Koara

The Koara, today more often spelt Kuwarra, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Western Desert region of Western Australia. Their country lies in the dry interior where the Mid West, Goldfields-Esperance and Pilbara regions meet, and most Kuwarra people today live around the towns of Meekatharra, Cue and Wiluna.

The anthropologist Norman Tindale estimated Koara lands at about 47,000 square kilometres (18,100 square miles). In his description they ran from around Mount Morgans and Leonora west to Mount Ida, Lake Barlee and Sandstone, north to Gidgee, Mount Sir Samuel and Lake Darlot, and east to about Mount Zephyr. Their neighbours included the Wajarri and Badimaya to the west, and the Ngaanyatjarra, Martu and Mantjiltjarra to the east and north-east. The South Australian Museum, which publishes his catalogue, notes that it attempts to show boundaries at the time of European contact and that much of the data has since been revised.

Neighbouring peoples used several names for the Koara. People to the east called them Konindja or Konindjara, from a word Tindale glossed as "poor fellow", which he thought might hint at an old movement out of the desert. The Waljen to the south called them Waula, meaning "northerners". Tindale also noted that in some Western Desert dialects koara carries the sense of "friendly" or "peaceable". The Kuwarra speak a dialect of the Western Desert language, the great chain of related dialects spoken across the desert interior; little has been recorded about the Kuwarra dialect itself, although the people are well documented.

Estimates of the Kuwarra population before colonisation range from about 250 to several hundred. According to the anthropologist Kenneth Liberman, writing in 1980, their communities were broken up by three successive waves of newcomers, the first being the Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie gold rushes and the last the uranium discoveries of the 1960s and 1970s, when Laverton and Agnew grew. By 1980, he counted about 60 people of Kuwarra descent.

Liberman describes how government policy of removing children of mixed descent, part of what is now called the Stolen Generations, disrupted the passing of culture between generations, and how families tried to hide children from the authorities. Such removals continued into the late 1970s. Many Kuwarra worked on pastoral stations as poorly paid bonded labourers. A 1940 law barred Aboriginal people from crossing south of the 20th parallel without medical clearance and ministerial permission, and a 1944 citizenship law required applicants to give up association with other Aboriginal people outside their immediate family; it was repealed in 1971.

Kuwarra people continue to live in and around Meekatharra, Cue and Wiluna. A Koara native title claim, numbered WC95/1, was mapped by the WALIS Land Claims Mapping Unit in 1996, and Kuwarra appears as a named group on the AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia.

Our maps for 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815 draw Koara country under the label "Kuwarra" in the Western Australian interior, among other Aboriginal Australian peoples. The outline is approximate.