Jaburara

The Jaburara ('Northerners') were an Indigenous Australian people who once lived about the Pilbara region of Western Australia and the Dampier Archipelago. The traditional tribe is virtually extinct, though some people of Jaburara descent are still active.

The Jaburara (Yaburarra) around Dampier, Burrup, and Nichol bay, are thought to have spoken a language similar to Ngarluma, affiliated with the Ngayarda languages.

During one of Phillip Parker King's voyages on the HMS Mermaid to survey the Australian coast, an attempt was made to communicate in February 1817 with members of the tribe, three of whom had been sighted off-shore floating on a log in the vicinity of present-day Karratha (Good Country). The intermediary used was the ship's interpreter Bungaree, who, speaking the Broken Bay Dharug language could not understand them, but managed to calm their anxieties by undressing and showing he wore ritual scars.

The Jaburara, together with other local tribes such as the Ngarluma and Mardu-Dunera fought against the colonization of their lands by white settlers. According to an American whaler at the time, the law that accompanied settlement in their region could be summed up as 'a word and a blow: the blow, which is generally fatal, coming first'. In 1868, near the present-day township of Roebourne, in an area known in the local language as Murujuga (hip bone sticking out), two policemen and a native tracker had been killed. The suspects, 3 Jaburara men, were duly caught and sentenced to imprisonment. Two parties, made up of north coast pearlers and settler pastoralists had been given permission by the district authority to apply lethal force 'with discretion and judgement', and they attacked Jaburara encampments in a pincer movement. In what is now known as the Flying Foam massacre it has been estimated that up to 60 Jaburara were killed. In one camp alone, some 15 were killed. Following the La Grange massacre, this episode constitutes the second known example of the use of massacre to forcibly remove an indigenous north Western population. One 'family' was recorded in the first half of the 20th century as still living around the peninsula north of Nichol Bay running up to the Dolphin and Legendre islands, but the massacre effectively cut off the tribe's connections to the islands.

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