Ngaygungu people (also known as Ngaygungyi, Ngȋ-koongō-ī or Ngai-kungo-i) are the people from the

Atherton, Queensland Atherton is a rural town and locality in the Tablelands Region, Queensland, Australia. In the , Atherton had a population of 7,331 people. Geography Atherton is on the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland. Atherton is joined by the Gil ...

area who spoke, or whose ancestors once spoke, the

Ngaygungu language Ngaygungu (also known as Ngȋ-koong-ō) is a sleeping, Australian Aboriginal language originally spoken by the Ngaygungyi, for which a wordlist was recorded from Atherton in the Wet Tropics of Queensland by Walter Edmund Roth in October 189 ...

Range

The Ngai-kungo-i were formally identified as a distinct locally indigenous group for

Walter Edmund Roth Walter Edmund Roth (2 April 1861 – 5 April 1933) was a British colonial administrator, anthropologist and medical practitioner, who worked in Queensland, Australia and British Guiana between 1898 and 1928. Roth and his brother, Henry Ling Ro ...

in October 1898, when he encountered

Aboriginal people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

identifying as Ngai-kungo-i, speaking their own language named Ngai-kungo based in Atherton (which they called Kȃr-kar), and described as having ranged (went " walk-about") up into the

Great Dividing Range The Great Dividing Range, also known as the East Australian Cordillera or the Eastern Highlands, is a cordillera system in eastern Australia consisting of an expansive collection of mountain ranges, plateaus and rolling hills, that runs rough ...

behind Atherton, crossing the headwaters of the

Walsh River The Walsh River is a river located on the Cape York Peninsula of Far North Queensland, Australia. The headwaters of the river rise in the locality of Watsonville on the Atherton Tableland approximately north of Herberton and then flow in a ...

(an area they called Balkan) wandering out to the township of

Watsonville Watsonville is a city in Santa Cruz County, California, located in the Monterey Bay Area of the Central Coast of California. The population was 52,590 according to the 2020 census. Predominantly Latino and Democratic, Watsonville is a self- ...

(an area they called Ilȃnbare).

Material culture

In addition to the Ngai-kungo-i being encountered and identified as having a base in Atherton, Roth also wrote about and collected samples of their

material culture Material culture is the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects creat ...

, much of which were later purchased from Roth by the

Australian Museum The Australian Museum is a heritage-listed museum at 1 William Street, Sydney central business district, New South Wales, Australia. It is the oldest museum in Australia,Design 5, 2016, p.1 and the fifth oldest natural history museum in the ...

Citations

Sources

* * * * {{Aboriginal peoples of Queensland Aboriginal peoples of Queensland Atherton, Queensland