The Kaiadilt are an indigenous Australian people of the South Wellesley group in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland, Australia. They are native to Bentinck Island, but also made nomadic fishing and hunting forays to both Sweers and Allen Islands. Their descendents now live on Mornington Island, though one group has returned to Bentinck Island.
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Language
The Kayardild language is an agglutinating, completely suffixing member of the Tangkic languages, but unlike most Australian languages, including others classified under Tangkic including Yukulta, Kayardild exhibits a case morphology that is accusative, rather than ergative. Etymologically Kayardild is a compound formed from ka(ng) 'ìanguage' and yardild(a) 'strong', thus meaning 'strong language'.
Analysis of the grammar of Kayardild revealed that it provided an empirical challenge to a theorem regarding putative linguistic unniversals in natural languages. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom asserted that "no language uses noun affixes to express tense", a claim that reflected a tradition in Western thought going back to Aristotle. Nicholas Evans discovered a breach in the theory, for Kaiadilt happens to inflect not only verbs, but also nouns, for tense.
Kaiadilt was spoken by no more than perhaps 150 people, and by 1982, when Nicholas Evans began to record it, the numbers had declined to approximately 40.
Ecology and Lifestyle
The general area is characterised by reef-building corals, predominantly Acropora hyacinthus and the associated molluscs, some 400 varierties of which had been discovered by the early 1900s. For the Kaiadilt, Bentinck island was Dulkawalnged (the land of all) while the outlying Sweers and Allen islands were Dangkawaridulk (lands void of men). Despite the poor soil, a wide variety of vegetables were noted by early travellers. The basic arborial cover consisted of small varieties of eucalyptus, casuarina and pandanus. The Kaiadilt lived on a maritime seafood economy, with nomadic movements determined by weather and seasons. The division of labour meant women gathered on the littoral such foods as small rock oysters (tjilangind), mud cockles (kulpanda) and crabs, while the men, when not harvesting the catch from rock fish traps (ngurruwarra), which are found one every .9 kilometres around Bentinck's coastline, but also along the shores of Sweers islands's calcareous peneplain, foraged more broadly for turtle, sharks, dugong.
The construction of the rock traps for fishing is attributed to the mythical creatures Bujuku (black crane) and Kaarrku (seagull).
History
The Kaiadilt were mainly centered on Bentinck Island. Unlike many other northern aboriginal groups, particularly those of Arnhem Land, they appear to have had little contact with Southern Asian island traders, something attested by the lack of loanwords from the Malay, Buginese and Makassarese languages, though some early records indicate tamarind and teak had been harvested by visitors who had axes, and earthenware pots have been uncovered. They were generally diffident with strangers. The first white man to have set foot on the island was Matthew Flinders, captain of the Investigator in 1802.
Sometime around 1916, a man remembered only as McKenzie came to Bentinck Island and set up a sheep run, basing himself on a site at the mouth of the Kurumnbali estuary. He would ride over the island, accompanied by a pack of dogs, and shoot any Kaiadilt man who came within sight; in local memory, he murdered at least 11. He also kidnapped and raped native girls. He then moved to Sweers Island, and set up a lime kiln there. The Kaiadilt managed to return to the latter only on McKenzie's departure.
Sweers Island was declared an Aboriginal reserve in 1934. After a cyclonic tidal surge swept the area in 1948, which followed fast on the severe drought that struck in 1946, the Kaiadilt were transferred by missionaries to Mornington Island. The uprooting effectively set in place the process of the destruction of both Kaiadilt culture and language since all children were restricted to dormitories, away from their parents and kin, and the transmission of the language and lore was lost. On Mornington Island they lived in a separate zone, in beach humpies facing Bentinck Island. They were looked down on by the indigenous Lardil people, who denied then access to the fishing grounds. Conditions were so severe that for several years all children were stillborn, creating a gap in the generations. From the late 1960s onwards, the Kaiadilt began to return to their own islands.
Land title
In 1994, a deed of grant in trust was given to the original inhabitants, represented by the Kaiadilt Aboriginal Land Trust, which made a native title claim in 1996. The application concerned all the area covered from Bentinck and Sweer Islands' high water line for 'as far as the eye could see'. In The Lardil Peoples v State of Queensland [2004] FCA 298, the Federal Court accorded the owners rights to five nautical miles seaward.