Kalamaia

The Kalamaia are an Aboriginal Australian people whose country lies in the Wheatbelt and Goldfields regions of Western Australia, around Southern Cross and Boorabbin. Today they are often known as the Kaprun people, and their language is called Kaalamaya. Kaprun people today live mainly in Kalgoorlie and in South Australia, away from their traditional country.

The anthropologist Norman Tindale, whose catalogue aimed to show tribal boundaries at the time of European contact, estimated Kalamaia lands at about 88,000 square kilometres. He described them as running east to Bullabulling, north to Youanmi, Lake Barlee and Pigeon Rocks, west to Burracoppin, Mukinbudin, Kalannie and Lake Moore, and south to around Mount Holland in the Parker Range. He applied the name Jawan to the north-western groups. It is dry country with few reliable, permanent water sources.

Tindale placed the Kalamaia among the peoples who practised circumcision as part of initiation, and recorded that they used a term, Mudia, for south-western neighbours who did not. He listed many other names for them, including Kalamai, Jungaa (said to mean "men"), Yungar and Jaburu ("north"). The Goldfields Aboriginal Language Centre notes that records often name two languages in the area, Kaalamaya and Gubrun, and that Kaprun people explain Kaalamaya as the language of the Kaprun.

Kaalamaya is a Pama–Nyungan language, poorly recorded and apparently close to Noongar; its classification is still uncertain. The Natingero variety once listed as a dialect shares only around 36 to 43 per cent of its words, by different comparisons, and is now treated as separate.

According to the Goldfields Aboriginal Language Centre, the building of the railway from Perth to Kalgoorlie and the gold rush of the 1890s took over the scarce waterholes on Kalamaia land. The centre cites an 1895 newspaper report of Aboriginal people being tortured to reveal water sources, records of water being guarded against Aboriginal people and documented evidence of at least one massacre, and links these to the movement of Kaprun people away from their country.

Kaprun elder Brian Champion, removed from his family as a child, spent more than ten years researching and recording Kaalamaya with older relatives, working with the Goldfields Aboriginal Languages project. As of 2015 he was described as the language's only fluent speaker, alongside several partial speakers. A wordlist, sketch grammar and stories have been prepared, though speakers have chosen not to share them publicly yet.

The maps label this territory "Kalaamaya" and draw it from 1600 to 1815, an approximate outline of Kalamaia country among other Aboriginal Australian peoples of what is now Australia. On later maps the area falls within the colony of Western Australia, during the era of the Australian frontier wars.