Talk:Yugambeh people

Stuff removed
I removed a large amount of stuff simply because the source does not mention the Yugambeh, and is a generic statement mainly applied to the aborigines of northern Queensland and laws regarding them.Nishidani (talk) 14:44, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Not RS
This is a comment made in 2008 by a politician. Such sources are not RS for details of aboriginal history. IEvwen if it were, it would have to be prefaced by some attribution such as '.'According to Stuart Robert the then Liberal Party member for  Fadden, which would again be giving the said politician a voice as an expert, which he isn't.  Nishidani (talk) 11:10, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * ps. A template exists, by now the standard format for citation on all aboriginal articles. It is easy to use, and any material added should employ it. Secondly, given that there is a lot of confusion in contemporary newspaper sources on history, they should be avoided, certainly if they do not specify which tribe is said to have done what. I know this means one must make a deeper effort to get things right, but encyclopedias must be constructed warily. I for one can't access the abc et the other source introduced to verify the data.Nishidani (talk) 11:51, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Both of these sources are far too generic and thin to be used for the points being claimed.Nishidani (talk) 12:17, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * {Cite news|url=https://hillstoheadlands.com.au/kombumerri-saltwater-people/|title=The Kombumerri Saltwater People | Gecko Hills to Headlands|date=2014-10-10|access-date=2018-02-24|language=en-AU}}

Perhaps I am better off introducing myself to explain my position. I am actually a Yugambeh man, from the Migani clan group (aka migunburri), and my grandfather was dalgayngin (aka tul-gi-gin - I only spelt in that way in the article because I can't find a source with our modern spelling). I am known in our mob as being quite knowledgable and as a language speaker I am heavily involved in our cultural institutions. I registered for Wikipedia because a number of community expressed their concern about the minimal (and incorrect) information being shared about us. A lovely lady from the local libraries wiki-team gave me some information to get started, and I've just gone from there. I am still rather new to how things work, but I can assure you everything I have ever added was true, I am just finding it rather difficult at times to find the right kind of wiki-approved sources. There is a lot of things written of us, but not a lot of it is factually correct. Fortunately I've been informed that some new books are being published this year, so I may have better material to cite then. Originally I was writing then looking for sources, but I can see it's easier to look at what information the sources have and just go from there.

As for the dolphin hunting, it was definitely a Yugambeh practice as well. Did you see the Robert Longhurst source, page 18? That mentions it. I've been told there is information on it in the book 'The Kombumerri: Aboriginal People of the Gold Coast' by Rory O'Connor, I am going to fetch a copy this week to scour, and add from.

Another thing I wanted to bring up was Tindale; he is no infallible, and his map is not 100% correct. Here is some community knowledge, he did a drive by as the aunts who were alive when he came say, he spent a few days, went to the libraries in the city then left. Nobody here drew boundaries for him. For one, you will NOT find any Yugambeh person who claims anywhere near Brisbane. The clan map on the page was actually drawn by a Yugambeh Wangerriburra clansman in 1913. Tindale doesn't even note our clans properly. There are some papers talking about his errors, specifically mentioning some Western australian mobs, I'm trying to find them.

It's also important to remember we and our neighbours are living people, living cultures, and living languages, we are not some stagnate piece of history left to the ages. I have enjoyed some of your edits, some of them are a bit odd though from my perspective. Your edit on the war memorial makes sense as I know you're just quoting all three seperately, but all 3 of those sentences are the exact same, just written in different spelling systems, (we as a people do not have a standard spelling system). I look forward to working with you to build a better Aboriginal-Australia Wikipedia. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 04:01, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I've found over 12 years working here that it's no easy job. There's a very large amount of information I have on a number of topics, which I'm fairly sure is correct, but I have to withhold it because, whatever my various areas of competence, as an editor I am denied permission to add what I trust is the truth or the facts, until I can find an independent WP:RS source that corroborates or validates it. The most common problem is this: once one knows what historic tribe was in such and such an area, then it is easy to guess that when one comes across, reading the primary documents of early explorers, a mention of 'Aborigines/the  blacks/savages/natives' at any one geographical point, the strong odds are that they are not 'generic' but the explorer's comments refer to a specific tribe.  But, normally, one cannot infer from the primary report that these aborigines are such and such a tribe until a scholarly or otherwise reliable secondary source makes that connection. It's a pity because the odds are that one's intuition is correct, but to draw on the inference and write, say, Yugambeh when the source says 'aborigines' is ruled out by the policies set down at WP:OR/WP:SYNTH.
 * The second problem is that there are many different views in local communities depending on their descent and land claims. You see this over and over again in the sources, with one side of a tribe (a clan challenging what a representative from another clan says. The white land owners and states love this, it gives them the ammo to rebuff legitimate land claims.
 * I started this series of 600+ articles because the few that existed were disgraceful, pathetic gestures and mostly unreadable because they were based of chance googling results, on interested people getting their family version over into the encyclopedia, free composition,etc. Just as in the court process, you only get a land claim secured by passing fairly rigorous documented and verifiable claims, so, in the world of information, you only secure the respect hundreds of years of put-down racism would deny by riveting the details in sources no one can challenge.
 * Dolphin lore is fairly widely attested from the Great Australian Bight through to the coastal tribes of Queensland, but if a source like that on p.18 says Stradbroke islanders engaged them to fish (as did the Moreton Bay tribes generally), and then that the Yugambeh revered the dolphin, one cannot write: 'the Yugambeh fished enlisting the aid of dolphins' even if they did according to family lore, because the source doesn't say that explicitly, and the connection would be 'original research' in Wikipedia terms. I put the three different transcriptions in because that's what the record states - hoping that some knowledgeable readers will get back to their communities and figure out what the correct transcription is of that single incised inscription actually states. The three reporters were being lazy, and that reflects, unfortunately, badly on the community, making passing 'whites' probably mumble 'Bluddy abos can't get their fucken act together'. In other words, one strives to get the best information over, with scientific precision, so that excuses for that kind of putdown can't get leverage or traction from hapless errors or oversights (or lack of oversight). It's tough, I know, but since racism is universal, the only way to beat it is to demand of oneself a scrupulous commitment to precision that gives the baiters out there no room for cheering the Windshuttles of this world. It's not a matter of variant spelling systems: the text reported is incised on stone in one script, one orthoography (which may represent a phrasing that is right for one dialect, but said differently in another). All one need do is get a photo of the clear text, and see which source properly reproduces it. This hasn't been done.
 * I agree with you re Tindale, and I am slowly compiling criticisms of his approach for the Norman Tindale page. But again, he happens to be, for Wikipedia purposes, a fundamental source, so one has to add his views, particularly because as often as not, he interviewed a huge number of survivors of the genocide who still remembered good parts of their traditional lore for their specific tribes before that was reduced to dribs and drabs by the passage of time, the erosion of memory or, as often, by the breakdown of the strict tribal marriage laws, so that large communities of aboriginals retained lore mixing several distinct traditions, coming from grandparents who hailed from different backgrounds. What Tindale was trying to do was to establish the uniqueness of each tribe, salvaging the lore specific to each historically, before whites came in and  ravaged these distinct, complex social universes and more or less, in the early colonial ethnography, depicted aboriginals everywhere as identical (they are 'cannibals, who eat their kids, practice infanticide etc.etc.etc.,' all distortions that twist rituals in order to vindicate the white man's 'superiority'.
 * What I'm doing is getting all pages organized in one format, searching all of the sources I can find which I then provide links to, so that any other editor can click on them and pursue page improvements on the basis of those sources. I'm trying to do the boring legwork so that editors can be saved hours and hours searching for accessible copies of the material that, per Wikipedia rules, will form the only acceptable basis for the article. I'm delighted therefore to see any new editor come in and join the project - whose dimensions are far larger than anything I can offer personally and require many more committed hands than are visible at this early stage. All you need do is examine the protocols of wiki editing, which explain 99% of my edits, and removals or rewrites. I mightn't like these rules, but I have to live by them (much like life itself). So I look forward to your continuing work here, and if you need any help, don't hesitate to contact me on the talk page or otherwise.Nishidani (talk) 09:46, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Dugandan Fassifern massacres of 1860
"Another incident was the Dugandan and Fassifern scrub massacres by the Native Police Force, retold by survivors and their descendants."

These incidents appear to refer to occurrences among the Yugambeh’s northern neighbours, the Jagera/Ugarapul peoples at Fassifern and the Dugandan scrubs. It was taken down from Cyclone Jack a few days before he died.(Bill Rosser,Up Rode the Troopers: The Black Police in Queensland,  University of Queensland Press, 1990 9780702222245 p.91. See also  Gordon Reid, Review:  Up rode the troopers: the black police in Queensland by Bill Rosser Aboriginal History, Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (1990), pp. 236-237, and Timothy Bottoms, 'Conspiracy Of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times,' Allen & Unwin 2009 p.23) No doubt remnants intermixed with Yugambeh people and stories of such massacres were transmitted by the latter as part of their larger tradition of descent. But unless we have a source that makes a connection, we can't tie it in to Yugambeh history. Nishidani (talk) 16:11, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Not every idiot who gets a published book is RS
The Yugambeh are now often called collectively the Kombumeri, a family group claiming the whole of the Gold Coast on the grounds they are the traditional owners of all the area drained by the Logan, Albert, Coomera and Nerang rivers, including the Tallebudgera Creek.[3] The term actually refers to one clan of the Yugambeh. and first came into use in 1913 when a schoolteacher, John Lane, gave a word list of the language of the Wangerriburra, which he had obtained from Bullum (aka John Allen), described as the last survivor of that tribe with any knowledge of their language.[4] Before that time, authorities such as Archibald Meston called the aboriginals in the Nerang river area the Talgiburri while other sources spoke of them as the Nerangballum. [5]

Germaine Greer has no qualifications in Anthropology or Linguistics. The main topic of her book isn't Indigenous history, and the stuff written is clearly opinion. Kombumerri haa not become a generic word for Yugambeh.

I started working on his page so I could get the truth out about my people. Not to watch all my hard work be twisted and distorted by people who know anything about us and aren't even from here.BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 22:03, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
 * You introduced a source that was self-published. Many sources here are written by people with no qualifications in the required field. It's not allowed on Wikipedia to use self-published sources. Greer is RS. Ethnic authenticity has nothing to do with the 'truth'. Who are you speaking for? Allen per Lane said that the Nerang tribe dialect (Kombumeri? we don't know because there were two other NSW  tribes in that area as well, the Minyungbal and Kalibal) was mutually unintelligible with some other (Yugambeh) dialects, meaning probably quite distinct cultures. In many sources I have read there is utter, repeated confusion even about tribe boundaries, tribes versus clans, languages, customs.Nishidani (talk) 23:19, 8 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Greer is absolutely not a WP:RS on to a matter of disputed fact on indigenous issues: she has no qualifications, background, experience, knowledge or anything else in the area that would allow us to rely on her conclusions - rather, she's an opinion writer with no claim to being more than that. We do our readers no favour by citing obviously and ridiculously unreliable sources on contentious issues. We also don't help our readers by established users being rude to new users with a better knowledge of their subject area than them. Please don't get discouraged by this, User:BlackfullaLinguist - you're doing a brilliant job, and I will keep a closer eye on this article to help keep this kind of dreck out. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 23:55, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
 * A lot of the composition of this page was pure unsourced editorializing. There were ratshit sources, and no sources for key claims. Not a murmur from either of you. As soon as I start to measure text against sources, you both get upset. You ripped the guts out of a lot of work over one small dispute, whether the Yugambeh fished with dolphins on the Queensland coast. Nishidani (talk) 09:12, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * You introduced a swathe of questionable material referenced to a non-WP:RS, sassed BlackfullaLinguist for raising the obvious problems with it, and then tried to revert me rather than actually discussing your edits here. I have nothing to add either way about dolphin fishing, but the mass use of Greer was ludicrous and warranted intervention. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 09:27, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I.e. you didn't even take the trouble to examine what you were reverting out. You took out in your blanket revert material from Lane and Allen (1913) documenting the massacres visited on the Yugambeh; You obliterated my addition of Best and Barlow’s Kombumerri, Saltwater People; y7ou elided Margaret C. Sharpe‘s remark on Dalgaybara when she is an acknowleged authority on Yugambeh, just because Greer uncontroversially cited it, and much else. I'll approach the appropriate boards. Blackfellalinguist stated he was unfamiliar with Wiki practices. They are strict, and you are promoting WP:OR by mechanically backing anything he says his relatives told him. In other words you are gutting with out looking at the merits of edits, material that reliably documents Yugambeh history, even when  not from Greer. So much for careful attention to detail and concern for the indigenous, whose massacres you dislike having mentioned? Nishidani (talk) 11:27, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Not sure why you're acting like re-adding the non-controversial aspects of your edit would be an issue. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 11:37, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * If it was non-controversial, why did to gut it? You're supposed to read what you edit. Yuou didn't, and that carelessness is typical of these pages.Nishidani (talk) 12:24, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Moreover, Rory O'Connor is a recognised expert in his field who is treated as an authority on such in other reliable sources (per Identifying and using self-published works). Accordingly, his book is a WP:RS. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 00:06, 9 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Rory O'Connor is the CEO of the Yugambeh Museum, he's appeared on the ABC's Drum News program discussing Indigenous topics, and is called upon by numerous government departments such as Dept. Education, DATSIP, and GOLDOC for information and advice on local SE-QLD Aboriginal people. Germaine Greer on the other hand, is a womba who purchased land in the area, claimed she wanted to give it back to local Aboriginal people, then wrote a distorted version of our history and culture to justify not doing so. The chapters in the book and everything she wrote can not be taken as unbiased or without a conflict of interest, she specifically even states her 'research' shows that she 'owns' the land now.


 * Also, to that Kalibal and Minyungbal stuff. I know there is probably not a RS for this, but here is what I know. Tindale's Kalibal is probably the Gullibal/Gullybal fellas, who according to them go from near Unumgar to the edge of the Tweed caldera, with the macpherson range as their border, and south to just past Kyogle, this is also backed up by maps produced by the Geyteenbeeks, Crowley, and Keats. The only source Tindale has for Kalibal is Joshua Bray and his own work in the 40's, he clearly has misinterpreted Bray, because the Mooburra do no claim outside of the caldera and Bray never uses the term Kalibal/Gullibal when referring to his group anyway, so the only source for the Kalibal within the Caldera and north of the range is Tindale himself, yet we have a larger amount of sources disproving that - He has clearly conflated two seperate groups, the Kyogle people and the Murwillumbah clan group. The Gullibal actually joined their native title with the Githabul, that's why their claim went from the caldera to out past Woodenbong. As for the term Minyangbal, EVERYONE HERE IN THE NORTH IS A MINYANGBAL FELLA. It is not the name of a seperate group, the people from the Byron Bay area call themselves 'Ngarakwal/Arakwal', but Minyang is our word for What in the north, any one of us can be called Minyangbal, it's a moniker for a few dialects, and I believe their is an RS for this somewhere (Dr. Sharpe, maybe) If you look at the Smythe, Geyteenbeek, Crowley, Keats and even Calley map, you'll see that Minyangbal has been used for different northern areas in all of them. Livingstone does not say that the group he is describing and the Tweed people are the same, he says:

''The Minyung dialect is spoken at Byron Bay and on the Brunswick River. The natives on the Richmond River have a sister dialect called the Nyug ; those on the Tweed call their own Ngando or Ngandowal, but the Minyung they call Ngendo. The words minyug and nyug mean 'what"? or 'something,' for they are used either interrogatively or assertively. Similarly, the words ngando and ngendo mean 'who'? or 'somebody.' These three dialects are so closely related that they may be regarded as one language ; it is understood from the Clarence River in New South Wales northward to the Logan in Queensland. For this language the aborigines have no general name.''


 * While oddly worded, he clearly says 'These three dialects' and talks of three separate people 'the byron bay and brunswick river people', the 'richmond river people', and the 'tweed people. I.e, what we know as the Arakwal, Nyangbal, and Ngandowal. Tindale conflates a number of clans, and another dialect group into his 'Minyangbal'. Also, this naming situation is a common thing, we have names used by others, names used by ourselves, and all the variations. My own clan we call 'Migani', Bullum called 'Migunburri', one uncle says 'Balgaburri', Muliburra is also used - duggai are the only ones who are confused about our names and boundaries, there is actually no confusion amongst our mobs about who belongs where. Instead of letting people like Tindale decide who is a people, clan, language/dialect group perhaps we should be using better source material. While he may be the only source for some mobs, this area has extensive research done, and a lot better maps have been produced. Also, while some of the families and clans met whitefellas quite early on, some didn't. My own grandmother was born on the banks of Running Creek in a gunyah and lived traditional until she was about 11, she is also still alive. We're not some decimated people who have forgotten our history and need to rely on old whitefella papers to get it back. Also, your comments about the Dugandan and Fassifern massacres are not correct, the Dugandan scrub actually stretched from near Boonah right to Mt joyce, and south to Maroon (which is Yugambeh country), my nan's great-grandfather was a survivor of the massacres at Maroon, Wheeler also took a Migani woman as his 'wife' - I don't know if you'll find that in the history books, but we have members in our mob who are descendants of him and her. During his rampage through Dugandan and Fassifern, he shot up the mt. barney camp, the maroon camp, the creek camp, and then went into Yugarapul country and massacred them in the Fassifern. Also, Uncle Bullum is very well-remembered, as I write this, I am in an office space over from a Kombumerri Elder who knew him as a little girl and would often hide his walking cane as a joke; Kombumerri, Jabuburri, Talgiburri, Nerang Ballun, all literally mean the same thing to us, totem association name, responsibility association name, country association name. How hard is the concept that one thing has many names depending on how you look at it and who you are?BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 02:30, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * It's easy to criticize Tindale - all modern experts do, as is proper. Knowledge is cumulative, but we stand on the shoulders of giants, and he was one, one who went into minute detail sitting in camps to try and get the oldest version of things before whites decimated Aborigines and burnt out a large part of their traditional lore. In Tindale's day, every scholar mocked R. H. Mathews for his amateurism and repetitiveness, but what Tindale says of that gentle fellow, who was one of the few people careful about how to approach people for information - he wouldn't barge in, or patronize: when he sighted an encampment, he would quietly make camp a discreet distance away, and cook etc., waiting for the aborigines to size him up, and decide whether they thought it worth their while to approach him. Tindale admired him for this, and adopted similar methods. Of course he got things wrong. I've corrected dozens of mistakes while checking his sources for linking to these pages, but he wrote down faithfully what many of the last fluent speakers of hundreds of tribes told him and one should be exceptionally careful in claiming that memories recorded several decades later are superior to what he collected. He's not a bible, his maps are problematical, he can cause confusion, but whether we like it or not, his classic must serve as the foundational text, and then, entry by entry, corrected whenever we can find better contemporary scholarship. My father drummed into me, with many a comic yarn, how unreliable our tribal memories can be - the Irish were bullshit artists - and our family's goes back 2 and a half century. I can't even tell many of my relatives what I know of their parents's stories because they would be upset. I was taught, learning classical Greek, to check relentlessly Greek primary sources, esp. when Greeks wrote about foreign peoples, to detect the ethnic bias, and I try to apply that to all the fields I work in. The 'truth' is often far more complex and 'imaginative' than our common versions of it allow. I'm all for describing difficulties, even things that contradict what I grew up to believe. Nishidani (talk) 20:52, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Aboriginal lore is not a game of chinese whispers, it is an extremely complicated practise of repetition, fact-checking, and careful study. Our oral tradition is very strong, which is why there is a conflict in how we see research. For one, people have the 'right to speak for X', whether that was a place, story, etc. Tindale and many others do not tell us who they got their information from, therefore under Aboriginal methods, the research is already tainted. Whitefellas don'tseem to see it like that. My people value source material that mentions their informants, like allen or cunningham (Bullum and Culham were very well known and respected people). Im not sure about tribal memories in other countries, but they are no comparison to ours. There is also a lot of research that backs up our strong oral trzditions, so this isnt a new po oint, duggai have known for a while now that our stories aren't just fairytales. Also, I'm going to be honest, I know a few mobs around the ciiuntry and we all look at tindale like huh? Half the time I'm not sure what he was even trying to document, a people, a language group, or a dialect, the map of our area looks like a mkxture of all of them. My point is also, if Tindale says X, but I have Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah saying Y, clearly Tindale is the minority view and I dont see the point of adding in what is obviously incorrect information when it has Tindale as a single source. Also, when tindale says these are his sources, but his sources dont say what he saying, that also seems suspect to me. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 00:17, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
 * What we know of most aboriginal languages, what saved them from extinction, was whitefella fieldwork. You are raising blanket suspicions about the reliability of anything recorded by an outgroup if it conflicts with what a modern ingroup believes, thinks, has had transmitted by being handed down, or ascertained. Reconstruction of these 600 worlds is not ridiculous dilemma between 'believe us' or 'believe them'. It is collaborative, in which both approaches feel out common ground and methods for sifting out the probable truths behind the disiecta membra of what remains of the past. A native tradition can be as confused as accounts given by a whitefella: the history of internecine disputes about land title between descendants of different tribes or clans is widely documented.
 * The Bundjalung-Yugambeh tribes are known for the tenacity of their fight to resist deculturating absorption. But I think you are making an error in insisting, apparently, that there is a conflict between the techniques of modern research ('academic' scholarship is what optimally Wikipedia formally prioritizes) and oral lore. It's not about 'whitefellas' versus 'us' (in the political dimension this has far more weight of course). You write:'Tindale and many others do not tell us who they got their information from, therefore under Aboriginal methods, the research is already tainted'. I’ve no need to be told of Tindale’s defects: I’m documenting that regularly. But you are dead wrong. He is RS, warts and all, and his massive archives preserve huge volumes of material that have not been transmitted by indigenous generations. Actually Tindale meticulously told us where he got his information from, only it is unpublished: he alone wrote out the genealogies of some 50,000 people of Aboriginal descent: this like most of his work, is unpublished, but people of aboriginal descent can get permission to access those records and reconstruct what their own traditions have failed, through genocide and all the devastations of imperial deculturation, to preserve.
 * Wikipedia’s rules do not allow editors to use private, family or group knowledge that has not been reliably published, preferably in peer-reviewed work.Nishidani (talk) 10:56, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I was unaware we could request his work. I shall have my people request these files and see what has been written. Also, I was not saying he wasn't wiki RS, he is just not Yugambeh RS. As long as it's noted that his opinions are his, I have no issue with including it in the page. It's not as if he did much anyway, but, we shall see what these files hold. I have his 'jukambe' wordlists. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 14:21, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

See for all Queensland names, and also here. You can obtain them from Queensland Library sources. Those collected at Woodenbong in your area are there, but given the dispersion, it’s best to check the whole name list against your knowledge of genealogies rather than focus on one collection site. He also collected a lot from NSW, which may have relevance. Generally, you can email Ali Abdullah-Highfold Family and Community History Consultant at ali.abdullah-highfold@samuseum.sa.gov.au for  inquiries as to how to go about this.Nishidani (talk) 17:05, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
 * We don't cite sources because they are right or correct, and if you believe I espouse slavishly what Tindale or any other source may state, I think you are misreading. We cite sources, optimally, because they are  writers of peer-reviewed scholarship printed by mainstream presses for what each author states on a given argument. In the case of Tindale, one cites his views on, say, the Yugambeh and successively adds later scholarship questioning this or that detail, without making a judgement as to who is correct. It is left to the reader to judge. I'll illustrate this  by showing how the dolphin story developed. We can't state it is 'true' of the Yugambeh. We can state who first  wrote it down, and what reliable sources (some of them skeptical) state about it. This is the way both Wikipedia and all academic scholarship works, with the difference that, a wikipedian editor is forbidden to write out inferences, synthesize as personal generalizations, on the basis of the sources (s)he uses. Such judgements may only be cited when they are found in reliably written sources. I know it's tough, but they are the house rules.Nishidani (talk) 14:47, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

Discuss Greer/O'Connor
For their reliability on Wikipedia see here.

The Yugambeh are now often called collectively the Kombumeri, a family group claiming the whole of the Gold Coast on the grounds they are the traditional owners of all the area drained by the Logan, Albert, Coomera and Nerang rivers, including the Tallebudgera Creek. The term originally referred to one clan of the Yugambeh. and first came into use in 1913 when a schoolteacher, John Lane, gave a word list of the language of the Wangerriburra, which he had obtained from Bullum (aka John Allen), described as the last survivor of that tribe with any knowledge of their language. Before that time, authorities such as Archibald Meston called the aboriginals in the Nerang river area the Talgiburri while other sources spoke of them as the Nerangballum.


 * What is controversial about this? Please list by bulleting objections.Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

My objections are as followed:
 * Greer's opinion that the Yugambeh are now often called collectively thr Kombumerri is not fact. She has no history with the topic or people, and she cites no primary or secondary sources to back her claim. It would have to prefaced with 'according to Germaine Greer...' and to do so would give her undue weight as an expert.
 * Saying that all the clans are now called by one clans name is offensive and controversial to the other groups. - If you're going to cite something so controversial it will need more than a single source. Particularly when dealing with Living Culture.
 * The term Kombumerri did not 'first come into use' because of a whiteman, that is incredibly euro-centric. Lanes page does not explicitly state that.
 * The last point is valid, it's an observation of the written record, not the people. Either way it would belong on the Kombumerri clan page. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 14:54, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * (a) When was the word Kombumerri first attested? (b)You are stating that the Yugambeh are not represented by the Kombumerri Corporation? Nishidani (talk) 16:09, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * From the outset, there has been deep confusion in this article, which I, for one, hope to slowly fix. The confusion comes from asserting as facts matters which the technical literature does not treat as facts but as hypotheses. I'll give you one example: Cunningham 1969 p.71 provides a map in which represents the Yugumbir (Yugumbeh) as inland tribes, to be clearly distinguished from the coastal Ngaragwal, and adduces (p.22) Allen's own testimony (p.122) was a Bandjalung language mutually unintelligible with Yugambir. Cunningham therefore treats the Ngaragwal as a distinct tribe east to the coast of the Yugambeh. (pp.96-98) All of this is collapsed in popular treatments like the one you think is RS. For Rory O'Connor's The Kombumerri : Aboriginal People of the Gold Coast, 1997 is described as follows:' In this book the author presents information from an Aboriginal perspective 'on the Aboriginal Kombumerri people of the Gold Coast and Beaudesert Region, i.e. he is conflating as Koombumerri people groups that at least some authoritative scholars assert are distinct in language, environment and culture. This is the point Greer was making.Nishidani (talk) 21:09, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Cunningham and Sharpe are the same person, the Cunningham paper it purely based on her information collected from Joe Culham and a litrature review, but her later works draw on a larger source of material and informants. The story in Allen is highly speculative, it says that an Albert Black could not understand a Nerang black, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, the most obvious being that language is not extinct and speakers of different dialects can communicate fine. My personal opinion is that in the Allen story, it was prpbably a Jandai speaker they met at Nerang (The Jandai vosited and lived with the kombumerri frequently), again that is just conjecture. Also, Lentz and Sharpe note, the Gold coast tribes refugees mostly ended up in Beaudesert, where language was still spoken well into the 60s. (This is also why there is mention of Kombumerri in Beaudesert as in rory's book, clans also lived in each others countries during particular seasons and ritual times, so you would find clans living all over, it is not a collapsed treatment to talk about Kombumerri in Beaudesert.) The confusion in this article came from vandal edits, going through the records you can clearly see that at one stage, an I.P based editor has replaced all the instances of Yugambeh with Kombumerri, this may be more comnected to clan disputes, as we do have families who claim 'they are the only Gold coast family), but modern disputes between descendants are not new and wikipedia is not place to be fanning them. Also, the the words tribe, language group, etc make it confusing, Cunninghams treatment of Ngarangwal as a seperate tribe is due to clan and political structuring. The dialect groupings form a second lay of our social stratosphere. The language group at the top (Miban), our dialect groups (Yugambeh/Yugambir, Ngarangwal and Nganduwal), our clans (the 9 clans), then the familys (paternal lines, roughly 4-6 each clan). Their is a very complicated relationship between all of these elements and unfortunately there isnt any published material that properly exlains it all. My issue was not that John allen was the fhe first written attestation of kombumerri, my issue was the phrasing implied that it did not exist before 1913, which is clearly not true. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 10:52, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I'll get back in some detail tomorrow. Allen's use of Kombumerri to designate the Nerang river people whose language he said was unintelligible is an example of an exonym, a label applied by an outside people to their neighbours. If so, the problem technically would be, how did the Nerang people call themselves? Meston and others refer to a root talgi- as in Talgiburra. The dissonance in sources might be explained that way, Talgiburra or its likes being an autonym. By the way, I've figured out the dolphin story. It comes from Gresky 1947 p.60 of course. I think that matter should go into the Kombumerri clan page, and I will draft it tomorrow, with out 10 sources. There's another reason for puytting it there: the page is thin. It would be nice to showcase this particular feature, and deal with other material on the Nerang group in depth.
 * The fuckup on this page which first caught my eye was the godawful linguistic section. It's a complete and misleading mess and prejudices the page from thereone. We should iron this out. Dixon summing up the scholarship in 2002 wrote:
 * "Mf Banjalung-Cunningham (1969); Geytenbeek and Geytenbeek 1971); Crowley (1979). Further dialects include: Yugumbir, Nganduwal, Minjangbal, Njangbal, Biriin, Bayulgil, Waalubal, Dinggabal, Wiyabal, Gidabal, Galibal, Wudjeebal (Dixon 2002 p.xxxiv"
 * This is surer ground for a rewrite than the messily selective synopsis we have here. Are you okay with this. By the way I don't have Crowley, Geytenbeek, Holmer or Sharpe's later work, and if you could share copies without trouble in some pdf format, I'd be deeply obliged. I have masses of jstor material on my computer and if there's anything about any topic you can't get from them, I can get it for you instantaneously.Nishidani (talk) 20:33, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm very aware of what an exonym and endonym are, I am an Anthropologist. There are a wide range of labels used amongst community, Kombumerri may have been an exonym, but it may also have been an autonym, or a mere country descripter (Kombumerri can mean 'Near Kombu worms' in language as well). The word used by meston is corruption of Dalngay, it is still in use, and is also a place name. The neighbouring Tweed Clan is also called Dalngayngin in language. Also, I don't understand what you mean about the Linguistics section, I wrote it. The varieties you listed form part of the Yugambeh-Bundjalung language group, which according to traditional knowledge is broken up into 3 languages(Githabul, Bundjalung and Yugambeh, the linguists say 4 (they split bundjalung into east and west groups), crowley called these languages Upper-Clarence-Condamine (Githabul), Middle Clarence (Western Bundjalung), Lower Richmond (Eastern Bundjalung). Each language has 3-5 dialects, which is what you listed above. The Yugam or Miban people speak dialects of Tweed-Albert,or Yugambeh/Mibanah in language, these dialects are typically called Yugambeh or Yugambir, Ngarangwal (which Crowley claimed was actually made of 3 smaller dialects, but considering we have 3 clans in that area they may have been clan varieties) and Nganduwal. The other varieties mentioned are part of different languages and spoken by people elsewhere. What edits would you have in mind? Have you seen Yugambeh-Bundjalung languages? BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 11:06, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Discuss (2)
"The coastal clans of the area were hunters, gatherers and fishers. The Stradbroke Island blacks and Kombumerri are reported to have had dolphins to aid them in the hunting and fishing processes; on the sight of a shoal of mullet Kombumerri men would hit the water with their spears to signal their dolphins, the dolphins, whom had been given individual names, would then chase the shoal towards the shore, trapping them in the shallows and allowing the men to net and spear the fish."

My objection aside from the second source, is that
 * (a) This is a page about the Yugambeh, not about one clan
 * (b) by placing on it material about one clan, whose name is now widely used to refer to the Yugambeh (synecdoche) editors are causing potential confusion for readers.
 * (c) we have a page specifically for the Kombumerri clan, where this material would comfortably fit.Nishidani (talk) 14:18, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
 * (d)'A number of early sources suggest that the Stradbroke tribe was assisted in their fishing by friendly dolphin.'Longhurst 1980 p.18
 * In none of the nearly reports I am familiar with do sources mention non-Stradbroke tribes being assisted by friendly dolphins. We have for that two very late sources for extending the practice to the Kombumerri clan. They may be correct. I don't know but the usual practice is to cite these inaccessible sources verbatim on the page, so we can see where that inference or tradition came from. This hasn't been done.Nishidani (talk) 14:38, 9 March 2018 (UTC)


 * I've just come to the realisation that you don't think the Kombumerri inhabited Stradbroke, which they did from Curan Cove south. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 03:17, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I have no set opinions. I go by sources, and take what they say all to be provisory. By the way, is your offer here still good? I won't take it badly if you think I'm a pain in the arse, and not worth collaborating with. A lot of editors elsewhere have that view:)Nishidani (talk) 18:08, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Do you have an email or such? I don't think you're a pain in the arse, I just want you to know that this page is extremely important, for some duggai it is literally the only bit of information they bother to access about us - for thousands of TAFE, UNI, and high school kids this is where we direct them (Only as of September last year when I started on the page), and now that you popped up, my biggest concern is the page being filled with inaccurate or misleading statements. Not that I believe that is your intentions, I just know whitefella read an old paper, and no matter how silly it sounds theyll take it as fact and out it everywhere. My only concern in giving you material is that you will put things up that are incorrect, but of course, since an old white guy said it it's good enough for wikipedia - hence my preference for openly attributing the author.BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 11:14, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
 * To email me look at the left hand columns at User:Nishidani where you will see 'Email this user'. Click on that and Robert's a close relative.
 * I didn't pop up. This is just one of 700 articles on aborigines that I am writing or revising because the whole topic was neglected or ignored. Most existing pages, when I began this work in September 2016 were a disgraceful mess, poorly sourced, full of errors, and composed in an arbitrary slapdash fashion. It's not me, surely?, 'filling up' the page with 'inaccurate or misleading statements'. I don't take anything as a 'fact', though I'm pretty sure I was born and that I know my wife's name.
 * What I put onto these pages conforms as far as possible to what the strongest reading of Wikipedia's house rules obliges editors to do. I.e. identify reliable sources (WP:RS), which optimally must come from experts who have been reliably published by mainstream outlets; add each item without distorting the content in the source; striving to be neutral (WP:NPOV) and avoiding partisanship if the matter is under dispute. My personal ambition is to restore to the landscape the original inhabitants and owners of Australia - every page on a town, city or place in Australia should be annotated with a link to the original tribe whose territory it was before colonial invasion, dispossession and genocide literally and figuratively wiped them off the map.
 * If through oversight, incompetence, or incomprehension I make a mistake in summarizing a source, then other editors are obliged to pick me up on it, notify the page, and, if it turns out to be a disagreement, ask for neutral outside editors to adjudicate. It's laborious at times, but that's how this encyclopedia functions.Nishidani (talk) 12:11, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

To clarify, I meant you popped up on this page less than a month ago (17th of Feb according to the history). You realise not all us blackfellas are the same, those 699 other articles aren't us, we are our own people. Before I started here in September this page had barely 20 edits, and was riddled with vandalism. I do appreciate your work, you can write out all the massacre stories as far as I'm concerned, I'd rather vomit than read that gunang. Dagay need to see it though, so it is appreciated (I tell Mob to skip that the Settlement period section when reading the page). Also, I didnt realise I could remove things that werent in the sources, so I didnt touch the things you had removed, thank you for that. I haven't had any issue with your edits, the germaine greer thing just really pushed a button, it's a long story. I feel like you misinterpret me sometimes, I didn't say the page was being filled up..., I said my biggest concern is the page being filled up..., as in it is something yet to happen. Keep up the good work. I will attempt to email you tomorrow (can i attach documents with the wiki email?)BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 12:40, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I may have misinterpreted you. Doing so many aboriginal articles, I have had to constantly weigh competing claims from descent groups, who unfortunately are in dispute. It's no easy matter for an outsider to figure out what's going on when essentially the same people by descent split into factions - giving the rails' run to genocidal denialists in the Australian court system - as you get in to differences of opinion over land claims between the Jagera and the Turrbal, the rifts in the Awabakal, the Kurnai/Gunai vs Gunai, Harry Boyd's squabble, as a Ngarakwal/Githabul elder, with Bunjalung claims; Larrakia bickering; differences between Dyugan and Yawuru, though they sorted that one out; who gets the upperhand in the recently formed Martu Wangka aggregation; unresolved tensions between the Ngambri,  Ngarigo,Walgalu andNgunnawal over the Canberra area, metc.etc.
 * When I get this mess of competing claims, I can't decide who's right. I simply muster and investigate what solid available sources say, and that's it. It's up to the reader to figure out, if that matters, where the probabilities lie.
 * As to attachments, if you use that email service you will note it has an attachment option below the window. Click on that and it will access your computer, and you search for the document you want attached and when found, you click on the document and it is automatically uploaded to the email. Sending one at a time is the best thing. And there's no hurry. I guess if you decide to share these sources, I will only be able to repay the debt by learning Yugambeh, instead of Yidin, as I've been thinking of doing.Nishidani (talk) 13:21, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I can see your problem, seems tiring. I can assure you I'm not a factionist, and my goal is to represent all familys and clans respectfully... including Uncle Harrys. Btw, should you have any questions about Uncle harry boyd, ask away. His connections here actually run through an old fella called Dirabah Andrews (he is mentioned in Gresty as one of the old residents of Numinbah). Dirabah was also given a breast plate call him king of murwillumbah, this is what he calls his Ngarakwal side, he is also decended from Githabul mob too. I once asked Dr. Margaret Sharpe why she thought we in the north part of the Yugambeh-Bundjalung language group did not prefer the term Bundjalung (from her view, I have my own tradition dreaming view of it), while groups south did, and she told me that there was a difference of intiation, north of the Bruxner highway (which takes in Yugambeh, githabul, nganduwal, ngarangwal, galibal, dinggabal and geynon). This also lined up with stories, and thankfully Dr. Sharpe is publishing this in a new chapter she is writing for a book, so i will get the source when it becomes available. Did you recieve the copy of sharpes work I emailed? BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 10:19, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes! Thanks!Nishidani (talk) 11:45, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

New class and importance rating
I updated the class from start to C, and importance from low to mid. Please let me know if you do not agree. Just trying to learn how this system works. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 08:13, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The aim is to get this to Good article status. Once we have reviewed it all, we can get an external editor or a competent technician to look at it and perhaps go for a DYK (Did you know) citation, which helps in the process.Nishidani (talk) 12:02, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
 * BL, you could make a request on the talk pages of the WikiProjects listed in the banner at the top of this page. It's possible that different Projects could give it different importance rating, for example the QLD project might consider it of higher importance than the overall Australia Project. However, my impression is that people don't pay much regard to "importance" ratings anyway. But I've added them to the banner at the top, just to make it a bit easier in case anyone does want to change it. --NSH001 (talk) 14:15, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Shire categories
I don't think that the city/shire categories, , are appropriate here. Other than the coincidence of co-location, is there something linking the Yugambeh people with the LGAs? Mitch Ames (talk) 12:47, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Also, which is for "is a coastal city". (Possibly the author intended , which is for the LGA.) Mitch Ames (talk) 12:17, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * It probably should be the other way around, with the shires sub categories of Yugambeh country as they are on their land and as such would consult with the Yugambeh elders about anything relating to the country. Gnangarra 13:31, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * The shires may well be on Yugambeh country, but I think that categories – LGAs and "Aboriginal peoples of ..." – should be independent, because they serve different purposes. For comparison, Noongar and are not in LGA categories, even though the City of Perth acknowledges, at the bottom of their web page, that it is on Noongar country. Mitch Ames (talk) 12:17, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Norman Tindale
The use of Tindale as source should be done with care and should be assigned to specific historical positions as much of Tindales work has been superseded or more recently rejected. Only other observation is reducing the number of sub headings and condensing the section into paragraphs making it more of a story. Gnangarra 13:35, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * He has been used with care, with just 4 citations in 59 notes. I think anyone looking at the critical material I added to his bio (requiring much more work) will see that. The numerous problems with this very poorly organized page have nothing to do with Tindale's presence on it.Nishidani (talk) 16:40, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Nishidani, when I asked for the page to be reviewed, I was hoping people would provide constructive criticism, like Gnangarra and as I mentioned the Yugambeh people page is without precendant among  Indigenous Australian pages, so there isn't much I can compare for organisation. If you could elaborate on 'very poorly organised' it would be much appreciated. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 14:39, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

comparative article
The article Noongar is one that you can use as a guide on how to construct information about country and its people. That article has more detail less subsections, also has sub articles for the 14 clans like Whadjuk. There is also Category:Noongar which has additional articles related to Noongar. I've been part of a group for the last 5 years has been building a Nyungar Language Wikipedia at https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nys/Keny_mia Gnangarra 14:53, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that. A lot of people's articles in this area arent as helpful, nice to see Perth showing the way Hah. A group seems like a good idea, wonder how many other people I could convince to help. How many are in your group? Or how many do you think would be a good aim? Also... Oddest irony though, in Yugambeh language ngan'gara is a word for a liar/untrustworthy person, which I thought was quite a funny coincidence. What does it mean your ways? BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 15:44, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Also, is there a policy on subsections?  I thought they were quite useful for people to jump to particular sections.  The Noongar page is nice, I feel like it's a bit more difficult to navigate though. Just my thoughts. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 15:55, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Both the Noongar and Yugambeh articles were driven initially, and still bear strong traces of, a desire to establish an overview of a modern political and cultural unity of identity between distinct groups, whose languages and dialects, culinary and hunting traditions varied significantly according to the distinct differences in their habitat and history. I am interested in differences, not homogenization, be it driven by white processes of modernization or the understandable defensive reaction by people of aborioginal descent to reconstruct a new, supra-clan, supra-tribal identity. I found both articles were also and still are vitiated by poor sourcing, privileging modern identitarian websites over the hard evidence of the historical record, be it in whiteman ethnographies or modern studies of traditional oral history. Let me illustrate
 * The article on Noongar, where it is sourced, comes mainly from work I did to try and fix a piece of vague free composition
 * It still remains at a very basic level of composition, the problem being that Noongar is a modern collective term for people descending from 14 or so distinct tribes, each of which would have had a vocabulary of some 5000 words at a minum.
 * Leaving out the Wiilman, Wardandi, Pindjarup and Njunga for which data are not available, examine the similarities and differences of the various nwords for just 4 basic concepts.


 * {| class="wikitable"

! tribe !! father !! mother !!tame dog!!wild dog | rowspan=1 | Ballardong ||  maman  || unkan  ||    doorda || yockine 
 * rowspan=1 | Amangu || ammatha || agootha ||  hotther||
 * rowspan=1 | Amangu || ammatha || agootha ||  hotther||
 * rowspan=1 |  Yued ||  mamman  ||   nangan  ||    dura umbanon || dura waiwe 
 * rowspan=1 | Kaneang  ||  mammon  ||  nongan  ||    dwoda || yakkine 
 * rowspan=1 |  Koreng  ||  mam  ||  ngangk  ||    twurt || moakin
 * rowspan=1 | Mineng ||  mam  ||  nginung, ngyank, nonk  ||    twert ||  moking 
 * rowspan=1 | Njakinjaki   ||  mamon  ||  knockan  ||    dooda. || yokkine 
 * rowspan=1 |  Pibelmen ||  mammon  ||  nungun  ||    dwardar || yakine 
 * rowspan=1 | Whadjuk ||  mamman  ||  jukan.  ||   ||
 * rowspan=1 | Wudjari ||  mann  ||  kun  ||    twart || mookine 
 * }
 * At a glance one can see strong similarities with 'father', less so, but still clear, with 'mother', and with the words for 'dingo' ( and so many other basic terms for wildlife and natural objects), differences obtrude. I'm fine with modern collective identities, but that what interests me is trawling up the distinctive, unique eco-linguistic-mythic features that white civilization wiped out in its systematic ethnocidal policies. The tension between your and my approaches lies here, a difference of focus, and secondly, I don't allow myself to write a line unless I have a quality specialized RS source to provide a documentary warrant for the paraphrase. Far too much in both articles in uninformatively generic, belying the distinctive features of each group, and free composition. Nishidani (talk) 21:37, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * "the Yugambeh people page is without prece n d a nt among Indigenous Australian pages"
 * I don't know what you mean by this (compare many pages like Gunditjmara). Do you mean it is the best page Wikipedia has so far on this topic area? My minimal ideal for a basic overview of an Australian tribe is exemplified by Gadubanud.Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the flaw in your thinking lies in the fact that you think our people are somehow disconnected from our past and are not continuations of our ancient past, these assumptions that these are modern creations, and that 'people of Aboriginal descent' have nothing to offer, besides apparently getting in the way of your 'historical truth' are just offensive to say the least. Also, the comment 'that white civilization wiped out in its systematic ethnocidal policies' is completely inaccurate and a bit of a biased assumption, though they say the victors write the history, don't they? Doesn't make it true though, and I would wholeheartedly argue that white civilisation failed to wipe us or our people out. 'Who gets to define a people and their identity? I would think the people themselves. Who has said / Where is it written that Yugambeh is a 'modern collective identity' besides you? I would argue that the concept of the 'Bundjalung nation' is more akin to the 'modern collective identity' that you suppose. Noongar and the Bundjalung nation are more on the same level as modern constructs, and the vocabulary example you provided could easily apply to Bandjalangic dialects as well. The Yugambeh varieties are a standard mutually intelligible language, and besides some regional vocabulary, the only major grammatical difference is the third person singular pronoun, which differs in 'saltwater', 'freshwater', and 'valley' talk, though if differences between the bangangara* is something you'd like to see more of, I can certainly work on that.
 * and when I said that Yugambeh was without precedent, I meant it was the largest (in terms of readable prose), the Yugambeh article sits at 4,514 words, with Noongar and Gadubanud sitting at 2,860 and 2,037 respectively. I was not implying that the article was better than any other. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 01:54, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I usually stop reading whenever I hear someone start to tell an outsider that he or she of the ingroup represents everybody in that group, expecting the outsider to take their word as an earnest of the authenticity of what she or he may say about anything. I don't trust spokesmen. I trust individuals talking about their experience and knowledge. Nishidani (talk) 09:39, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * , I was not speaking as a Yugambeh person, I was speaking about your view of Aboriginal people in general, and I speak for nobody but myself and those who ask me to do so. I am not a spokesman... This page does not have enough space nor I the years to explain the entirety of my experience and knowledge, but if you want to hear my experience, I imagine I should just make a user page to explain myself, but besides being a Yugambeh man who has been taught quite extensively by his grandparents and other Elders for over 2 decades, I have grown up a native speaker of my language. The linguist Margaret Sharpe has learnt a lot from me and my family, and in fact mentions us in some of her work. She recently did an interview about the Bundjalung dialects and she mentions ME specifically and my work in Yugambeh language. I am also a vital asset in our native title process, and I am privy to knowledge that will probably never see the light of day, our connection report written by the court appointed anthropologist. I am involved with our clans across housing, education,  language,  native title,  and more and I should probably just write a  book instead of bothering with wikipedia, though I am working on a few papers ATM and when published,  I guess I'll be citing myself, and you're not the only linguist here... (Anthropology too), so I feel that the above knowledge and experience should suffice. I'm not looking at this with some nationalist mindset,  I'm looking at this as a privy linguistic-anthropologist, with the added bonus of being a native of his people, frustrated that I can't put everything I know on this article and until it's published elsewhere first, for the time being I can still go through what's out there and find some gifts for Wikipedia.  BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 10:19, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * }
 * At a glance one can see strong similarities with 'father', less so, but still clear, with 'mother', and with the words for 'dingo' ( and so many other basic terms for wildlife and natural objects), differences obtrude. I'm fine with modern collective identities, but that what interests me is trawling up the distinctive, unique eco-linguistic-mythic features that white civilization wiped out in its systematic ethnocidal policies. The tension between your and my approaches lies here, a difference of focus, and secondly, I don't allow myself to write a line unless I have a quality specialized RS source to provide a documentary warrant for the paraphrase. Far too much in both articles in uninformatively generic, belying the distinctive features of each group, and free composition. Nishidani (talk) 21:37, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * "the Yugambeh people page is without prece n d a nt among Indigenous Australian pages"
 * I don't know what you mean by this (compare many pages like Gunditjmara). Do you mean it is the best page Wikipedia has so far on this topic area? My minimal ideal for a basic overview of an Australian tribe is exemplified by Gadubanud.Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the flaw in your thinking lies in the fact that you think our people are somehow disconnected from our past and are not continuations of our ancient past, these assumptions that these are modern creations, and that 'people of Aboriginal descent' have nothing to offer, besides apparently getting in the way of your 'historical truth' are just offensive to say the least. Also, the comment 'that white civilization wiped out in its systematic ethnocidal policies' is completely inaccurate and a bit of a biased assumption, though they say the victors write the history, don't they? Doesn't make it true though, and I would wholeheartedly argue that white civilisation failed to wipe us or our people out. 'Who gets to define a people and their identity? I would think the people themselves. Who has said / Where is it written that Yugambeh is a 'modern collective identity' besides you? I would argue that the concept of the 'Bundjalung nation' is more akin to the 'modern collective identity' that you suppose. Noongar and the Bundjalung nation are more on the same level as modern constructs, and the vocabulary example you provided could easily apply to Bandjalangic dialects as well. The Yugambeh varieties are a standard mutually intelligible language, and besides some regional vocabulary, the only major grammatical difference is the third person singular pronoun, which differs in 'saltwater', 'freshwater', and 'valley' talk, though if differences between the bangangara* is something you'd like to see more of, I can certainly work on that.
 * and when I said that Yugambeh was without precedent, I meant it was the largest (in terms of readable prose), the Yugambeh article sits at 4,514 words, with Noongar and Gadubanud sitting at 2,860 and 2,037 respectively. I was not implying that the article was better than any other. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 01:54, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I usually stop reading whenever I hear someone start to tell an outsider that he or she of the ingroup represents everybody in that group, expecting the outsider to take their word as an earnest of the authenticity of what she or he may say about anything. I don't trust spokesmen. I trust individuals talking about their experience and knowledge. Nishidani (talk) 09:39, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * , I was not speaking as a Yugambeh person, I was speaking about your view of Aboriginal people in general, and I speak for nobody but myself and those who ask me to do so. I am not a spokesman... This page does not have enough space nor I the years to explain the entirety of my experience and knowledge, but if you want to hear my experience, I imagine I should just make a user page to explain myself, but besides being a Yugambeh man who has been taught quite extensively by his grandparents and other Elders for over 2 decades, I have grown up a native speaker of my language. The linguist Margaret Sharpe has learnt a lot from me and my family, and in fact mentions us in some of her work. She recently did an interview about the Bundjalung dialects and she mentions ME specifically and my work in Yugambeh language. I am also a vital asset in our native title process, and I am privy to knowledge that will probably never see the light of day, our connection report written by the court appointed anthropologist. I am involved with our clans across housing, education,  language,  native title,  and more and I should probably just write a  book instead of bothering with wikipedia, though I am working on a few papers ATM and when published,  I guess I'll be citing myself, and you're not the only linguist here... (Anthropology too), so I feel that the above knowledge and experience should suffice. I'm not looking at this with some nationalist mindset,  I'm looking at this as a privy linguistic-anthropologist, with the added bonus of being a native of his people, frustrated that I can't put everything I know on this article and until it's published elsewhere first, for the time being I can still go through what's out there and find some gifts for Wikipedia.  BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 10:19, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * , I was not speaking as a Yugambeh person, I was speaking about your view of Aboriginal people in general, and I speak for nobody but myself and those who ask me to do so. I am not a spokesman... This page does not have enough space nor I the years to explain the entirety of my experience and knowledge, but if you want to hear my experience, I imagine I should just make a user page to explain myself, but besides being a Yugambeh man who has been taught quite extensively by his grandparents and other Elders for over 2 decades, I have grown up a native speaker of my language. The linguist Margaret Sharpe has learnt a lot from me and my family, and in fact mentions us in some of her work. She recently did an interview about the Bundjalung dialects and she mentions ME specifically and my work in Yugambeh language. I am also a vital asset in our native title process, and I am privy to knowledge that will probably never see the light of day, our connection report written by the court appointed anthropologist. I am involved with our clans across housing, education,  language,  native title,  and more and I should probably just write a  book instead of bothering with wikipedia, though I am working on a few papers ATM and when published,  I guess I'll be citing myself, and you're not the only linguist here... (Anthropology too), so I feel that the above knowledge and experience should suffice. I'm not looking at this with some nationalist mindset,  I'm looking at this as a privy linguistic-anthropologist, with the added bonus of being a native of his people, frustrated that I can't put everything I know on this article and until it's published elsewhere first, for the time being I can still go through what's out there and find some gifts for Wikipedia.  BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 10:19, 11 January 2019 (UTC)


 * a few things you need to understand about nyungar language, firstly it is an oral language, the written spellings of the language came from the person who recorded it. There was no one individual who recorded the language across the whole extent of Nyungar country which is an area greater then Western Europe, to north of the region an emphasis is placed more commonly on the first vowel and trails off at the end of a word. This shifts across the languages groups as you move south where the emphasis shifts to the final vowel. To the east where nyungars had common connections to other countries they also shared words with those groups.  Most of the individual people who wrote the language down were not linguists, many were just settlers with some degree of literacy.  To the north east the primary author was Dom Salvado who wrote in spanish and latin, along the south coast there was french explorers who wrote down many of the words.  The rest was people from the UK with the multitude of differences from there and all of these people worked in isolation. One actually needs to ignore the spellings and hear the spoken to understand that the spellings are irrelevant and erroneous for comparisons.  What we have is european created knowledge war over the spellings of language pitting communities against each other. Gnangarra 06:40, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but your good intentions are, really, telling granny how to suck eggs. What you say is exactly what happens with all languages and dialects. I'm a professional linguist,and I have a fair grasp of one Victorian language. I'v e read the relevant early literature on 650+ tribes, I wasted apparently two years, not with my own ethnic identity (I have none, for that matter, by choice) but to give a basic profile to all of those groups so that Australians of all backgrounds can get an inkling of the richness devastated, whether conserved by oral tradition or by whites. Tell the Arrernte that the 6 magnificent volumes Carl Strehlow wrote up on every aspect of their lives, ritual, mythic, ecological etc., is just 'european created knowledge'. I've seen this argument over at least 15 nationalist fields of discourse, and it is intensely boring.Nishidani (talk) 09:21, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

This is not the first time that Nishidani has been aggressive and patronising in these discussions in talk page discussions that won't amount to much. Better to ignore and pay attention to people with useful feedback - you've already done some pretty fantastic work here and I'd love to see more of it. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 10:28, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not being aggressive. I'm making a pleas for people to drop attitudinizing, and actually read widely on the topic before editing a page (b) ensure that the page has sourced information rather than serving as a feel-good and-groupy venue for one's identity (c) and it is not asking much: if I can in my spare time write out 650 articles, those who Iimit their focus to one should be able over the same two years, at least dedicate a week of their time to actually building an article like this up to a readable 8,000-10,000 word article of readable and interesting coverage, rather than complain generically about some putative 'whiteman's' lack of respect. Respect is obligatory in all relationships, but in situations demanding tasking work, it must be earned. Curiosity is attracted by diligent care over details.  I'll take some time to outline what's wrong with the page, then. Nishidani (talk) 11:15, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * no of course not, point taken, your not being aggressive but why would anyone work with someone who acts as you have. What Hope for Open Knowledge? Productive (Armed) vs. Connective (Tribal) Knowledge and Staged Conflict. Understanding that sources based on colonial methodologies are patronising.   Gnangarra 07:42, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I read the paper, and you misuse it. It's a reasonable position, but the substance has been said in a thousand articles and books, and its methodology is ineludibly 'colonial/whitefellerish'. It's an academic speaking to other academics, abstractly, without a salvaged jot or tittle of some obscure piece of indigenous lore. They don't, or didn't, speak like that on Elcho Island, in Borroloola, round the Block, or the at the Big E pub in Redfern  I.e. that brilliant woman Margaret Sharpe  must be patronizing, an exponent of 'colonial methodologies?' Robert M. W. Dixon used 'colonial methodologies' to write his 420 page plus masterpiece The Dyirbal language of north Queensland, thanks to an extraordinary woman Chloe Grant, and George Wilson, who confided her deep understanding to him. But nah, chuck it out, he's a patronizing pom who used 'colonial methodologies'. Toss away everything Milerum told Norman Tindale about Tanganekald language and culture, because Tindale was titrating it all through 'colonial methodologies'. Give the flick pass to Peter Austin 's Dieri dictionary while we're at it. Austin used 'colonial methodologies', and while we're at it chuck out the accumulated details of 150 languages collected by Barry Blake,  Gavan Breen, Luise Hercus, Carl Georg von Brandenstein, Terry Crowley, Carl Strehlow, Ted Strehlow, Geoffrey O'Grady and Ken Hale, all condescending patronizing whitefellas using 'colonial methodologies'. Yeah, fuckem (even if it means wiping out the records of a salvage operation desperatety trying to conserve something of the cultural genius of hundreds of culturally raped peoples). Far better to listen to university lecturers waffle on,  in a thousand books and articles, about cognitive imperialism and the detrimental impact of some generic occidentosis, without even troubling to trudge about for months under a fly-blown sky to eke out some scrap of oral memory retained by a drover, a shearer or whoever in the bush or the outback.Nishidani (talk) 12:57, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Feedback
As I said above - I think this page is great, and I understand that there may be reasons for the absence of some of this stuff, but I thought I'd make a few suggestions because you asked for feedback:


 * The citation needed tags need dealing with and there are quite a few unsourced statements without them. I know the problems you're having with them - just noting that it's the only issue that really stands out.
 * There's a gap in the history section from 1860-1901.
 * The twentieth century section is a bit disjointed - one sentence then "armed forces service" then the war memorial - and not much about anything else that happened in the twentieth century.
 * The "modern day" section is very focused on the Commonwealth Games - is there anything else that could be said there?

Everything else looks pretty good to me (being someone who doesn't know much about the subject). The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 10:58, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Pages don't write themselves. Someone or other has to actually roll up their sleeves, read broadly, edit according to best practice, and convey to the reader what the editor has been able to ascertain and verify on the topic. If you edit Wikipedia reactively, tweaking what others write, or, with great reserve adding snippets of knowledge from the considerable stock at your disposal which you (see above) prefer not to share, then it is pointless consistently addressing the talk page re supposed defects or merits. Let me illustrate, not to  blow my trumpet, but to simply state how things are done by committed editors here.


 * I rewrote the Kombumerri clan when I found it in this measly state (2,492 bytes). It developed into this (20,447 bytes), i.e. with 79 edits constituting  54.86% of all edits made to the page (a) I expanded it tenfold (b) reformatted it with a coherent internally consistent set of templates, thanks to the indispensable assistance of User: NSH001. You  made 15 edits to Kombumerri, of which 5 were zero-grade tweaks, totaling  10.49% of the edits made to the page, adding 2180 bytes, of which one alone was substantive The article amounts to just 1,414 words, sure, not much compared to the 4,514 words of the Yugambeh people article, but quite a lot if you consider that the Kombumerri were just one of 9 Yugambeh clan estates. If I, a raw outsider willing to work, can do that in a few days, why do you refrain from or hesitate to apply(ing) your talents and knowledge to the Yugambeh page, which is not very satisfactory in encycopedic terms?
 * A third of the Yugambeh article is open composition and generic, so the data of interest is below 3,000 words. A rough calculation by extrapolation would suggest that the minimum for a fairly comprehensive article on the Yugambeh would run to 10,000 words.


 * I haven't much time to relook over the article. I gave up when I realized that there was no evidence of any real interest in writing it, but a lot of talk page evidence of worries and anxieties. But at a glance today, these are the kind of things that stand out like dogs' balls as needing fixes.
 * Ngarangwal is asserted to be a dialect of the Yubambeh, ie. Tweed River dialect cluster/languages but that is a contested view, as the footnote shows, since some evidence places it with Bunjalung languages/dialects, and claim it was not mutually intelligible with Yugambeh. In other words, the source and the summary are contradictory.


 * Compare the scant and generic food summary here, which could apply to any and all of a hundred Australian tribes, with the far more detailed and orderly arrangement on the same topic for the Turrbal. Only two sentences are sourced, and the bulk of the section is free composition that technically should be removed as such, unless it can be amended.


 * Clans This whole section is either WP:OR or WP:SYNTH, and poorly sourced, with elementary errors i.e. Moorung-Mooburra should be Murangbara, whom Tindale for one identified as being a north-western clan of the Kalibal, not the Yugambeh. Likewise Joshua Bray’s transcription Cudgenburra, identified vaguely as inahbiting the ‘southern lower Tweed river basin’  should be something like Kudjangbara and they  have been classified as the  Minyungbal, not the Yugambeh, whom some place  from Cape Byron north to Southport,  and inland to  Murwillumbah and Nerang Creek.


 * The bunyip section is again poorly sourced. The warrajum was the Rainbow Serpent as much as the white man's proverbial ‘bunyip’, according to Mununjali clan lore. The settler transcription of Burrajahnee and Inneroogun likewise should probably be written Burrajan and Ninerung.  who is not used, not even consulted, though I placed him in the bibliography before giving up on this article.
 * Mugay-Ngagam is sourced to a non-RS unlinked paper Anthony Jordan. "Booning Ngagam": The porcupine and the dingo. Fingal Head. 1989  pp. 7–8.
 * The war memorial and commonwealth games material is placed before the society section, when it should be below it and the Commonwealth Games is vastly undue, as The Drover's Wife also observed.
 * There are dozens of things needing fixing. Anyone can do that if they just read through the bibliography's list of sources. And a vast amount of knowledge you have at your elbow, from M.Sharpe, still hasn't been used. If you prefer not to share it, fine. But complaining about editors who do work hard here, while labouring under the misimpression this is acceptable, indeed the best thing about any one Aboriginal group available, as it stands, is rather pointless.
 * I wrote this after reading your remark you retain information out of the public purview, that will die with you. Fine. The Yugambeh cultural heritage will be denied what you privately know. It reminds me of something in my own distant past. I speak Italian, and also two dialects of that language, one of which is, publicly, poorly documented. I'd heard one scholar had made a list of 8,000 lexemes, but refused to publish her work. Another native resident had managed to write down 6,000 words. By the time I started living there, I could manage, by probing fieldwork, research, and archival investigations to gather up only 2,600 words. I'm a rank outsider, but I handed over my compilation to the local municipal cultural authorities. If the other two die off, and as often, their heirs just see piles of paper as rubbish and bin it, then we will have my meagre 2,600 words, at least: a bitter residue from the other 5,400 two people knew of, but, for petty motives, refuse to share. They are very proud of their own traditions, but will allow them to die, because their pride in having secret information no one else in the community knows trumps every other consideration. Go figure.(Of course I know there is secret lore not to be rendered public. Large sections of the Adelaide Museum have loads of documents of this material, which the intelligent old men of several tribes confided to those dreadful whitefellas who promised to maintain the secrecy of what was written down, because they knew without such a discrete effort of conservation,- based on hard-won up trust- it would otherwise die out with them, because the young couldn't give a fuck, or were too fucked up by white civilization to guarantee its retention)  Nishidani (talk) 15:05, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

John Allen's belief
Re my edit here see see Margaret Sharpe here. Nishidani (talk) 20:23, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Not that I have an RS for this, I'm just leaving it as is, still I wanted to tell you, Uncle Bullum hadn't used language in over 50 years, and had spent a lot of time with his wife's people out near Cunnamulla. He hardly remembered any of our language, so much so that he would go outside and ask the Williams women for vocabulary when him and Lane were writing his dictionary. On top of that, there are recordings and things written out in Ngarangwal, and the language is clearly a regional variety. It is not some separate language, i.e. I as a native Yugambeh speaker clearly understand what is being said contrary to what Bullum is saying. Of course I know none of this matters because a white man hasn't written it down in a book a yet, but I thought you'd still like to know why I wrote things the way I did. Don't get me wrong, uncle Bullum's resource is important, but some of it is clearly wrong. Margaret Sharpe, however does say '
 * we are fairly sure people could understand the dialects nearest them, even if they said they were ‘different’ languages.

BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 06:16, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * 'speakers of one dialect could understand speakers of a neighbouring dialect without too much difficulty, though groups more distant on the chain could have difficulties understanding each other'. Sharpe 1998 p.1
 * I do know why your rewrote the source, because you have private knowledge (and interpretations) of the language, which appear to contradict what the source states. Unofrtunately, one must write strictly according to the available sources, nothing  else. Not to do so is WP:OR. The rest is speculative.
 * Unlike 'whitemen', Aboriginals were fluent, as often as not, in two languages at least (related to exogamy) and familiar with several dialects. To assert from this that a man who provided 1,000 words to a whiteman (not professionally trained) in 1913, of what he remembered from the 1850s,'hardly remembered any of our language' is silly, particularly since Bullumm's native tongue was Yugambeh before it was inflected by the massive disruptions of white invasiveness, whereas, by 1994 there were hardly any native speakers of Yugambeh among the, for example, Kombumerri people. Most people in all languages get by on 800 words a day, though they recognize and can use, if prompted, far more. Properly stated, a speaker of a language is someone who can converse in that language freely over all kinds of subject matter normally cropping up throughout the day, who can express any one thought several different ways; who, if probed, can illustrate the differences of nuance between similar terms, and do so in his native or adopted tongue. Knowing even a large number of words and phrases, for example, does not qualify one as a speaker. Mastery of syntax alone does. A language belongs to anyone who speaks it, Margaret Sharpe for example, or, Ezra Hale who, when he delivered the eulogy to his father by his grave in the U.S. in 2001, spoke only in Warlpiri because his father raised him to speak it as one of his mother tongues. English is as much the language of foreigners like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, as it is of native speakers. No one owns a language simply by being a descendant of people who once spoke it. Nishidani (talk) 14:22, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * That's not how Aboriginal language works, a language is owned by the community, regardless if one even speaks it, and that's a fact you and no other can change. What European cultural norms are regarding language has no bearing on Mibin people or OUR language. A language that Margaret Sharpe herself does not speak, she mixes dialects and to me, she sounds like a Githabul person, using Bundjalung and Yugambeh words randomly. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 00:05, 16 January 2019 (UTC)


 * If you don't have any respect for Aboriginal people, their culture and law...describing it as 'silly' then why do you bother with these pages, User:Nishidani? BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 00:16, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Sigh. That stupid attempt at being offensive would have Harold Blair (not to speak of the gentle people who passed me around along their kinship network after hearing I and some friends had been harassed by racist 'white' police in Queensland) raise an eyebrow. Reread what I wrote. I said your statement was 'silly'. As to Sharpe you cited her esteem for yourself, and now scorn what you take to be a mongrelized version of the language you yourself do not speak in any 'pure' form, since, as everyone knows but yourself, Yugambir now remains a synthesis of a dialect chain, none of whose constituent dialects have been conserved in a comprehensive description. If you think anything I add to this poorly developed article must lie under the cloud of a 'whiteman's' unavoidable racist intrusiveness, then by all means, keep it as it is. Nishidani (talk) 10:10, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I think your last sentence comes surprisingly close to self-awareness for once. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 10:33, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Yawn. It would have been more helpful if you had caught and commented on BlackFullaLinguist's allusion to Rumsey.Nishidani (talk) 20:54, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
 * a mongrelized version of the language you yourself do not speak in any 'pure' form, since, as everyone knows but yourself, Yugambir now remains a synthesis of a dialect chain is entirely incorrect, and is an ignorant assumption. Where on earth did you get that? Perhaps you need to actually come to Yugambeh country before you start making up things. I would write this entire message in Yugambeh if I had any faith you'd be able to understand it. You know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about my language abilities, and I will thank you not to imply otherwise. You said that Margaret Sharpe speaks Yugambeh...She has stated many times that she does not, and has said so in numerous interviews, she just has a good linguistic understanding on the language, when she does try and translate however, she mixes her knowledge, because she did not just study Yugambeh, she studied a number of other lingos, which has influenced her. She is a good linguist, not a good language speaker, the two are very different. Your Western ideals and understandings are completely corrupting Aboriginal knowledge, and you are oblivious (as many Western Linguists and Anthropologists are) of the flaws in applying your methodologies to Indigenous Cultures. It may take some time, but Indigenous peoples are studying and publishing all the time, and will hopefully fix the field and right the wrongs done by Westerners. At the end of the day, there are quite literally hundreds of other Aboriginal pages that are stubs / a paragraph or two, so this page may be 'poorly developed' as you say, but at least it's actually being developed, and not left in the wind.  BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 01:58, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

You asked me where this comes from (As to Sharpe you cited her esteem for yourself, and now scorn) what you take to be a mongrelized version of the language.

You wrote.

A language that Margaret Sharpe herself does not speak, she mixes dialects and to me, she sounds like a Githabul person, using Bundjalung and Yugambeh words randomly

A mongrelized language can be understood from the following example:-

"My focus here is on one instance of the hugely diverse networks of contemporary Australian language that include dialects of English, Aboriginal English, indigenous literary modes, “migrant” English, Kriol, emergent versions of Australian English and ethnolects—mongrelized lingos of all kinds. These networks of language and culture were hardly acknowledged in the narrowed range of official Auslit, as the Oxford Companion indexed it, for example, or as represented in institutionalized modes of research, publishing and teaching, The linguistic ecology of contemporary Australian culture and the work of living poets like π.ο., who contribute significantly to the diversity of that ecology, are beginning nows to be read and narrativized in post-national terms.’ Philip Mead, ‘Unsettling language. π.ο. ‘s 24  Hours in  Lucy Collins, Stephen Matterson  (eds.)Aberration in Modern Poetry: Essays on Atypical Works by Yeats, Auden, Moore, Heaney and Others,   McFarland, 2011 isbn 978-0-786-48901-5 p.162."

All vital languages are mongrelized: Margaret Sharpe revised approvingly of what Marjorie Oakes wrote in defense of adopting words from other sources in the following terms "Some people complain that this borrowing makes a language “impure”. That is nonsense. Some people use the insult name “bastard” as though the new words have no right to come into the language. That is thoughtless. The new words enrich the language.Margaret Sharpe et al. An Introduction to the Yugambeh-Bundjalung Language and its dialects, 2005 p.12"
 * You need to update the census data, since the links do not show 22 speakers, and see thisNishidani (talk) 18:28, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Jordan re RS status
This secrtion Mugay-Ngagam (Devil Dog Spirit) "A number of tales speak of the Mugay-Ngagam or Devil Dog Spirit, said to only be seen at night, they are black and variously described as four to five feet tall or half way between the size of a dog and a smallish horse. The Devil Dog Spirit is said to inhabit caves along the coastal region." simply cannot be verified, is apparently privately published, and fails all RS criteria. So I have removed it.Nishidani (talk) 13:16, 18 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Fascinating. I thought Dr. Jordan was published. He is cited in a few places, I'll have to dig those up.  I'll work on something.  BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 11:19, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Minyungbal
Minyungbal. Tindale gives as one of their alternative names Cudgingberry (horde at Cudgen), Coodjingburra.p.197

In another context he writes: "To clarify Bray’s statements we should notice his situation involved two hordes of the Kalibal, one the Murwillambara at Murwillumbah in the south and the Murangbara (his Moorung-moobar) living to the north and somewhat inland. The Kudjangbara (his Coodjungburra) lived in the Cudgen district south of Tweed Heads and belonged to a different tribe, the Minjungbal.p.79"

So this looks highly contradictory, since he is mixing what he defines as the Kalibal with the Minyungbal. This needs clearing up, but in the meantime I have replaced some names, which unfortunately tend to approximate to settlers transcriptions without any effort to render them closer to the probable indigenous terms.Nishidani (talk) 17:59, 18 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Is there any evidence for what Tindale claims besides his own book? Tindale seems to only cite Bray, but Bray does not use the word Kalibal or Minyungbal, and I have been through everything of Bray's, as far as I'm concerned Tindale just appears to be misunderstanding Bray's statements. Joshua Bray was speaking of the Tweed clans, and the people mentioned his diaries are the Apical Ancestors of Yugambeh people, 1 or 2 of whom Bray fathered. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 03:59, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
 * There is, in his archives, I should think. His technique was to read everything that had been written and do field work checking, and in this case, he undertook interviews among the people of Woodenbong, who were of course the source for much later ethnographic and linguistic work. His time there was in 1938, relatively early, and given his past practice I would think that he would have listed in his notes the names of the people he interviewed. Like everything else in this field, wer have vast archives, but few people examining and writing about them. At the moment, all I've been able to do is set out what puzzles me. Sometimes a good edit takes a few years. The wiki rule as I use it is: if a source is RS, cite it. And, if it is contradicted by other sources, cite them. When you get a latter source pointing out the contradiction and making an informed judgement on who srtuffed up, then use that as the main  sentence and put a note in clarifying the source clash.Nishidani (talk) 08:11, 21 January 2019 (UTC)


 * I will order a copy of whatever Tindale has in UniSA and see what it has to offer. However I am not sure they would count as RS, as I believe most of Tindale's work is locked for descendant groups only so I do not believe that counts as 'verifiable'. Thoughts? My issue with Tindale and I actually should see if this is written or oral knowledge, I've forgotten which,  but he is known to many groups as a racist, a purist who only spoke to so-called 'full bloods', which is why he refused to speak to many people, his belief supposedly was that the 'half-castes' had no knowledge or if they did it was corrupted by western culture, so in effect he missed an opportunity to record massive amounts of information, which I can thankfully say is not lost,  but sadly barely written. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 11:18, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
 * No one will knock back your credentials, You're a descendant, and accessing that is a right. It won't count as RS here, but really good editors, whatever the rules, will persist in trying to ferret out the facts in the textual background. Whatever uses that knowledge may or may not be able to be put to, if one can get one's hands on it, it will eventually see the light of day. I.e., be cited in some source we can eventually use. One must think long term (present editor excepted, for anagraphical reasons). If his files have good data on the Yugambeh people he interviewed, that data will be impeccable evidence in court, say, for example, in the ongoing land claim.


 * I've known a lot of racists, I've studied racism for decades: there are quite a few racists, sometimes even very competent as editors, on Wikipedia. Calling Tindale a racist empties the term of meaning because, compared to all the racists one meets or reads of, his human behavior with aboriginals in no way fits those patterns: to the contrary, as witness his deep affection, respect for Milerum. He was heir to 19th and early 20th century primitive race theory, as nearly all of his generation were, and he reelaborated this as 'tribes', and embraced the three migrations theory, etc. But placing him among the great, powerful, influential racist swine in Australia who engineered the whole campaigning to 'dilute' the blood of Aborigines, finding those of unmixed descent, despicable remnants 'fortunately' doomed to extinction, is wrong-headed, surely. He was a salvage ethnologist, searching pertinaciously for the best informants he could find, those who, like Milerum were raised by deeply conservative parents who steered clear of whites and drummed into their children the traditional native lore. We stand on the shoulders of giants, that is why we can see further, but not simply because of modern merits.  His deep 'mateship' with Milerum gives the lie to him being a racist. He cited him as an exemplary person who would be an ideal model for Australians, by which he meant white or black. I've always wanted to write a wiki bio of Milerum, but it can't be done until some scholar works up Tindale's last unfinished ambitious account of how that remarkable Tanganekald-Potaruwutj described the songlines of his area of South Australia.
 * I can understand the discontent: he quite often got his maps wrong, and in several cases this has prejudiced native title claims. If he missed a lot, all intellectual pioneers do. But he wasn't like that Victorian settler who heard a 'black' on his veranda talking about star lore, and noted the fact without getting out a notebook and extracting more details, other than the simple fact that this chap knew 'stuff'. Tindale did: he was always the last to dowse the lantern in the outback camps, as he meticulously transcribed all of the data a day's conversation with several people had yielded, and that was often aleatory, the cullings of happenstance encounters. What is overlooked is that he produced the first authoritative mapping of all known tribes, locating them in areas defined as fixed and bounded by tribal propriety law, and thereby a half a century before his time, established the innovative theoretical basis for all later native title claims. Without an authoritative masterpiece by a man of his scientific stature, I find it hard to imagine the Mabo decision getting on its feet, though I may be wrong. I won't  ask you to change your opinion, or challenge those who think that his massive encyclopedic efforts to salvage as much native lore as was possible on limited outback sojourns, is 'racist', useless as tits on a bull because he didn't speak to them or their forefathers, out of some presumed contempt for their 'mixed blood'. I do think you might think to some end the fact that however frustrated we might be with John Lane for not asking Bullum the kinds of questions we would now ask him, we should thank our luck that, unlike tens of thousands of other people, Lane did try to preserve what he could of the Yugambir past, just as Tindale strove to preserve, one of only a handful of people in his day, what he could glean industriously from the memories of thousands of informants from over 600 different clan groupings. One anecdote: I once spent a few hours with a Western Australian, to all appearances, 'full-blood', robbed from his mother's camp at 8 and forced into a white school. He graduated, went back bush, and rehoned his native language and lore. When I met him, he was helping deracinated youths of aboriginal descent who had memories only of being raised as objects of contempt by whites, and often thrashed by drunken relatives. I was of course fascinated by the side he appeared to embody, a deeply indigenously enculturated man with a mass of knowledge of his mother tongue and his people's traditions, but when he noticed this drift in our conversation, he cannily blindsided me, and told me how proud he was of his Scottish grandfather, and of his deep love of Greek myths. We ended up talking of Jason and the Argonauts. What he knew of his own world, in short, was his business, but he felt equally at home in my kind of world, which, of course, he wanted me to understand, was now as much his as mine. He knew more about 'white' culture than most Australians I have encountered. He was more completely 'Australian' than the large majority of his fellow-countrymen, fore he was at home in both identities and didn't need to prove himself in either. Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

The Tweed-Albert languages are split into three major dialect groups
This, like the clan list, is unsourced, and like the 9 clan list has struck me from the outset as free composition, a retroactive judgement regarding the traditional society, based on contemporary land claims. I may be wrong.

There are simple technical reasons why it is all wrong descriptively, but the main one is that in a system of a dialect chain as complex and difficult to precisely figure out as the Yugambeh-Bundjalung languages, we have this generic term, then a branch of it 'Yugambeh' which in turn is said to be composed of three dialects (a) Ngarangwal (b)Yugambeh and (c)Nganduwal. Yugambeh has two meanings, it is a tribal subgroup on one hand, and a supra-tribal grouping on the other, and if there were 9 clans, one would expect that these are spread over the three sub groups, including Ngarangwal and Nganduwal, or that the 9 are divisions of the Yugambeh (proper). I can't see anything so simple in the literature I have read so far, but for the moment, I am working on what the article has, which is unsourced, because I presume someone has RS data to justify these divisions.Nishidani (talk) 21:57, 18 January 2019 (UTC)


 * See, part of the issue is that we are not 'technically speaking'→ Yugambeh, that is a lingo name. We are all Mibin/Mibany! It was the white man who started calling us 'Yugambeh people'... It should actually be 'Mibin people' who speak Yugam (Yugambeh, Ngarangwal, Nganduwal). Does that make sense? And yes,  there are Nganduwal clans, Ngarangwal clans and Yugambeh clans, all are Mibin/Mibany and speak Yugam. I did however go and take a picture of a map from the museum and I found a copy of it online with a paragraph written, I cited it. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 11:27, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I have no position. We have the (a)jetsam and flotsam of many early explorer and settler reports (b) the evaluation of this material by ethnographers and linguists over some 80 years, who also gathered in fresh material from their informants, many of them 80 or 90 years old and thus recalling things from the mid nineteenth century onwards (c) unpublished oral traditions transmitted down the families descending from 15 apical foreparents. I see indetermination in much of this, failure to pin down with precision a lot of details, notable gaps in information one might expect (mibun as an autonym suggests the wedge-tailed eagle, which evokes speculations about moieties in my mind, since it has that function way down south, and in at least the Maric language areas of Queensland, a bird/bee moiety structure is generalized over large areas. I would expect that of the dozens of informants in the dialect cluster who were interviewed over the last century, some hint of this as a generic ethnonymic appellation covering those groups would have come up. If it didn't, of course, that doesn't mean the oral lore is wrong. It just means a dopey wiki editor like myself is nonplussed as to what to do). One thing I think I know about with some comparative knowledge is that the formation of identities, white, black, yellow, green whatever, is fluid, not static. I feel that what you are saying refers as much to the modern descendants reorganization of their collective traditions, as to the past, which, as Hartley's famous line has it, 'is another country'. My only option is to keep plugging doggedly away, in a no man's land of uncertainty and provisory bits of half-(baked) knowledge. Don't take that negatively. It's my general outlook and makes a lot of people, who prefer the security of beliefs, uncomfortable.Nishidani (talk) 21:28, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I was actually reading today and came across this line and it reminded me of this talk, regarding Mibin/Mibany. "The Aborigines of Australia are called, by Kamilaroi-speaking blacks and neighbouring tribes, "Murri"; westward of the Balonne they are called "Murdin," and about the Weir River," Mial (Mee-al) ; along the coast about Moreton Bay the name of the race is " Djan " or " Dan." As they have no knowledge of the extent of the country they inhabit, the names given to the land can only be regarded as the names of small districts.". What the author doesn't explicitly note though is all of these are the words for 'Man'. There is another author somewhere I've been trying to find it for an hour now, and he noted that when you asked an Aboriginal from here who they were,  they would give you their word for Man and if you asked them what they spoke, they gave you their word for the negative. When I find that last source I'll mention it. That first line is from  Kamilaroi, Dippil and Turrubul : languages spoken by Australian Aborigines /​ by Wm. Ridley. And it was compiled in 1866. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 10:55, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
 * It's a complex business. I've of course read of many aboriginal people being called by he local word for 'man', i.e. murri/miai etc. But every time I come across this statement, I remind myself that this is the kind of remark made in early colonial ethnography, by whites. With tribes we know about in much more detail, it is not that simple.  A good many Aboriginal words for ‘man’ generally turn out to refer to a male of a tribe, one who has undergone initiation Pitjantjatjara  wati) In the Gunwinggu’s  Kunwinjku speech, again, their word bininj as ethnonym  actually denotes a male person of the ‘tribe’ as opposed either to a person not of that tribe or a woman.
 * Your 'mob' takes the word for 'man', namely mibiny to mean (a) a Yugambeh person and (b) kind of cognate with the alternative ethnonym miban, which refers to a wedge-taled eagle. They may be related etymologically, I don't know. But are they interchangeable, and, in the deep past, did members of all three groups used either to denote their collective identity, or were the terms redeployed in modern times, legitimately, to designate their modern self-identification? Dunno, as usual.
 * By the way it has long struck me that Bray’s reference to the word ‘cabra’ as an initiated man might refer to the Kombumerri whose name is etymologized from kumbamir/kumbamar, a composite of kumbaw (cobra worm)+bar(i)). Any chance of that? Nishidani (talk) 13:13, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
 * You are right in that it isn't simple. Our words Mibiny/Mibany are very much interchangeable, it's only the whitefella linguists who say they are two different words (just as it is the whitefella linguists who decided to label us all Bundjalung), but ask any person from here and they will tell you they are one and the same. The word 'Baygal' is said by us to refer to 'any Aboriginal person', and it is the Bundjalung language word for Man, and interesting, our word Mibiny means 'Face, person' or 'to know' in their lingo. In a lot of old sentences, Mibiny is just translated as 'The blacks', but all I have spoken to are quite adamant it never referred to anyone but us, and a woman can be called a Mibiny just as much as a Man. We have another word 'Gibara', which is for an Initiated Man, I personally think Cabra, is a corruption of that, however a Gibara is not just a Yugam man, it refers to anyone from the groups we 'share' our Bora ring with, i.e. Yuggera, Ugarapul, Jandai, and Githabul people are also called Gibara, when you wanted to refer specifically to one of those groups, the word we use for them is just their word for Man...A Yuggera person is a 'Malara'... This word also appears as Chepara (obstruents have fricative allophones, so I assume the Ch is a velar fricative, although Tindale transcribed it as Tjapera/Tjipara at one point) and as 'Kipper', which is also a word for a Buhl (bora ring), i.e. a Kipper-ring, and it was also used as a moniker for some of the old ones, Kipper Tommy, Kipper Johnny, etc. I don't believe it has a connection to Kombumerri though. I am certain though that our use of the word Mibiñ reflects our historical usage, as we have stories of it's use from people in the 70's and earlier, and at the time they were in their 80/90s, i.e. born around 1880-90. Trust me in that I have spent a lot of time with the anthropologists and linguists because these questions are pertinent to our connection report, where we have to prove that we are the continuation of the sovereign society that existed at the time of 'effective colonisation', which in this area is 1860ish. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 06:59, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Excedllent reply, and I have learnt much from this, esp cabra/gibara. My work on Wikipedia is slow, because most of my day is obliged to heavy chores that take precedence. But I'll keep slowly working through the materials.Nishidani (talk) 13:36, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Recent Improvements
I've expanded the history section with information about the mission era from 1860-1950, and I've taken the institutions section and re-written it into a Recent history (1950-) section. I also read the wikipedia citation guide and realised I had been citing incorrectly, so I have adjusted my citations to their protocol - sorry it's been a while. This is in addition to some extra information on Marriage and Kinship. In light of the recent changes I think the article should at least be a B class now, but please discuss if you disagree. I am planning some more additions with the ideal of reaching Good Article status, if anyone has any recommended additions that they think would help accomplish this please let me know. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 02:29, 5 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Some improvements are definitely sound. But several things continue the page tradition of original research. For example the uploaded photo for the kinship section refers to Livingstone's description of the related Minyangbal. Yes, you cite Jefferies (2011:145-146) but the reader must take it on faith Jefferies is specifically naming the Waijang/Biyang terminology as characteristic of Yugambeh as opposed to every other group Bundjalung, Minyangbal etc.,where the primary source Livingstone used it primarily for the southern Minyangbal of the Brunswick River-Byron Bay area. This reflects the larger problem with all of this area: we have a cultural-dialect continuum, and this page looks like it is trying to extract some distinctive and dominant group within the continuum, by a synthesis of sources that are far more discriminating in handling the complex ethnographic data. Perhaps, then, you'd do the page a service by transcribing the exact paragraphs where Jefferies describes the kin terminology as Yugambeh? 16:16, 6 May 2019 (UTC)Nishidani (talk)
 * , there are cultural-dialect continuum all around the world that nonetheless have distinctive groups, Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes...the Dutch people and the German people..? Humans draw lines, however arbitrary they may be. All I'm trying to do on this page is reflect the facts as they are. I've added a 'Bundjalung confusion' subsection under Name & Etymology that I hope will clarify things with readers. I've also added some more to the Kinship section, any other points? BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 12:42, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Of course. But there is a lot of unironed out confusion in the classification here od the available data. There are all sorts of divergences in the secondary literature, and what is done here is to use a mixture of primary sources and secondary sources with arbitrary selectiveness, to create a new synthesis which cannot be found in any one secondary source I know of. Just one small example.
 * Yugam(beh)[e] also known as Yugambir, Minjangbal/Minyangbal or Manaldjali
 * (a) Crowley 1978 p.158 distinguishes Yugambeh and Minyangbal as separate dialects of the Albert-Tweed group
 * (b) Crowley’s map places the Birihn dialect speakers at Byron Bay which however in Livingstone is a Minyangbal dialect.
 * (c) Sharpe distinguishes the Minyangbal dialect from the Yugambeh dialect p.2
 * (d) In Crowley’s dialect map the three geographic groups we refer to here as
 * (i/a)Ngarangwal – Bullongin and Kombumerri of the Coomera and Nerang rivers,
 * (ii/a)Nganduwal – Cudgenburra, Moorungburra, and Tulgigin of the Tweed River valley
 * (iii/a)the inland Yugam[a]/Minyangbal.
 * Are respectively in Crowley
 * (i/b)Ngarahngbal/Ngarahgwal: Gold Coast area, between the Albert and Tweed Rivers (Crowley-1978:145)
 * (i/b) (Coastal) Minyangbal
 * (i/c) (Inland) Yugambeh
 * (e) dagay is, you say,  the Yugambeh term for whiteman/ghost. But in Livingstone’s glossary of Minyangbal  (Byron Bay/Brunswick river) the corresponding word is duggerrigay, which may have the same etymology (dugay/dukkai = dead) but in Minyangbal does not mean 'ghost'. (Livingstone  Appendix 1 p.24)
 * Yugambeh we fail to note, is (a) a generic term and (b) a specific term referring to one dialect spoken by people who collectively now identify as Yugambeh. When we throw in Minyangbal as a synonym of Yugambeh, we are ignoring the fact that in secondary sources, there is a confusion. Livingstone's Minyangbal were south of Crowley's Minyanbal, and Crowley appears to call them Birihn-speakers. Thirdly, if you use Yugambeh/Minyangbal interchangeably as heteronyms for the same group, you create confusion because the Yugambeh are defined as inland, whereas in Crowley's mapping, the Yugambeh are inland, while the Minyangbal of the Tweed River extend to the coast.
 * So, in conclusion, there is source conflict, and in our synopsis of the sources, we are cherrypicking from both primary and secondary sources, themselves in conflict, to fudge an impression that there is no contradiction at all in either. The result is unreadable. I haven't time, nor the full range of necessary secondary sources at hand, to try and iron some of these errors out, and will leave the page as it is. But, strictly speaking, it is not being constructed according to wiki GA/FA criteria. That said, without wishing to sound condescending, your recent work shows a major advance in quality on earlier attempts to work the page, and for that, is commendable. So take your time. There's no hurry.Nishidani (talk) 13:56, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I think I've pin-pointed one issue to clarify, please check my edit under under - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugambeh_people#Other_confusions
 * Does that clarify the Minyangbal thing? I think the confusion lies in that you think there is A single Minyangbal which the sources are confusing, while my contention is that Minyangbal is a general noun, referring to 'those who say Minyang' (applied to multiple groups), as well as being a Proper noun that is the self-name used by the Byron Bay people. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 09:58, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
 * That indeed helps the readers. The problem with using the Byron Bay Minyangbal language recorded by Livingstone as though it were a Minyangbal dialect of Ygamnbeh, contra at least Crowley's map, remains. I wouldn't worry overly about this. Such incongruencies are in the sources, and no one, as far as I can see, has ironed them out, so one cannot expect editors to do better. What editors should do is, as you have done partially, gather details that make readers aware of the problem. Regards Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
 * P.S Could you think of better subsection titles? I'm not sure they fit well. BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 10:43, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
 * For the moment, let them stand. The page is under development, and once you have a more complete survey written up, one can review it all, synthesize and make a more synoptic rewrite. No hurry.Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

A-Class Nomination
This article has been nominated for A-class, and the review can be found here:

Merger discussion
Request received to merge articles: Minyangbal into Yugambeh people; dated: February/2022. Proposer's Rationale: per Cunningham, Sharpe, Geyteenbeek etc Minyangbal is an alternative name for Yugambeh, Tindale is the only outlier separating them and as the Yugambeh article notes he places others where Sharpe places Yugambeh,  articles should be merged, and perhaps the Tindale issue mentioned and a citation or two to other mapping issues, or maybe the section on the Norman Tindale page. Discuss here. 2001:8003:643A:7600:7454:4CC3:DB88:C5AC (talk) 14:56, 25 February 2022 (UTC)