Wulwulam facts for kids
The Wulwulam, also known as the Woolwonga, were an indigenous Australian people of the Northern Territory. They are reputed to have been almost completely exterminated in the 1880s in reprisal for an incident in which some members of the tribe speared 4 miners.
Country
Wulwulam land extended over some 1,900 square miles (4,900 km2) from the headwaters of the Mary River westwards as far as Pine Creek, and southwards almost to Katherine. On their eastern flank, their boundary lay at the source of the South Alligator River. They were also reported in the Mount Bundy area.
People
According to Norman Tindale, the Norwegian ethnographer Knut Dahl was referring to the Wulwulam in those passages where he wrote of the Agigondin, a central tableland tribe and a horde called the Agoguila.
History of contact
The Wulwulam's numbers grew as a result of the rapid reduction of members of two tribes to their south and west as European colonization developed, namely the Agikwala, Awinmul and Awarai. Remnants of the two were absorbed into the Wulwulam as subtribal hordes.
History
Copper mining discovered near Mt. Haywood in 1882 led to the development of a settlement on tribal lands along the Daly River soon afterwards, and members of the Wulwulam tribe were drawn to the site and employed there. Starting on 3 September 1884, several Wulwulam murdered four European settlers and in a reprisal known as the Coppermine massacres.
The pogrom continued for some years, enfeebling what had been the most powerful Daly river tribe, and also decimating the Mulluk-Mulluk tribe.
Four Wulwulam men, Tommy, Jimmy, Daly, and Ajibbingwagne, were put on trial for the killings of 4 settlers, Johannes Lubrecht Noltenius, Jack Landers (known as Hellfire Jack), Henry Houschildt and Schollert. The Jesuit mission diary records Sachse as still waging his campaign against the Wulwulam 4 years later, in 1888.
Charlie Yingi, known as Long Legged Charlie, one of the four Aboriginal men charged for the killings, was cleared eventually and settled at the Jesuit Mission on the Daly River. He was later sentenced to death for the Coppermine killing.
In 2014 there came to light a document indicating that one child of Wulwulam/Woolwonga parentage had been registered in the census undertaken in 1889, and that by virtue of this fact, her descendants moved to assert native title rights to the old Wulwulam hunting grounds.
Alternative names
- Agigondin (eastern horde)
- Agikwala, Agiqwolla, Agoguila, Aquguila
- Agiwallem
- Agrikondi, Aggraakúndi
- Oolwunga Oolawunga
- Wolwongga, Wulwanga, Wolwanga, Wulwonga, Woolwonga
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