Anindilyakwa

The Anindilyakwa people, also known as Warnindhilyagwa and formerly known as Ingura, are an Aboriginal Australian people living on Groote Eylandt, Bickerton Island, and Woodah Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory of Australia.

The Anindilyakwa people, also known as Warnindhilyagwa and formerly known as Ingura, are an Aboriginal Australian people living on Groote Eylandt, Bickerton Island, and Woodah Islandin the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Macassans from Sulawesi traded with northern Australian Aboriginal people long before the arrival of Europeans. Exploiting the monsoonal winds in December of each year, they sailed down in praus, to trade for native trepang, beeswax, ironwood and pearls, which they brought back to supply the southern Chinese market, where, in particular, trepang was highly sought after as a delicacy. In exchange, they provided beads, metal, canoe technologies, sails, ceramics, earthenware pots and fishing hooks. The scale of the enterprise was large: Matthew Flinders came across one expedition involving some 1,000 sailors in 60 praus. After the Australian government started to impose taxes on this kind of Macassar-northern Australian commerce in the 1880s, it experienced a downturn, the last trading season concluding in 1906-7.

They introduced tamarind to the island. The presence in four families of genetically transmitted Machado–Joseph disease is thought to derive from a Makassar ancestor who carried the disease.By the 1950s, the Anindilyakwa had moved into settlements like Angurugu and Umbakumba, ran by a Church group called the Church Missionary Society. However, their lives would be drastically altered when manganese was discovered on the island. In 1964, the Groote Eylandt Mining Company was given lease over the island, in exchange for royalty payments to the Church Missionary Society. The first shipments of manganese ore left in 1966, and as of 2015 the mine was producing over 3 million tonnes of manganese a year, over 15% of total world production. The mine was expected to continue production at least until 2027. The establishment of the mine caused upheavals in traditional land sensibilities, since the Indigenous people were forcibly dislocated and compelled to live in close proximity to one another. As a consequence, two clans, the Mamrika and Amagula, have been feuding for some decades, perhaps reflecting a longer historical enmity, and on occasion eruptions of violence, involving also machetes, have broken out.