Ngaro people
The Ngaro People were a seafaring Australian Aborigine group of people that inhabited the Whitsunday Islands and coastal regions of Queensland, in an area that archaeologically shows evidence of human habitation since 9000 BP. Ngaro society was destroyed by warfare with traders, colonists, and the Australian Native Police. The Native Police Corps forcibly relocated the remaining Ngaro aborigines in 1870 to a penal colony on Palm Island or to the lumber mills of Brampton Island as forced laborers.
Ngaro territory amounted to some 200 square miles (520 km2), from Whitsunday and Cumberland islands; ranging over Cumberland Islands and including the coastal mainland areas around Cape Conway. Their inland extension reached as far as the mountains to the east of Proserpine.South Molle Island was an important quarry for materials used in stone manufacture, and Nara Inlet on Hook Island affords archaeologists insights into the earliest Ngaro habitation in this area.
The Ngaro were divided into hordes; the name of at least one is known:
Whitsdunday island formed the centre of Ngaro life, furnishing the only permanent area of habitation. The Ngaro were noted for their distinctive sewn three-piece canoes, crafted from ironbark and known as winta. Despite assertions, notably by Alfred Cort Haddon, that outrigger technology never reached further down the east Queensland coast that 300 miles north of Whitsunday Islands, the entries in Captain James Cook's Endeavour journals prove that by 1770, the first contact date with Europeans, outriggers were already employed in this area. On these the Ngaro made their journeys and fishing expeditions, sailing not only about the islands in their immediate area but covering an estimated 100 kilometres in and along the reefs, including those between St.Bees and Hayman Island, reefs which they knew intimately. Ngaro oral accounts are consistent throughout the historical record in their description of seasonal visits to the Great Barrier Reef, 43 miles from the mainland and 25 miles from the nearest island, in their canoes.
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