Wangaaypuwan

The Wangaaypuwan, or Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan, are Aboriginal people of the dry plains of central western New South Wales, around Nyngan, Cobar and the upper Bogan River. Once written Wongaibon or Wonghibon by colonial observers, they are one of the groups of the wider Ngiyampaa nation. Some still live in and around their homelands, while many now live in larger towns and cities in New South Wales and beyond, and their dialect has been gathered into an online community dictionary.

Their name comes from wangaay, their word for "no". Neighbouring Ngiyampaa speakers towards the Macquarie Marshes and Walgett said wayil instead, and so were labelled Wayilwan by colonial ethnographers. Like other Ngiyampaa, the Wangaaypuwan also named themselves by their home country, and the online dictionary describes their dialect as the language of the Pilaarrkiyalu, Nhiilyikiyalu and Karulkiyalu peoples of the dry, riverless country of western New South Wales. The Ngiyampaa call their homeland ngurrampaa, "camp-world".

The anthropologist Norman Tindale estimated Wangaaypuwan lands at some 27,000 square miles. They took in the upper Bogan River, the Tigers Camp and Boggy Cowal creeks, and places such as Trida, Narromine, Nyngan, Girilambone, Cobar and Gilgunnia, reaching west to Ivanhoe and the Neckarboo Range and south to Trundle. In severe drought they travelled into Wiradjuri country on the Lachlan River. Mount Grenfell, north-west of Cobar, is a significant place for Ngiyampaa people, who were barred from visiting it until the 1970s.

The nineteenth-century observer A. L. P. Cameron recorded four intermarrying divisions, Ipai, Kumbu, Murri and Kubbi, each with its totems, among them the crow, kangaroo, iguana, bandicoot and possum, and noted that the Wangaaypuwan married with the Wiradjuri under the same system. He also described stages of life through which a boy passed, from childhood through initiation to old age. One Wangaaypuwan story he published tells how the brolga tricked the emu out of its wings and later its chicks, until the angry emu hurled its last egg into the sky, where it broke and became the sun.

The Wangaaypuwan spoke their own dialect of the Ngiyampaa language, one of its two main varieties alongside Wayilwan. The linguist Tamsin Donaldson reported that the last known speaker of the old local variety, who supplied a sixty-word list, died around 1914. Recordings made by Ngiyampaa speakers in towns across the region now underpin the Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan dictionary, with words such as paapaa, father, kunii, mother, palkaa, boomerang, and wangaay itself.

Our maps from 1600 to 1800 draw an approximate Wangaaypuwan territory, labelled Wongaibon, in central western New South Wales, Australia. Its neighbours include the Wiradjuri, the Wayilwan, the Gamilaraay and the Paakantyi, among the Aboriginal Australian nations of the south-east.