,Ernest Ailred Worms, transcribed the name as Bād.[1]
↑ However, the method had its flaws. Bowern writes:'Another flaw in the data in Nekes and Worms (1953) is their attribution of various forms to the wrong language. Nekes and Worms’ technique for gathering cross-linguistic data was to hold meetings with representatives from each language, and to goaround the table asking for the equivalents in each speaker’s first language. Since many Aboriginal people of the Dampier land area were multilingual, this has led to words being said to be part of the lexicon of a particular language, when in fact they are not.'[5]
↑ The word is also used for the stopper used to stem the outflow of blood from the Basilic vein which is cut when young men are undergoing initiation.[14]
Bird, W. H. (1910). "Some Remarks on the Grammatical Construction of the Chowie-Language, as Spoken by the Buccaneer Islanders, North-Western Australia". Anthropos. 5 (5): 454–456. JSTOR40443562.
Bird, W. H. (1911). "Ethnographical Notes about the Buccaneer Islanders, North Western Australia". Anthropos. 6 (1): 174–178. JSTOR40444080.
Nyulnyul is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language, formerly spoken by the Nyulnyul people of Western Australia.
Jawi or Djawi is a nearly extinct dialect of the Bardi language of Western Australia, the traditional language of the Djaui. There are no longer any known fluent speakers, but there may be some partial speakers.
Ardyaloon or One Arm Point or Bardi is an Indigenous Australian community town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It is located 2,446 km (1,520 mi) north of Perth and the closest populated town is Derby. At the 2016 census, Bardi had a population of 365.
Lombadina is a medium-sized Aboriginal community on the north-western coast of Western Australia on Cape Leveque, north of Broome. The name is derived from the Aboriginal word, "Lollmardinard". The community is inhabited by the Baada.
The Nyikina people are an indigenous Australian people of northern Western Australia. They come from the lower Fitzroy River.
Dyaberdyaber is a Western Nyulnyulan language formerly spoken on the coast south of Beagle Bay in Western Australia. Earlier sources spelled the name DjaberrDjaberr or Dyaberdyaber; the contemporary accepted spelling is Jabirr-Jabirr, which reflects the spelling conventions of languages of the Kimberley region.
Djarindjin is a medium-sized Aboriginal community located 170 km (110 mi) north of Broome in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, within the Shire of Broome.
The Karajarri are an Indigenous Australian people, who once lived southwest of the Kimberleys in the northern Pilbara, predominantly between the coastal area and the Great Sandy Desert. They now mostly reside at Bidyadanga, south of Broome. To their north lived the Yawuru people, to the east the Mangala, to the northeast the Nyigina, and to their south the Nyangumarta. Further down the coast were the Kariera.
Ernest Ailred Worms (1891-1963) was a German missionary to the Australian aborigines. He became an expert in Aboriginal languages, and an important contributor to the development of both Australian studies of native languages, and to the ethnography of the continent's indigenous peoples.
Helmut Petri was a German anthropologist.
The Miriwung are an indigenous Australian people of the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia.
The Yawijibaya, also known as the Jaudjibaia, were an indigenous Australian people of the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia.
The Gugadja, also written Kukatja, are an indigenous Australian people of Western Australia who speak the Kukatja language.
The Djaberadjabera, also written Jabirrjabirr, were an indigenous Australian people of Western Australia.
The Nyulnyul are an indigenous Australian people of Western Australia.
The Djaru people are an indigenous Australian people of the southern Kimberley region of Western Australia.
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