Gija

Roughly 200 kilometres south of Kununurra, in the East Kimberley of Western Australia, is the country of the Gija, whose name is also spelt Kija or Gidja. Many Gija live today around Halls Creek and Warmun (Turkey Creek). They resisted the arrival of pastoralists fiercely in the late nineteenth century, and in recent decades Gija painters have won international recognition.

Tindale estimated Gija territory at about 32,000 square kilometres (12,500 square miles), on the Pentecost, Chamberlain and Wilson rivers and the upper Margaret River, reaching east to Halls Creek and Alice Downs. Lissadell, the Durack Range and Turkey Creek all lie in Gija country, as does most of Purnululu National Park with its Bungle Bungle Range. In the 1930s the ethnographer Phyllis Kaberry wrote of them as the Lungga.

Unlike most Aboriginal languages, Gija is not part of the Pama–Nyungan family; it belongs to the small Jarrakan group of the East Kimberley. Around 100 to 200 people still speak it. A book of Gija names for plants and animals appeared in 2018, and a full Gija–English dictionary in 2022.

The Kimberley gold rush brought prospectors into Gija country in the 1880s. In July 1886, after a miner was speared, a party of prospectors attacked the Gija; a contemporary diary recorded that many were shot with repeating rifles, "some say at least a hundred". Gija oral history agrees that a large massacre happened at a place called Spear Gully. The last known massacre came in 1924 on Bedford Downs Station, where Gija and Worla men accused of spearing a cow were given food laced with strychnine and then killed; their bodies were burned. The artist Rover Thomas later depicted these events in his Bedford Downs Killings series.

In 1979 mining explorers found rare pink and red diamonds at Smoke Creek and at Barramundi Gap, which is central to Gija women's Dreaming, and the Argyle diamond mine was opened there, on the border of Gija and Miriwoong country. Local Aboriginal employment was only 10% in 2003; after a change of approach, about a quarter of the workforce came to be drawn from local Indigenous people.

Gija communities maintain active programmes of cultural teaching and art. The painter Paddy Bedford, born on Bedford Downs around 1922, had his work adapted by Qantas for the livery of a Boeing 737. Lena Nyadbi's barramundi-scale design, commissioned for the roof of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, can be seen from the Eiffel Tower; it tells the Dreaming story of a barramundi scattering its scales, which are likened to the Argyle diamonds.

Our maps draw approximate Gija territory, labelled Kija, in 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815, with the Ngarinyin to the north-west and the Jaru to the south. See also Australia and the Australian frontier wars.