Qualla: Wilyakali

Wilyakali: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 28 August 2023, in a Federal Court determination, the Wilyakali people were formally recognised as native title holders over roughly 9,200 square kilometres of the country they had never stopped belonging to. The land in question runs from the New South Wales border, along both sides of the Barrier Highway, out toward Mannahill in South Australia. Settlers had once been told this people was extinct. The court paperwork, lodged in 2012 by Maureen, Glen, and Dulcie O'Donnell on behalf of their people, said otherwise. So did the families who stood up to claim it.

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wilyakali: The People of the Hills

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poyt448 Peter Woodard, Public domain. Across the languages of the Darling River valley, one word keeps surfacing: kali, an old term meaning "people." It anchors the Paakantyi, the "creek people," and it anchors the Wilyakali too. Their other name says it plainly: Bulali, the "hill people," from bula, hill. Their coun...

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Image: Poyt448 Peter Woodard | Public domain

Wilyakali: What the Silver Cost

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poyt448 Peter Woodard, Public domain. When Europeans pushed into the Barrier Ranges in the nineteenth century, they brought diseases that moved faster than any wagon. The ethnographer A. W. Howitt later recorded the Wilyakali as part of a wider grouping he called the Itchumundi nation, and colonial authorities declar...

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Image: Poyt448 Peter Woodard | Public domain

Wilyakali: Stone That Remembers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poyt448 Peter Woodard, Public domain. To understand how deep this belonging runs, go to Mutawintji, in the Bynguano Ranges northeast of Broken Hill. Here, in shaded gorges where water lingers after rain, the rock is covered in engravings older than memory can hold: outlines of hands, the tracks of animals, the long-l...

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Image: Poyt448 Peter Woodard | Public domain

Wilyakali: A Living Language, a Living People

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poyt448 Peter Woodard, Public domain. The Wilyakali language belongs to the Paakantyi group, and like so many Aboriginal languages it was pushed to the edge of silence. Yet edge is not the same as end. Since the 1980s the Wilyakali Aboriginal Corporation has run Poolamacca Station, negotiated with miners on the peopl...

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Image: Poyt448 Peter Woodard | Public domain