Nyamal

Nyamal country, in the Pilbara of north-western Australia, runs from a narrow outlet on the coast near Port Hedland inland along the De Grey River to Marble Bar and Nullagine. Nyamal leaders were at the heart of the Pilbara strike of 1946–49, a landmark in the struggle for Aboriginal rights.

Norman Tindale estimated Nyamal lands at about 16,300 square miles (roughly 42,000 square kilometres), though his figures for this region are not considered reliable. They included the upper courses of the Coongan and Shaw rivers and the lower De Grey, where white ochre on the riverbanks gave the Yarrie country its name. To the north and east lay the lands of the Nyangumarta and of the desert peoples now known as the Martu.

Nyamal people hunted two kinds of kangaroo, one of the plains and one of the hills. Ripe native figs were used as bait: bustards were caught in grass nets spread in the branches, and emus were steered through a gap in a brush fence into hidden, spiked pits.

Nyamal belongs to the Ngayarta branch of the Pama–Nyungan family, and in the 2021 census about 45 people reported speaking it. Its kinship terms are unusual: they mark a relative's sex, generation and moiety but not the exact relationship, so that a father and a father's brother share one word. In the late nineteenth century workers on pearling boats far along the coast used a pidgin built on a form of Nyamal, and one Nyamal word, kaluta, is now the English name of a small marsupial.

In 1863 the pastoralist Walter Padbury took up land on the De Grey, and other leases followed. Nyamal survivors found work on the stations, but they were paid in flour, sugar and tobacco rather than wages; in 1885 Aboriginal workers sheared over 13,000 sheep in six weeks on these terms. Large flocks stripped the grasses and bush foods, leaving people ever more dependent on the stations. Under the Aborigines Act of 1905, workers could not leave a station without the manager's permission.

On 1 May 1946 some 800 Aboriginal pastoral workers walked off Pilbara stations and out of work in Port Hedland and Marble Bar, demanding fair wages and decent conditions. It went on until August 1949, making it the longest strike Australia has seen. Among its leaders were the Nyamal men Clancy McKenna and Peter Coppin. Coppin later managed Yandeyarra Station, and in 2002 he was named NAIDOC Elder of the Year. More recently the Nyamal psychologist Tracy Westerman was named Western Australia's Australian of the Year for 2018.

Our maps draw approximate Nyamal territory in 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815, with the Ngarla on the coast and the Nyangumarta to the north-east. See also Australia.