Warnindhilyagwa

Warinindilyakwa

Warnindhilyagwa men and boys in a bush shelter in Groote Eylandt, 1933
Total population
1,596 (2016)
Regions with significant populations
Australia Northern Territory
Languages
Anindilyagwa (written in various ways)

The Warnindhilyagwa are an Indigenous Australian people living on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory of Australia.

The Warnindhilyagwa are speakers of Anindilyagwa. In the view of Arthur Capell, Anindilyagwa displayed perhaps 'the most complicated grammar of any Australian language, a distinction it has come to share with the nearby mainland language of Nunggubuyu. Anindilyagwa is a language isolate, unrelated to the Pama–Nyungan language family, which contains most Australian languages. It shares similar grammatical structures with Nunggubuyu, though the two differ in basic vocabulary. There is a dialect variant, Umbakumba, which uses laminopalatals in place of laminodentals, and a stronger pitch. Anindilyagwa is characterized by prefixation for number, person and gender with regard to all (an exception concerns loanwords) nouns, adjectives, personal and demonstrative adjectives., and syllables are characteristically lengthy, ranging from 3 to as many as 14 in a word. An 'eyelash' for example is mwamwitjingwila mwanpwa (eye's plumage), and a man is nanimwamwalya (human male possessing body fat).

Dua spirit children travel with the jirridja winds, as do jirridja spirit children with dua winds.

Groote Eylandt has a variety of habitats: dense stands on monsoon forests rising behind coastal sand dunes, alternating with mangrove and mudflats. Sandstone outcrops and laterite provide excellent niches for shellfish. The fruit of the Zamia Palm called burrawang which though containing the deadly toxin macrozamin is reported to have been generally avoided, except as a 'hard time food'. But the Warnindhilyagwa have several methods of making it edible, by leaching it in running water for several days.

Macassans from Sulawesi traded with northern Australian aborigines long before the arrival of Europeans. Exploiting the monsoonal winds in December of each year, they sailed down in praus, to trade for native trepang, beeswax, ironwood and pearls, which they brought back to supply the southern Chinese market, where, in particular, trepang was highly sought after as a delicacy. In exchange, they provided beads, metal, canoe technologies, sails, ceramics, earthenware pots and fishing hooks. The scale of the enterprise was large: Matthew Flinders came across one expedition involving some 1,000 sailors in 60 praus. After the Australian government started to impose taxes on this kind of Macassar-northern Australian commerce in the 1880s, it experienced a down-turn, the last trading season concluding in 1906-7. They introduced tamarind to the island. The presence in four families of genetically transmitted Machado–Joseph disease is thought to derive from a Makassar ancestor who carried the disease.