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Noongar Erotic

Homeland

The southwest corner of Western Australia, from Geraldton to Esperance, taking in Perth, Bunbury and Albany.

Language

Noongar, also spelled Nyungar or Nyoongar, a dialect continuum in the Nyungic group (Pama-Nyungan); English is the first language of most people today.

Religion

Noongar law and Dreaming, centered on the Wagyl, alongside widespread Christian affiliation dating from the mission and settlement era.

Subgroups

Fourteen groups within the Noongar bloc: Amangu, Ballardong, Yued, Kaneang, Koreng, Mineng, Njakinjaki, Njunga, Pibelmen, Pindjarup, Wadandi, Whadjuk, Wiilman and Wudjari.

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Noongar People

Noongar is a name for fourteen groups who share one law. Their country is the whole southwest corner of Western Australia, from Geraldton down the coast through Perth, around to Albany and east along the Southern Ocean to Esperance: jarrah and karri forest, wandoo woodland, sandplain heath, and a coastal plain that was wetland before it was suburb. They call it boodja. The fourteen groups (Amangu, Ballardong, Yued, Kaneang, Koreng, Mineng, Njakinjaki, Njunga, Pibelmen, Pindjarup, Wadandi, Whadjuk, Wiilman, Wudjari) are better understood as related communities along a dialect continuum than as separate nations, held together by a kinship system built on two moieties, crow and white cockatoo, and by obligation to the same ancestral beings. Chief among these is the Wagyl, the serpent that cut the rivers and opened the springs, whose presence in Perth's waterways has been argued over in courtrooms and on building sites within living memory. The Noongar year runs to six seasons rather than four, and they track what the country is doing rather than the calendar: Birak and Bunuru through the heat, Djeran as it breaks, Makuru cold and wet, Djilba unsettled, Kambarang warming. Zamia nuts, poisonous raw, were made edible by burial and long fermentation. The kodj, a hatchet with two stone blades set in grass tree resin, is a Noongar tool.

The Swan River Colony landed in 1829 and dispossession moved fast. In 1833 the Whadjuk resistance leader Yagan was shot and his head sent to England, where it stayed until 1997; he was buried in 2010. In 1834 Governor Stirling's party attacked Pindjarup people at Pinjarra, a killing Noongar have never called a battle. From 1927 until 1954, Aboriginal people needed a pass to enter central Perth. Children were taken to settlements at Moore River and Carrolup, and at Carrolup in the 1940s a group of them produced landscape drawings good enough to tour Europe, after which the collection went missing and was not returned to Western Australia until 2013. Native title has been the long fight of the present era. A 2006 Federal Court judgment recognized Noongar native title over metropolitan Perth, the first such finding over an Australian capital, and it was overturned on appeal two years later. What followed was negotiated rather than litigated, and the South West Settlement, in effect since 2021, is the largest agreement of its kind in the country. The language is coming back through schools, songwriting, and a Macbeth staged entirely in Noongar.

Related ethnic groups

Groups that share Noongar's homeland, region, language, or religious tradition. These are likely candidates for comparative phenotype reference.

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