Wik-Mungkan people facts for kids

The Wik-Mungkan people were a large group of Aboriginal Australian people. They lived in a big area of the western Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland. They spoke several different languages.

Language and Communication

The Wik Mungkan language is part of the Paman language group. This group is a smaller part of the even bigger Pama-Nyungan language family. Wik Mungkan is very similar to the Kugu Nganhcara language.

The word Wik means "speech" or "language." People speak Wik Mungkan around Aurukun and the Edward River, including Pormpuraaw.

It's interesting that people who speak Wik Mungkan describe their language using the word "eating." Wik Mungkan literally means "language-eat." This idea comes from their relatives who lived inland. These inland groups used different forms of the verb "eat" to show how their dialects were different.

Living with Nature

The Wik-Mungkan people lived on a strip of land about 30 to 50 miles (48 to 80 kilometers) wide. This land was next to the Gulf of Carpentaria, but coastal groups lived between them and the sea. Their territory was huge, covering over 3,000 square miles (7,770 square kilometers). Five main rivers flowed through their land: the Watson, Archer, Kendall, Holroyd, and Edward rivers. These rivers flowed west from the Great Dividing Range to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Their land had many different natural areas. There were flat woodlands, mangrove forests, rocky hills, and even special "melon hole" land.

Seasons and Food Gathering

The year had two main seasons. The dry season lasted from May to November, with winds from the southeast. Then, storms and humid weather brought the short wet season, starting in November. North-westerly winds blew from December to April, causing a lot of flooding on the flat coastal lands.

Men and women had different jobs for getting food. Men hunted, and women gathered plants. Women used a digging stick called a katjan and a dillybag (a woven bag). In the wet season, they ate yams (mai watea) and arrowroot (mai woppa). They also ate waterlilies. During the wet season, they camped higher up in the river areas.

Their hunting grounds inland had three types of areas: grassy plains, river courses, and thick forests. As the dry season ended, they built dams and kiddles (fish traps). This helped them catch fish swimming upstream when the rains started to refill the rivers. They also used a special vine that had a poisonous substance. They would put this in waterholes, which made fish jump out of the water so they could catch them easily from the riverbanks.

Hunting and Cooking Methods

The Wik-Mungkan people used Fire-stick farming every year at the start of the dry season. They would set controlled fires to make wallabies and other animals run out of the grasslands. After the fire, women would search for bandicoots, snakes, goannas, and other small animals in their burrows. They even trained their dogs not to eat the prey they caught.

The grassy plains offered plenty of food. They gathered nutritious roots and fruits. For hunting, they found wallabies, ducks, ibis, flying foxes, jabirus, and emus. The wooded hills had many iguanas, snakes, and opossums. Large areas of flowering bloodwood and messmate trees provided lots of honey.

The rivers were full of fish like sardine-fish, Catfish, Rock cod, white fish, snapper, barramundi, and stingray. They speared these fish from fast-moving canoes, even against the incoming tides. Even the less fertile land around the Kendall River had many bream. They hunted two types of crocodiles: the Freshwater crocodile in the upper rivers and the saltwater crocodile near the coast. The eggs of the freshwater crocodile were an important food in winter. The roots of a coastal swamp plant called panja were a key vegetable at the end of the dry season.

They made cooking ovens by digging a hole and lighting a fire in it. They fanned the flames with feathers from a black-necked stork (jabiru). Then, they put pieces of ant-bed (from a termite mound) on the coals. Food was placed on top, covered with tea-tree bark, and then covered with sand to slow-cook it.

Increase ceremonies were special events to make sure there was enough food. These ceremonies were held in a clan's territory. They also invited relatives from other groups to share the food once the local group had eaten their fill.

Family and Community Life

Early reports say that Wik-Mungkan clans were patrilineal, meaning family lines were traced through the father. Marriage rules allowed marrying a father's sister's daughter or a mother's brother's daughter. However, marrying a cousin from both sides of the family was strictly forbidden.

Because of Exogamy (marrying outside one's own group), family connections spread across different clans. This meant that if one clan had a lot of food, relatives from other areas would be invited to share it. This often led to large gatherings.

Older people were well cared for. They had the right to eat certain foods that younger, more active people were not allowed to have. Younger members would give them special snake and stingray meat. The fireplace was very important to family life. The word for father, pan tuma, means "man of the fire," and mother, wantya tuma, means "woman of the fire."

Ursula McConnel studied the Wik-Mungkan family and marriage system in 1934. She believed that its basic rules applied to all Wik peoples. She noted five main features:

• Clans lived in specific areas and married outside their group (traced through the father).
• Each group was divided into two halves, and people married someone from the other half.
• They practiced sororate (a man marrying his deceased wife's sister) and levirate (a woman marrying her deceased husband's brother).
• They had a modified form of cross-cousin marriage.
• They used a detailed system of family terms.

Runaway marriage (maritji) was accepted if the couple's relationship was considered proper by their family links. When this was acted out in dances, it often made people laugh. Bride kidnapping was also practiced if a spouse couldn't be found in the usual way. However, it was often pre-arranged between the groups, so the "kidnapping" was more of a symbolic act than a real fight.

The Wik-Mungkan people called their coastal neighbors north of the Archer and Watson rivers "bad speech" (Wik-waiya) people. This was because they found their languages hard to understand.

Totem System by Territory

The word for totem was pulwaiya, which means "old ancestor." The place where a totem originated became an auwa, a special ritual site. It was also the place where a person's spirit returned after death. Before Europeans arrived, the Wik-Mungkan were thought to have about 30 clans. Each clan had its own territory. A clan could have more than one totem, and these totems worked together. A person's clan totem influenced their birth name. For example, someone from the "meteor" totem might be named Aka (ground)-battana (hits). A child from the kangaroo totem might be named pampointjalama (kangaroo sniffs the air and smells a man). The word mai refers to vegetable food, and min refers to meat.

Here are some of the totems associated with different river areas:

Archer River

• Saltwater crocodile, night-fish, white fruit.
• Black mangrove, bone-fish, fly, frog, bullroarer.
• White fish-hawk, small hawk, swamp duck, plains turkey, rock cod, parrot, blue water-lily, string dilly bag, fishing net.
• Water-lily root, water lily seed.
• Bush-nut, a type of fish, freshwater mussel, a black fruit, red and white fruit.
• White water lily.
• Male cuscus, female cuscus, storm bird, white fruit, jabiru.
• Tree grub.
• White water-snake, edible palm-tree fruit, black fruit.
• Male leech, female leech, male dingo, female dingo, edible palm, small root.
• Kangaroo.
• Male ghosts, female ghosts, small bird, small fish.
• Native companion, yellow fruit.
• Carpet snake.

Kendall River

• Bream.
• Cat-fish.
• Emu.
• White crane, small root, water-lily, ironwood flower.
• Curlew.
• Chicken hawk.
• Male opossum, female opossum.
• Black snake.
• Bloodwood and messmate flowers.
• Eaglehawk.
• Shooting star/meteor, quail.
• Crow, praying mantis, large iguana.

Holroyd River

• Small sweet water lily.
• Pandanus.
• Native cat, blue-tongued lizard.
• Small iguana.
• Snake.
• Freshwater stingray.
• Sardine fish.
• Bandicoot.

Edward River

• Freshwater crocodile.
• Honey.

History of the Wik-Mungkan People

Ursula McConnel estimated that the Wik-Mungkan people traditionally numbered between 1,500 and 2,000. However, by the 1930s, their population had dropped significantly. Around the Archer River, there were only about 200 people on the Kendall and Edward Rivers. This was a huge decrease, about 60% to 75% of their original numbers.

This population drop happened after white settlers arrived. Several things caused it:

• Traders took men away to work on the coast.
• New diseases were introduced.
• Cattle ranchers took over their hunting grounds.
• Sometimes, there were attacks that wiped out entire camps.

At the beginning of the 1900s, a special coastal area was set aside for them on the Gulf.

Studies of the Wik-Mungkan

The Wik-Mungkan people's family systems have been very important for anthropologists (people who study human societies and cultures).

The first detailed study of the Wik people was done by British anthropologist Ursula McConnel. She started her work in 1927, focusing on groups living at the Archer River Mission, which is now Aurukun. Soon after, Donald Thomson also studied them in 1932-1933.

McConnel's work caught the attention of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a famous French anthropologist. In his important book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, he used the Wik-Mungkan as an example. He believed that groups like the Aboriginal Australians had very precise social systems. Later, Rodney Needham also built on McConnel's work, developing new theories about their social structure.

The British anthropologist David McKnight also did fieldwork with the Wik-Mungkan people shortly after.

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