Woppaburra

The Woppaburra were an indigenous Australian people who lived on Greater and South Keppel islands. They are often considered to be a branch of the Darumbal.

Though often thought to have spoken the Darumbal language, an early settler of the island, Robert Ross, stated that their language was unintelligible to the mainland aborigines.

'their 'yabbering' is altogether unintelligible to the blacks of the mainland.'

According to an early sojourner, C. T. Wyndham, the language spoken was divided into two distinct dialects, northern and southern. This was disputed by another white informant who said that mainland blacks in that area could understand the Woppaburra language.

The Woppaburra were described by white settlers as small in stature, the hair of a reddish-brown tint, and their bodies covered in downy hair and living predominantly in natural caverns, and subsisting on a diet of fish and tubers since natural land game, such as kangaroos, opossums and wallabies, was absent from the island. Their numbers, as pastoral lease-holders began to establish a foothold on their territory in the 1860s, were believed to be about 60 people, and W. T. Wyndham reported later that during his own sojourn on the island in 1883-4, he counted 54.Archibald Meston in 1902 estimated the original population before contact to be around 200. Disparities overall numbers may reflect headcounts for the separate islands, and Rowland makes an estimate of the total Woppaburra before contact to be around 60 on South Keppel and a further 25 on the northern island.

Anthropometric studies have suggested the Woppaburra were quite distinct from the mainland peoples, one 1976 study concluding that, their bone remains constitute the 'most striking instance we have seen of micro-evolution within the Australian Aborigines'.

According to Michael Rowland, an authority on the Woppaburra writing in part to reply to the skepticism about reports of genocide advanced by Keith Windshuttle, the first visit of whites to the island occasioned a massacre of seven/eight members of the tribe: not mentioned in the report of the expedition, which spoke of an incident in which a fleeing gin, or aboriginal woman, had been saved by the group after she fell into the sea and injured herself, this or perhaps an earlier occasion of slaughter, was pointed out by tribal people later, who showed a hundred-yard line pitted with the skeletal remains of the Woppaburra who had been killed., and several males, accused of killing some sheep, were transported off the terrain, to Yeppoon, where the local tribes viewed them with hostility. The then lessee however stated that a full 30 had been removed, at their request, to the mainland, and relocated, after landing at a place 10 miles south of Cape Manifold, at the Water Park Native Reserve, while leaving only two native women (gins) behind. Robert Ross's pastoral lease ran 3-4,000 sheep on island. Another white version at the time (1883) claimed that the Woppaburra were not native to the island but had managed, being part of a mainland tribe, to get over to the island and kill a 100 sheep, and that this accounted for their removal. According to testimony given to Walter Roth, however, some whites and mainland blacks had descended on the island, and hunted up all the Woppaburra women and children they could find, and had them transported back to the coast. 'Human lives were sacrificed for sheep,' was his conclusion. Ross may have shifted them to the mainland to supply cheap labour for property at Taranganba.

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Wikipedia