Iningai

The Iningai, also written Yiningayi, are an Aboriginal Australian people whose Country lies in central-western Queensland, around the present-day towns of Longreach, Muttaburra, Aramac and Barcaldine. Their name appears in records in many spellings, and several of their old clan names survive, one of them in the name of a town.

The anthropologist Norman Tindale, whose 1974 catalogue tried to map Aboriginal groups as they were at the time of European contact, put the Iningai beyond the Great Dividing Range to its west, reaching the Forsyth Range, Maneroo Creek and Longreach. In his account their lands ran south along the tributaries of the Alice River to about Mexico, a locality near Barcaldine, and north to Muttaburra, Cornish Creek, Tower Hill, Bowen Downs and North Oakvale, and included Aramac. He estimated the area at about 19,500 square miles, roughly 50,700 square kilometres, and described it as well-wooded country crossed by broad, winding streams flowing west. Tindale also noted that some people later moved south-east to Alpha.

Tindale recorded the Iningai as several local groups, or hordes, including the Muttaburra, the Tateburra north of Cornish Creek and the Terreburra on the Alice River. Some of these names were also used for the people as a whole. Other recorded forms include Mutabura, Moothaburra, Mootaburra and Kana. The township of Muttaburra, founded in the 1870s, takes its name from the Muttaburra clan, the traditional owners of that area.

The Iningai language, also recorded as Yinangay or Yiningay, is closely related to neighbouring Bidjara, under which some classifications list it as a dialect, and shares words with Dharawala and Wadjabangayi to the south and west. According to the State Library of Queensland, it has very few speakers and limited documentation. Word lists gathered in the late 19th century were published by Edward Curr in 1887, and the linguist Gavan Breen analysed them in 1990, comparing body-part and kinship words such as mara, "hand", and yabu, "father", with those of neighbouring languages.

Our maps draw an Iningai territory in 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783 and 1800; the outline is approximate, and the map years are not dates in the people's history. Nearby peoples on the same maps include the Bidjara and the Wadjalang, and by our 1815 map the area falls within the Colony of New South Wales. The region today is part of Australia.