Coronation Island, also known as Garlinju, is located off the
Kimberley
Kimberly or Kimberley may refer to:
Places and historical events
Australia
* Kimberley (Western Australia)
** Roman Catholic Diocese of Kimberley
* Kimberley Warm Springs, Tasmania
* Kimberley, Tasmania a small town
* County of Kimberley, a ...
coast of
Western Australia
Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...
. It encompasses an area of .
It is located off Port Nelson in the
Bonaparte Archipelago
The Bonaparte Archipelago is a group of islands off the coast of Western Australia in the Kimberley region, within the Shire of Wyndham-East Kimberley. The closest inhabited place is Kalumburu located about to the east of the island group. Th ...
, as a part of the group of islands known as the Coronation Islands, which were named by
Philip Parker King
Rear Admiral Phillip Parker King, FRS, RN (13 December 1791 – 26 February 1856) was an early explorer of the Australian and Patagonian coasts.
Early life and education
King was born on Norfolk Island, to Philip Gidley King and Anna J ...
, the first European to visit the islands in 1820, after the anniversary of the
coronation
A coronation is the act of placement or bestowal of a coronation crown, crown upon a monarch's head. The term also generally refers not only to the physical crowning but to the whole ceremony wherein the act of crowning occurs, along with the ...
of
George III
George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 173829 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two kingdoms on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Br ...
, who had died in January of that year.
[
The ]traditional owners
Native title is the designation given to the common law doctrine of Aboriginal title in Australia, which is the recognition by Australian law that Indigenous Australians (both Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander people) have rights ...
of the area are the Wunambal
The Wunambal (Unambal), also known as Wunambal Gaambera, Uunguu (referring to their lands), and other names, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the northern Kimberley region of Western Australia.
People
The Wunambal were, according to Norma ...
peoples, in whose language group of Wunambal the name for the island is Garlinju.
Careening Bay (Wunbung-gu[) is a bay on the island, where King careened his cutter, , to make repairs. While on the island, the ship's carpenter engraved the name of the ship on a ]Boab
''Adansonia gregorii'', commonly known as the boab and also known by a number of other names, is a tree in the family Malvaceae, endemic to the northern regions of Western Australia and the Northern Territory of Australia.
Names
The specific ...
tree (known as the Bodgurri by the Wunambal[) that is still visible today.] Parker did not observe any of the local people, but made observations in his journal on the other signs of life that they observed. He described not only bark shelters on the beach, but more larger and more substantial buildings on top of the hill. He also observed the remnants of sago palm
Sago palm is a common name for several plants which are used to produce a starchy food known as sago. Sago palms may be "true palms" in the family Arecaceae, or cycads with a palm-like appearance. Sago produced from cycads must be detoxified before ...
nuts, which were commonly eaten along the coast.
There is a Makassan
Makassar (, mak, ᨆᨀᨔᨑ, Mangkasara’, ) is the capital of the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi. It is the largest city in the region of Eastern Indonesia and the country's fifth-largest urban center after Jakarta, Surabaya, Medan ...
Islamic mihrab
Mihrab ( ar, محراب, ', pl. ') is a niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the ''qibla'', the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca towards which Muslims should face when praying. The wall in which a ''mihrab'' appears is thus the "qibla w ...
(prayer alcove) behind the boab.[
Careening Bay is within the ]Prince Regent National Park
Prince Regent National Park, formerly the Prince Regent Nature Reserve, is a protected area in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. In 1978 the area was nominated as a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve.
Land
The national park covers a tot ...
and a permit is required to visit the site.
Priority flora
Flora is all the plant life present in a particular region or time, generally the naturally occurring (indigenous) native plants. Sometimes bacteria and fungi are also referred to as flora, as in the terms '' gut flora'' or '' skin flora''.
E ...
found on the island include '' solanum cataphractum''.[
]
References
{{coord, -14.9927, 124.9221, format=dms, type:isle_region:AU-WA, display=title
Islands of the Kimberley (Western Australia)
Bonaparte Archipelago