The ethnographic evidence concerning the Aboriginal people in occupation at sovereignty
533 Dr de Rijke's research has revealed few ethnographic records from the late 19th and early 20th centuries relevant to the claim area, and those that have been found are limited in their content. In his first report, he comments that no ethnographic text provides detailed descriptions of the composition of the landholding groups in the claim area, the body of traditional laws and customs of such groups, or the normative society from which such laws and customs were derived.
534 One early ethnographic source is Edward Curr's 1887 publication, The Australian Race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia, and the routes by which it spread itself over that continent. Dr de Rijke observes that Curr, as well as a number of subsequent writers, largely focused on linguistic characteristics and dialectic differences between Aboriginal groups. Dr de Rijke considers that underlying these works appears to be an unexplained assumption that such differences signified distinct socio-cultural and/or landholding entities. He notes that the presumption of "tribes" as politically distinct entities based on a unique language, a bounded territory, endogamy, and distinct laws and customs has been challenged in more recent anthropological literature.
535 Dr de Rijke states that there are few available "primary" documents which might allow better evaluation of the interpretations and conclusions reached by early ethnographers. A notable exception is a collection of field notes by Caroline Tennant-Kelly from her anthropological field research at Cherbourg in 1934, recovered by Dr de Rijke in 2010. The majority of these field notes appear to be verbatim statements recorded from elderly informants born around the time of effective sovereignty who had knowledge of pre-contact traditional laws and customs. Tennant-Kelly observed that her senior research participants had been, "fresh from living outback, mostly from living on the river banks, where they had lived, for the most part, according to the 'old way'".
536 There are also field notes taken by Norman Tindale, an anthropologist, from his research in 1938 at Woorabinda, Cherbourg and Palm Island. Woorabinda is within the claim area.
537 Dr de Rijke, with the assistance of Dr Andrew Sneddon, has mapped several of the early ethnographic descriptions of Gaangalu territory. He notes that the geographic references in the material are often broad and therefore only indicative.
538 The anthropologists' reports have not provided any detailed account of European exploration and settlement of the claim area and surrounding districts.
539 However, the material indicates that Ludwig Leichhardt, the German explorer, travelled north along rivers that he named the Comet and in December 1844 and the Mackenzie in January 1845. He recorded the presence of Aboriginal people in that area.
540 In the eastern part of the claim area, Rannes Station was established in 1853, followed by proclamation of the Port Curtis and Leichhardt pastoral districts in 1854. From the early 1860s, pastoral stations just to the west of the current claim area started to be established, including Cullin-La-Ringo, Emerald Downs and Gordon Downs (within what is now the Western Kangoulu claim area).
541 Curr's 1887 text contains a chapter headed, Eastern Slopes of Expedition Range, Lower Dawson, Upper Fitzroy, Mackenzie, and Isaacs Rivers and their tributaries. The information Curr obtained was provided by European informants Peter McIntosh, W.D. Cooke and C.G. Barthelemy.
542 Curr was particularly interested in comparing wordlists sent to him by his informants. McIntosh had lived with Aboriginal people while he was at Rio Station, south of the junction of the Dawson and Mackenzie Rivers. McIntosh wrote the following about the "Kaangooloo" (Gaangalu):
I have filled the accompanying vocabulary as far as my memory serves me in the Kaangooloo Thaa, in which I could converse indifferently some thirteen years since ... The Kangooloo are a tribe, or rather a confederation of several tribes - the Karranbal, the Maudalgo, the Mulkali, and others inhabiting the country on the eastern slopes of Expedition Range, the Lower Dawson, the Upper Fitzroy, and the Mackenzie Rivers, and their tributaries - all speaking the same Thaa or tongue. In common with many other tribes, their negative kaangoo also expresses the generic name of their tribe, Kaangooloo.
543 Dr de Rijke identifies two important matters emerging from McIntosh's description: first, the linguistic similarities of a number of named groups in an area broadly defined by the lower Dawson River, the upper Fitzroy River and the Mackenzie River; and, second, the reference to the Aboriginal people in the area as a "confederation of several tribes", presumably referring to more than linguistic similarities.
544 Curr produced the following map:
545 In Curr's map the area occupied by the Kangooloo is labelled with the number 150, the area of the "Dawson River" people is numbered 159, and the area occupied by the "Kanoloo" is numbered 157. Those groups are located within the current claim area.
546 In respect of the eastern part of the claim area mapped as "Dawson River" (no. 159), Curr noted:
I have received three vocabularies called after their negative adverbs - the Wokka, Wogga, or Woga dialects-two from Mr. John O'Connor and the other from Mr. E. Cunningham. The two first are said to belong to the Dawson River Blacks; the third Mr. O'Connor locates on the Burnett. Internal evidence, however, leads me to believe that though the Blacks from whom the vocabulary in question was obtained were met with on the Burnett, and said that they belonged to that river, as they probably do now, the language really belongs to the Dawson River country.
547 Dr de Rijke comments that reference to "Wokka" is a reference to Wakka dialects, generally considered to be located in the middle to upper reaches rather than the lower parts of the Dawson River. However, Curr mapped these Wakka dialects very broadly to include "the Dawson River country", conflicting in the northern part with the location given by McIntosh for Kangooloo as "the lower Dawson". Dr de Rijke regards Curr's mapping as broadly indicative only, and I accept that assessment.
548 In the western part of the claim area, Curr mapped the "Kanoloo" (no. 157). He wrote:
The following vocabulary and account of the Kanoloo tribe were kindly forwarded to me by Mr Thomas Josephson. The territory of this tribe is on the head of the Comet River, and was occupied by the whites, my informant thinks, in about 1860. At that date it is believed the tribe numbered about five hundred persons; that in 1869, when Mt Josephson resided in their country, it had been reduced to three hundred, and in April 1879, the date of that gentleman's communication to me, to two hundred souls.
549 Dr de Rijke states that this reference to "Kanoloo" is the only historical source for the group label spelt as "Kanolu" in native title proceedings. He notes that the term appears to be a close phonetic rendering of "Gangulu".
550 Dr de Rijke states that the geographical description for Kanoloo as "on the head of the Comet River" refers to an area otherwise considered part of Gangulu in the ethno-historical record. In his opinion, "Kanoloo" was more likely than not a spelling mistake or other corruption of the spoken word and should have referred to "Gaangalu".
551 The information provided by McIntosh to Curr with regard to the Kangooloo was corroborated in 1894 by "Gir-oonbah", an anonymous contributor to The Queenslander newspaper, who described the language group of the region as follows:
The Kong-oo-loo (Duaringa district), which is not considered to be an extensive language, I have known to be understood as far north as Townsville and south as far as the border [with New South Wales].
552 Dr de Rijke comments that this statement places the localised Duaringa district within the vast region of the Maric language bloc of which the Gaangulu language was part.
553 Gir-oonbah provided more detail in 1895, stating:
The tribe treated of here is the Kong-oo-loo who inhabit the country lying between the Mackenzie River and the lower Dawson.
554 Dr de Rijke has produced the following map of the claim area illustrating the approximate extent of the "Kong-oo-loo" as reported by Gir-oonbah:
555 In 1899, R.H. Mathews gave the following description of "Kang-ool-oo" territory:
On a tract of country at the junction of the Dawson with the Fitzroy, and thence westerly to Arthur's Bluff, extending also north and south for some distance, is a tribe called Kang-ool-lo, having four sections, the names of which are evidently modifications or combinations of those in use among the Dippil and Kooinmerburra nations.
556 Dr de Rijke observes that because Mathews did not undertake any fieldwork himself, he appears to have relied upon the information provided by McIntosh and Gir-oonbah and/or correspondence from the pastoralist, W.H. Flowers.
557 The following map depicts Mathews' description of Kang-ool-oo territory:
558 In his 1904 work, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, A.W. Howitt mapped the "Kongulu" in the area defined by the low-lying country in the large bend of the Mackenzie River and its confluence with the Dawson River. The location of the "Kongulu" according to Howitt has been overlaid on the following map of the claim area:
559 In 1938, Norman Tindale and Joseph B. Birdsell embarked on the Adelaide-Harvard Universities expedition, conducting field research among Aboriginal people in a range of locations, including Cherbourg, Woorabinda and Palm Island. Tindale undertook field research at Woorabinda, in the claim area. A mission had been established in 1927 at Woorabinda in the claim area and received Aboriginal people removed from many parts of Queensland under the authority of Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld).
560 In 1940, in Distribution of Australian Aboriginal Tribes: a Field Survey, Tindale published the findings of the expedition. Tindale described the 'Ka:ŋulu'. Dr de Rijke states that the symbol -ŋ- is a linguistic symbol from the International Phonetic Alphabet denoting the velar nasal sound. It is the sound of "ng" as in the English sing, so that "Ka:ŋulu" is pronounced as "Kangulu".
561 Tindale described Ka:ŋulu territory as follows:
Dawson River south to Banana and Theodore; west to Mackenzie River, Comet River and northern end of Expedition Range; north to junction of Isaacs and Mackenzie Rivers; at Blackwater and Dingo. The Don River, Mount Morgan, east of Banana and about Rannes may have belonged to a separate tribe (east of Gogango Range, west of the Coast Range). [Alternative spellings]: Kaangooloo, Khangalu, Kongulu, Kongalu, Konguli
562 Tindale's map of Ka:ŋulu territory captures much of the same area as earlier researchers, placing them to the south of the Mackenzie River and to the east of the Comet River. Tindale's map also depicts eastern and south-eastern boundaries for the Ka:ŋulu less clearly mapped in earlier depictions. Tindale is the first to locate a group called the "Wadje" in the area between the Expedition, Dawson and Bigge Ranges.
563 The map below depicts Tindale's map overlaid onto a map of the claim area. Dr de Rijke states that the overlay should be regarded as an approximation of Tindale's boundaries relative to the claim area. It may be noted that this map depicts areas described that Tindale stated "may have belonged to a separate tribe" as Gaangalu country.
564 In his 1974 work, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names, Tindale made important amendments to his 1940 map. He divided the territory he formerly identified as "Ka:ŋulu" between two different groups with very similar names: the Ka:ŋulu and the Kanolu. Additionally, he took the view that no separate group owned the area around the Don River, Mount Morgan, east of Banana and Rannes, contrary to the suggestion in his 1940 text. The change in Tindale's opinion was presumably based on a wordlist obtained by F Bennett from the Mount Spencer wordlist area, to be discussed later, which Tindale now included in his list of references. Tindale's 1974 map overlaid onto a map of the claim area is depicted below:
565 Tindale's 1974 description of the territory of Ka:ŋulu was:
Dawson River south to Banana and Theodore; northwest to Mackenzie River and near Duaringa and Coomooboolaroo. East to Biloela, Mount Morgan, Gogango Range, and the upper Don River; southeast to Thangool and the headwaters of Grevillea Creek. In the 1940 edition a western tribe, the Kanolu, was incorrectly mapped along with this one. It will be noted that their vocabularies have little in common. Two names mentioned by McIntosh, namely Maudalgo and Mulkali, may belong to one or another of these tribes, but no data have been found to enable them to be applied.
566 Tindale's 1974 description of Gaangalu territory as encompassing the eastern part of what is now the claim area, including areas such as Mount Morgan and east of Banana and Rannes, has been adopted by the applicant, but is disputed by the State.
567 Dr de Rijke comments that he has found few early references to the area east of the Dawson River, and ambiguous material exists with regard to the region around Mount Morgan. He indicates that the chief sources for the designation of these areas as Gaangalu territory at effective sovereignty are Tindale's work and Jefferies' analysis of Bennett's Mount Spencer wordlist and another wordlist from Mount Morgan.
568 Walter E. Roth, who was appointed Chief Protector of Aborigines for Queensland in 1904, had travelled to the Rockhampton area in 1897 and met Aboriginal people near Mount Morgan. He wrote in 1898:
Occasionally the Taroombul [i.e. Darumbal] would pay a visit to Gracemere and Westwood and in very early times were known to have traveled up to Mount Morgan.
Gracemere in the olden days formed the home of the Warra-burra whose peregrinations included Calliungal, Mount Morgan, Westwood, Rosewood, Rockhampton, Emu Park and Gladstone, than which they never traveled further south: the station, for many years past, has been deserted by the remaining members of the sub-tribe.
At Mount Morgan I visited the blacks' camp situated some 2 1/2 miles from the township on the banks of the Dee ... These blacks here are of Rockhampton and Gracemere parentage, the local (original) Wollea-burra, whose 'walk-about' extended out towards the Prarie and Banana way, being exterminated.
569 Roth's reference to "Taroombul" is apparently to the Darumbal, who have now obtained a native title determination to the east of the Gaangalu claim, encompassing Rockhampton.
570 Dr de Rijke understands Roth's reference to "peregrinations" to convey areas that were habitually traversed by the Warra-burra, which he describes as possibly a local sub-group of the coastal Darumbal. The reference to "walk-about" is, in his opinion, also likely to be a reference to the domain through which Aboriginal people habitually travelled, rather than a reference to traditional ownership of all the areas concerned. He has not explained why that is so, but I accept that the expression "walk-about" is ambiguous.
571 Dr de Rijke understands Roth to say that he had been told by Flowers that Mount Morgan had been associated with a group known as the Wollea-burra, and that those people had become extinct. The people Roth encountered had apparently moved up to Mount Morgan from the Rockhampton and Gracemere region. Based on his correspondence with Flowers, Roth considered the Wollea-burra to have been a sub-group of the "Warrabul Tribe".
572 In 1910, Roth mapped the "main tribes" of the region and their constituent groups as follows:
573 In Roth's map, the "Wollea-burra" sub-group of the Warrabul is indicated by the number 20, in the vicinity of Mount Morgan. Dr de Rijke considers it difficult to ascertain the veracity of Roth's depiction of the Wollea-burra as a Warrabal subgroup environmentally separated from the remainder of the coastal plain Warrabal by the steep range at Mount Morgan. He speculates that the "Wollea-burra", having the suffix "burra" or "bara" known throughout eastern Australia, may have been a localised land using group or "horde" within the broader Gaangalu language domain.
574 Dr de Rijke notes that Roth's information was based on data obtained from Flowers, who lived on the coast about 100km to the north of Rockhampton. Dr de Rijke comments that Flowers was not a trained anthropologist and suggests that his understanding of territorial organisation is likely to have been limited. It may be observed that, in contrast, Dr de Rijke has accepted other lay sources of information such as McIntosh and Gir-oonbah at face value.
575 Flowers also corresponded with anthropologist A.W. Howitt about Aboriginal territorial organisation in the region. In 1904, Howitt noted the following difficulties relating to an area to the north of the claim area, which Dr de Rijke considers are also applicable to the Gaangalu claim area:
The particulars given as to the tribes of this part of Australia are a good instance of the manner in which a large tract of country claimed by any one tribe is parceled (sic) out among its lesser divisions. It is in such cases most difficult to decide whether one has to do with a single tribe, with a group of sub-tribes, or a number of hordes where there is female descent, or clans where there is male descent. More especially is this difficulty apparent when the inquiries have to be made through a distant correspondent, however willing and careful he may be.
576 In terms of the information provided by Flowers for thirteen coastal groups between the Mackenzie River in the north and Gladstone in the south, Howitt specifically mentioned:
My correspondent speaks of these as tribes, and the area occupied by them is so considerable that it supports this view, but on the other hand their names suggest "local divisions" of a larger tribe. I am not able to decide this matter, and my correspondent is not now available.
577 Dr de Rijke states that in 1938, anthropologist D.S. Davidson largely reproduced Roth's map, which was based on the information provided by Flowers, in an article entitled, An Ethnic Man of Australia. Davidson expressed concerns about the accuracy of his own mapping, saying:
Since many of the earlier writers received their information by correspondence from distant settlers, who in turn may never have visited many of the tribes they reported on, but knew of them only through hearsay from local blackfellows, most of these conflicting reports of a tribe's location may be erroneous. Here again, however, it is impossible to make certain which accounts are reliable. Nevertheless the placing of these names on the accompanying map required the exercise of arbitrary judgment on the part of the author with the probability that he has accepted as authentic many claims which are faulty and has underestimated other evidence which deserves greater weight.
578 Dr de Rijke states that in view of concerns about the reliability of the data provided by Flowers, and because there is no convincing and corroborating evidence, he cannot rely upon the data relayed by Roth to form conclusive opinions about the region around Mount Morgan.
579 In 1918, F Bennett collected a wordlist from an Aboriginal man, "a very old blackfellow, the last of the Lower Dee blacks". The informant was said to come from the Mount Spencer area. Mount Spencer is about 44 km south-west of Mount Morgan.
580 Bennett was interested in the dialectical differences between the people from the Lower Dee region and those from the Middle Dawson, which he described as 50 miles to the south-west. Bennett thought the tribe of the Lower Dee was a small one located in a small area. He noted that tribes only 50 miles apart used different words for the most common objects. Bennett did not name the tribe of his informant.
581 As already noted, in 1974, Tindale described Gaangalu territory as extending east of the Dawson River to areas such as Biloela, Thangool and Mount Morgan, whereas, in 1940, his opinion was that such areas, "may have belonged to a separate tribe". The only further source cited by Tindale in 1974 relevant to that issue was Bennett's Mount Spencer wordlist. In Dr de Rijke's opinion, Tindale may have regarded the Bennett wordlist as Gaangalu, and, on that basis, disagreed with the description by Roth and Flowers of the territorial groups and boundaries in the Mount Morgan region.
582 In his 2006 publication The Maric Dialects of the Fitzroy River Basin, Tony Jefferies, a linguist, wrote of the Mount Spencer wordlist:
[l]t is the only significant 19th century wordlist we have from the Dawson River Valley ... It is a dialect with lexical features that separate it from most of the eastern dialects to which we have made reference, although we would be wrong to conclude that this separates the Mt. Spencer dialect from the Kaangooloo Thaa in any substantial way. More importantly, the Mt. Spencer dialect is from an area that falls within the orbit described by McIntosh for the Kaangooloo Thaa, albeit on the periphery of where this dialect was spoken. Mt. Spencer is in the vicinity of the confluence of the Don and Dee Rivers with the Dawson River, making it the most easterly of the Gaangalu dialects for which we have a wordlist…
583 Jefferies was not called to give evidence. Dr de Rijke states that he is not qualified to assess the linguistic technicalities upon which Jefferies' assessment is based, but notes Jeffries' "fundamental statement" that Gaangalu language was likely spoken in the vicinity of Mount Morgan and Mount Spencer, in the eastern part of the claim area.
584 Dr de Rijke argues, based on the anthropological literature, that Aboriginal territorial boundaries are, generally speaking, best understood as zones of transition rather than narrowly defined lines on a map.
585 Dr de Rijke notes that Tindale considered the Warrabal to be a subgroup of Darrambul, a coastal group in the Rockhampton region. He considers that, based on the references by Roth and Tennant-Kelly as well as contemporary evidence from Gaangalu witnesses, the Mount Morgan area was likely traversed by Aboriginal people from a variety of groups and may have functioned as a meeting place between Gaangalu and Darrambul. It is his opinion that the steep mountain range on which the town of Mount Morgan is now located was a boundary area, or transition zone, between the coastal group located around Rockhampton and the inland Gaangalu.
586 Dr de Rijke considers that the establishment of the Mount Morgan gold mine and associated town in 1882 likely attracted Aboriginal people from the region to stay on a more permanent basis. This is supported by Roth's observation that Aboriginal people from Rockhampton and Gracemere were resident at Mount Morgan when he visited in the early 1900s.
587 Dr de Rijke states that, "in the absence of convincing materials to suggest otherwise, it is my opinion that Mount Morgan and the area of the Don and Dee Rivers are appropriately included in the GNP native title claim".
588 Dr de Rijke also considers that the Gaangalu territory extended to the west of the claim area at sovereignty. He notes that in 1935, Caroline Tennant-Kelly mapped a number of Aboriginal groups in and around the claim area based on her fieldwork in Cherbourg, although it is merely a thumbnail sketch of the wider region not drawn to scale:
589 The numbers 9, 10 and 11 represent what Tennant-Kelly described as "Khangalu", "Kaingbul" and "Khararya" respectively and appear to be in or around the claim area.
590 Tennant-Kelly's field notes record statements from informants at Cherbourg in 1934, some of whom were born around the 1850-60s at the time when Europeans first entered the lower Dawson and Comet River areas. These statements include observations regarding the claim area and surrounding areas. Dr de Rijke considers that Tennant-Kelly's field notes provide data that support previous sources in respect of Gaangalu occupation of the area around Duaringa and the Mackenzie and Dawson Rivers, but also includes places such as Emerald and Springsure to the west of the claim area.
591 In Dr de Rijke's opinion, Tennant-Kelly's field notes provide "convincing data" to support a view that Gaangalu territory extended west beyond the boundary of the current claim area, particularly around Emerald. In his joint expert opinion with Kim McCaul concerning the Western Kangoulu native title claim, they stated:
Charlotte Costello... told Tennant-Kelly in 1934 that her "run" included "Emerald, Comet River, Blackwater, Dawson River (meet others here)".... McCaul's report (2015) [identifies] several "ranges" of association provided by informants to Tennant-Kelly and Tindale in the 1930s. This information strongly supports the interpretation that Kangulu people traditionally considered connection to a larger stretch of country than simply the station or town of their birth of residence. As well as Costello's range, another directly relevant piece of information is "Kangalu - Emerald to Duaringa. Right to Rolleston". Harriet Mummings [seemed] to identify some people as Kangulu from the Dawson River - Duaringa area, including Jack Bradly and Charlotte Costello. As McCaul states in his report, the available evidence suggests that Jack Bradly's main focus, in terms of country, was around Emerald. [See also Tennant-Kelly's fieldnotes from work with Jack Bradley]. But Harriet Mummings seems to have viewed him as a member of the same social group as her in the 1930s, and this recognition seems to have continued among Kangulu families to the present.
(References omitted.)
592 Charlotte Costello and Harriet Mummins (or Mummings) provided information to Tennant-Kelly in Cherbourg in 1934. Charlotte Costello was a Gaangalu woman. Harriet Mummins was described by Tennant-Kelly as Gaangalu, but Tindale recorded her as Wadja. Dr de Rijke considers that Harriet Mummins may have identified as Wadja in some circumstances, and as Gangulu in others. It may be noted that information provided by Charlotte Costello and Harriet Mummins will figure prominently later in these reasons.
593 Dr de Rijke considers the material to indicate there was an Aboriginal group referred to as "Gaangalu", and that some members of this group had connections to places that stretched from Duaringa in the east to Emerald in the west. His opinion is that the "Gaangalu identity label" covered areas now located in both the current claim area and Western Kangoulu claim areas.
594 In 1938, D.S. Davidson also mapped the "Kongalu" broadly at the low-lying land between the Comet, Mackenzie and Dawson Rivers, relying upon the earlier work of others. He mapped the "Kaing-bul" at the headwaters of the Comet River, and the "Wara-bal" west-northwest of Rockhampton.
595 With respect to the Kanolu in the west, Tindale stated in 1974:
Eastern headwaters of the Comet River from Rolleston north to Blackwater and upper Mackenzie River; east to about Dingo and vicinity of Duaringa. Their original population in 1860 was about 500 persons. Because of a similarity of name, this tribe has been confused with an eastern neighbour the Kangulu from whom they differed widely in dialect. Their word for 'man' was ['mari'] and for 'no' was ['kara'], contrasting with the ['bama'] and ['ka:nu'] of the Kangulu. In the 1940 edition of this map, they were incorrectly shown as a western part of Kangulu.
596 Tindale makes a distinction between the Kanolu and Kangulu on the basis of recorded vocabularies and dialect differences. Dr de Rijke notes that the only early source for Kanolu appears to be T Josephson in Curr's 1887 work. Curr described the "Kanoloo tribe", located at the "Head of the Comet River", which is a much smaller and more south-westerly area than that depicted in Tindale's 1974 map.
597 Dr de Rijke states that comparative linguistic research of the available wordlists from the region indicates that Curr's "Kanoloo" wordlist is related to the Bidjara language, which is a language located to the west-southwest of Gangulu. In 1974, Tindale placed "Kanolu" in the western half of the claim area, "correcting" his 1940 map. However, Tindale's 1974 placement of the Kanolu was not based on any fieldwork additional to that he had undertaken in 1938. Dr de Rijke observes that Jefferies stated:
Tindale's description of Kanolu clearly shows his reliance on Josephson [in Curr]. In addition, there appears to be no primary evidence that would have enabled Tindale to have made the broad expansion of Josephson's Kanoloo into the vastly enlarged Kanolu country he did [that is, much further north and north-east of "Head of the Comet River"]. Admittedly the linguistic evidence for the area in question is scant, yet all we do have: from Emerald [Meston], McIntosh, Cameron and contemporary informants .... contradicts the existence of Kanolu as Tindale describes it.
598 Jefferies considered that Tindale had misplaced the Kanolu by analysing the data available for the Garingbal dialect, which he considers to be a western Gaangalu dialect. Dr de Rijke notes that in 2009, Breen concurred with Jefferies' analysis and placed the Garingbal dialect in the area designated as "Kanolu" by Tindale in 1974.
599 Dr de Rijke considers there is a reference in Tindale's own notes of 1938 that also appears to place the Garingbal dialect in the area of the Mackenzie River. Tindale records Lily Tiger as "fb [i.e. 'full-blood'] Kaŋulu of Mackenzie River NE of Dingo". He added in parentheses: "(which is part of Kariŋbəl t. Huey)". The reference "t. Huey" ('t.' is Tindale's abbreviation for 'according to') likely means Lily's husband Albert Huey was the informant, and the reference to Garingbal and Gaangulu is an indication of the close linguistic relationship between the two. The linguist Nils Holmer characterised Garingbal as a form of Gaangulu and called it "Gangalu A".
600 Dr de Rijke's and Mr McCaul's joint expert statement for the Kanolu #2 native title claim, which at that time overlapped with the Gaangalu claim, stated as follows:
a. That there are only 2 reference to Kanolu in the ethnographic record. One is clearly a mistake as it is made with regard to Duaringa for which there are numerous references to Kangulu, leaving only 1 for the "head of the Comet", a poorly defined area. Here too there is a reference to Kangulu at Rolleston, which can be considered to at the "head of the Comet".
b. That it is well known in the context of historical linguistic work that many amateur observers misheard the 'ng' sound in Aboriginal words.
c. That there is no linguistic basis for a name "Kanolu" other than that it applies to a dialect that says "kanu" for "no" instead of "kangu". There is no record that such a dialect existed and the vocabulary list labelled as "Kanolu" does not use that word.
601 Dr de Rijke states that Gangulu people at sovereignty likely spoke a number of languages, which makes any determination of cultural and territorial distinctness based on language information alone difficult to sustain. However, he concludes that in 1974, Tindale erroneously located the Kanolu dialect in the broad area around the Mackenzie River. In his opinion, it is more likely than not that "Kanolu" was not an identifiable group at all, and that this label was the product of a misspelling or corruption of the word "Gangulu".
602 Dr de Rijke states that Garingbal is, in the linguistic terms of Holmer, a Gangulu dialect which appears to have been spoken around the Brown River as well as the Mackenzie River. Dr de Rijke considers that the designation of the area around the Mackenzie River as Gangulu, understood as an overarching "regional language label", is thus appropriate. He comments that any dialectic distinctions in this case are a matter of linguistic technicality, with the social and cultural similarities between Garingbal and Gangulu being more salient for native title purposes.
603 Dr de Rijke considers it likely that Garingbal speakers identified as Gangulu in certain contexts because the ethnohistorical record indicates that Gangulu can be regarded as a regional composite sociolinguistic label. In Dr de Rijke's opinion, Gangulu can be seen as an, "overarching, inclusive regional sociolinguistic identity label", which may well have been used by people who at other times identified as Garingbal.
604 Dr de Rijke notes that Tindale was the first anthropologist to distinguish the "Wadja" from the Kanolu and Kangulu. Tindale's material contains a number of alternative spellings of Wadja, such as Wainjigo, Wadjaiŋgo and Waingo. Tindale regarded these as variations of the term Wadja.
605 In 1974, in maintaining a distinction between the Kanolu, Ka:ŋulu (Gaangalu) and the Wadja on his 1974 map, Tindale described the Wadja as follows:
Streams on the east side of Expedition Range; south to Bigge Range; east nearly to Dawson River. Closely related to the Kangulu. The original inhabitants of Woorabinda. Native tradition is that they were formerly two separate small tribes, Wadja and Wainjigo. They lived together for "a long time" until their separate identities were submerged.
606 Dr de Rijke notes that in his field notes, Tindale recorded information which is supportive of some parts of this statement. In his comparative linguistic analysis, Jefferies concluded that Wadja is a Bidjera-related dialect significantly similar to the dialect Kanolu.
607 In 1938, Tindale's informant Fred Johnson told him the following about the Wadja:
A small group of people who in the time of my father lived at Banana on Dawson River lived 17-18 miles away from main channel. .. Loc[ation]. E[ast] side of Expedition Range and from Bigge Ra[nge] NE to Dawson Range on W[est] side of Dawson River but away from main river...
Tribes allied to Waiŋgo in Dawson River area are Kaŋgulu + Karainbal.
(Citations omitted.)
608 Tindale recorded further corroborative evidence from Charles Mummins at Woorabinda:
Charles Mummins gave information about the Wadja (Wainjigo, Warjarygo) tribe of the country on which this Station [i.e. Woorabinda] is situated, south west of Duaringa, west of the Dawson and north of Bigge Range. The people are now mixed with surrounding tribes or are dead. Formerly there were two small tribes Wadja and Wainjigo but they have been one 'for a long time' (Tindale 1938b:723 (N.1297)).
609 Dr de Rijke observes that first, Wadja and Gaangalu (inclusive of Garingbal) are "closely related" identity labels and, second, around the time of Tindale's recording in 1938, Aboriginal people appear no longer to be using the Wadja identity label, possibly as a result of group fusion and/or reduced population numbers.
610 Dr de Rijke makes particular comment about the area around Woorabinda, the Aboriginal settlement that was established in 1927. Aboriginal people from all over Queensland have been living at Woorabinda since their predecessors were forcibly moved there.
611 The Woorabinda area has been subject to an overlapping native title claim by the Wadja People, but the Wadja claim has been amended and there is no longer an overlap.
612 Dr de Rijke notes that Gaangalu claimants strongly assert that Woorabinda and surrounds are within Gaangalu country. He considers this to have been independently corroborated by information obtained from the Dunne family, the long-term owners of Wooroona and Coomooboolaroo pastoral stations in the claim area. The Dunne family arrived at Wooroona station in 1907, where Woorabinda was later established in 1927.
613 The current owner of Wooroona Station, Tim Dunne, informed Dr de Rijke that his father, Bill Dunne, who lived to the age of 95, was particularly close with the Aboriginal people who worked on the Station. Tim Dunne said that his father had been told by senior Aboriginal people who had worked on the station that the area was Gaangalu, and this is corroborated in an audio-recording estimated to be from the early 1990s of discussion between Bill Dunne and senior Gaangalu claimant Tim Kemp in which each of them regards Wooroona as Gaangalu country.
614 Tim Kemp's assertions are supported by the writings of Nils Holmer, who worked with older Gaangalu people such as Kruger White and Claude Anderson. Holmer noted:
Kangulu informants often hail from Springsure, Emerald, Duaringa or the Dawson river (the Woorabinda settlement, for instance, is to be considered as within the original Kangulu territory).
615 Dr de Rijke concludes that the ethnographic records from the late 1880s to 1970 consistently place the Gaangalu language in the area defined by the Comet, Dawson, Mackenzie and Fitzroy Rivers. In his opinion, it is reasonable to infer that these Aboriginal people and their predecessors were Gaangalu people who had detailed knowledge of, and a connection with, the claim area at the time of effective sovereignty.
616 Dr Kenny notes that the main ethnographic sources are Curr, Roth, Howitt, Mathew, Tennant-Kelly, Tindale and Holmer, as well as materials from the Mathew, Tennant-Kelly, Tindale and Howitt collections.
617 Dr Kenny considers there to be some general consistency in the written record in regard to the location of country associated with the Gaangalu "tribe" and/or language. The Mackenzie River and the lower Dawson River are usually said to be associated with Gaangalu as well as the Comet and Fitzroy Rivers.
618 Dr Kenny agrees with Dr de Rijke that Curr's data is the only historical source for the Kanolu group label and that Tindale seems to have misheard or misinterpreted "Gangaalu" as "Kanolu". In her view, it is likely that "Kanolu" is a variation of, or at the very least can be used today interchangeably with, the language label "Gaangalu/Kangalu".
619 Dr Kenny concludes:
Overall the ethnographic record relating to the Gaangalu Nation People shows that it is not possible to establish with precision where borders might be drawn with any kind of accuracy, because the information is not detailed enough and uses place and natural features as convenient reference points rather than as clear bordermarkers. However, it can be said that there is sufficient evidence that places the bulk of the application area consistently in the general area.