Wudjari

Esperance, Ravensthorpe and Cape Arid, on the south coast of Western Australia, stand on the country of the Wudjari. They are one of the fourteen groups that make up the Noongar, the people of the state's south-west corner, and their country formed the eastern edge of the Noongar world, where it met peoples who practised circumcision.

Norman Tindale estimated Wudjari lands at about 6,900 square miles (roughly 17,900 square kilometres), a coastal strip running east from the Gairdner River to Point Malcolm and reaching some 30 miles inland. The towns of Ravensthorpe and Esperance, and the coast at Fanny Cove and Cape Arid, now stand on Wudjari country. In the Noongar division of the south-west into natural regions, the Wudjari belong to the mallee country, with the Njunga on the Esperance plains to the east.

When Europeans first reached this coast, the Wudjari were not a single uniform group. Their western bands were shifting westwards towards Bremer Bay, and a group that settled there became known as the Yunga. Further east, beyond the Young River and Fanny Cove, bands had taken up circumcision as part of initiation. Wudjari who rejected the practice gave the easterners a separate name, and the easterners in turn called themselves Nyunga, "man", an assertive name that Tindale linked to taunts from neighbouring circumcising peoples such as the Ngadjunmaia. Tindale saw in this the early stages of a new tribal identity. The Nyunga contested the country between Mount Ragged and Israelite Bay with the Ngadjunmaia, and that stretch marked the cultural boundary between the two traditions.

The Wudjari spoke a variety of what is now classed as the Noongar language, part of the Pama–Nyungan family. Noongar peoples are thought to have had thirteen dialects when Europeans arrived; some knowledge survives today in five of them. Noongar territory is a recognised biodiversity hotspot, and its people traditionally followed six seasons marked by changes in weather, plants and animals. Today Noongar people live in towns across the south-west, including Esperance; in the 2021 census, 14,355 people in the south-west identified as Indigenous.

In 1855 an edited account appeared of a shipwrecked sailor, William Jackman, who claimed to have spent eighteen months held by so-called cannibals on the shores of the Great Australian Bight. The book was popular, but doubts about it have long persisted. In 2002 the historian Martin Gibbs concluded that parts of it nonetheless reflected real knowledge of Noongar culture, and suggested the author may have lived among the Wudjari, the Nyunga or the Ngadjunmaia.

Our maps draw approximate Wudjari territory in 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815, with the Ngadjunmaia (labelled Ngatjumay) to the east, the Kalaako inland to the north, the Wangkatha beyond them, and the Mirning further east along the Bight. See also Australia.