Lardil people

The Lardil are an indigenous Australian people and the traditional owners of Mornington Island in the Wellesley Islands chain in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland.

Lardil, now extinct, belonged to the Tangkic language family. The feature of kinship-sensitive pronominal prefixes had been ignored until they were discovered by Kenneth L. Hale in a study of Lardil. A special second language, Damin thought of as a tongue created by the Yellow Trevally fish ancestor Kaltharr, and devised in part to mimic 'fish talk' was taught during the second degree of initiation (warama). This initiation register of specialized Lardil has fascinated linguists: it contained in its phonemic repertoire two types of airstream initiation, a pulmonic ingressive (l*) and a labiovelar lingual egressive (p'), unique among the world's languages. The secret language reinscribed in what looks like an indigenous form of semantic analysis the entire Lardil vocabulary into 200 words, and has been described by Hale as a 'monument to the human intellect'. Since Damin was a language involving rituals disapproved of by the missionaries, it disappeared with the outlawing and suppression of the Lardil ritual cycles.

Rockwall fish traps (derndernim) were constructed off the coast to catch varieties of fish as the tides receded. The Lardil had a meticulous ethnobotanical knowledge and David McKnight has argued that 'their botanical taxonomy is of the same intellectual order as our botanical scientific taxonomy.'

People raised within the missions, once detached from the hunter and gatherer lifestyle of the traditional community, were considered good workers to recruit for the pastoral stations, where they were employed as drovers and . Once the mission was closed, the elderly once more regained some control. However the Landil people who had spent their mature years on the mainland as farm workers had no traditional background for raising children to draw on. The result was that the generation of children raised from the 1960s onwards had no grasp of either the old or new work technologies and ethics.

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