Noongar (Indigenous Australian people)

The Noongar (also spelled Noonga, Nyungar, and Nyoongah) are one of the Indigenous peoples of Australia. Like other Indigenous Australian groups, their numbers were decimated by the arrival of British colonists, due to the influx of new diseases, competition for scarce resources, and the violence that resulted from the latter, but in the twenty-first century their numbers recovered to roughly their pre-colonial levels or possibly higher.

A Western Australian people, the Noongar are generally found in the southwest corner of Western Australia, most of them living in and around the Perth metropolitan area. There are fourteen Noongar groups: the Amangu, Ballardong, Binjareb, Kaneang, Koreng, Mineng, Njakinjaki, Njunga, Pibelmen, Wardandi, Whadjuh, Wilman, Wudjari, and Yued.

Traditionally, the Noongar spoke one of several dialects of the Noongar language, which is part of the Pama-Nyungan language family of Indigenous Australian languages. However, like most languages in that family, the Noongar language is endangered. Although some Noongar words and constructions survive, nearly all Noongar individuals speak Australian Aboriginal English. This English dialect retains some features of Kriol, the Australian creole language commonly spoken in the colonial era.

Brief History

Indigenous Australians have inhabited Australia for at least forty thousand years, most likely having migrated from Africa. The exact genetic relationship of the Noongar to other Indigenous Australian peoples, and relative chronology of the pre-European settling of Australia, is less clear. Precolonial Noongar were primarily nomadic or seminomadic.

Some of the most easily identified archaeological sites in western Australia are trees that show scarring as a result of having their bark removed by Indigenous Australians who used it to fashion canoes, shelters, or containers. The types of trees used frequently live to be well over two hundred years old, not old enough to provide information about ancient Australia but old enough to have provided twentieth-century researchers with a wealth of information about Indigenous Australian hunting and settlement patterns in the late precolonial era.

The Stirling Range plains, in Western Australia’s Great Southern region, provided hunting grounds for many Noongar groups for thousands of years and are mentioned in their Dreamtime stories. Like other Indigenous Australians, the Noongar traditionally subscribe to an animist system of information organization that scholars have called Dreamtime. In this system, stories about legendary ancestral heroes are used to preserve information important to the culture, whether moral lessons or songlines (which provide instructions for traveling from place to place, critical for a hunting culture).

The British settlement of Western Australia was resisted by the Noongar and other indigenous peoples of the region, who were willing to conduct trade and to visit but did not want permanent British settlements in their lands. This became more difficult in the mid-nineteenth century, as settlers born in other Australian colonies came west determined to overpower Indigenous resistance. The nineteenth century warrior Yagan is remembered today as a Noongar hero for his resistance to British encroachment on the area that is now Perth. He led a series of raids in 1833 before being killed; his severed head was somehow acquired by a sailor and eventually given to the Liverpool Museum. It was not repatriated and buried until 2010, at a ceremony commemorating the opening of Yagan Memorial Park.

Topic Today

In modern Australia, the rights of Indigenous Australians like the Noongar have been recognized and the Constitution has been amended to ban racial discrimination. The Recognition Bill 2015, passed in October of 2015, recognized the Noongar people as the traditional owners of Perth and Western Australia’s southwest region. The Noongar people are represented by the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, formed in 2001 and empowered by the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act to help Noongar people with issues related to title claims on land and other rights. The council also maintains a Noongar Knowledge website and encourages the health of and interest in Noongar culture and heritage.

One of the best-known Indigenous Australian writers is Jack Davis (1917–2000), a Noongar playwright and poet. Born in the small Western Australian town of Yarloop, Davis was an activist for Indigenous rights and wrote a number of plays and poems drawing on the Indigenous experience. Several of his plays had become a standard part of the Australian school curriculum by the time of his death. Other famous Noongar include the landscape painter Tjyllyungoo (b. 1954), the novelist and screenwriter Archie Weller (b. 1957), and football player Nicky Winmar (b. 1965).

There has been some revival of interest in the long-endangered, Noongar language since the late twentieth century. Noongar has no standard dialect but neither do each of the fourteen groups speak a distinctive dialect, though they may at one point have done so. The Nyoongar Language Project Advisory Panel, studying Noongar language issues in 1990, found that there were at least three dialects and as many as seven, the most common of which seemed to be Yuat, named for one of the groups nearest Perth. Counting all of the possible dialects various scholars have proposed, there could be as many as twelve, but the number is likely closer to the seven that the panel found as the outside figure, with scholarly disagreement centering on which additional groups beyond the core three to count as dialect groups.

One reason the count is so difficult to establish is that there are so few speakers: only 232 in the 2006 Census, or an average of only thirty-three speakers per dialect. With groups this small, it is difficult to separate the difference between "dialect" and "personal language habits," not to mention the difficulty finding speakers to interview and collect data from. By the mid-2010s, the number of Noongar speakers had risen to over 400.

One of the notable features of the Noongar language is that it lacks the f and soft c sounds. A number of Noongar words have become loan words in Australian English, including gidgie (the Noongar word for spear) and kylie (the Noongar word for boomerang, used as a woman’s name in Australian English). The suffix "-up" in Australian place names, common throughout Western Australia, also originates from Noongar, in which it indicates "place of." The original meanings of many of these geographical names have been lost, however.

Bibliography

Brennan, Frank. No Small Change: The Road to Recognition for Indigenous Australia. U of Queensland, 2015.

Davis, Megan, and Georgia Williams. Everything You Need to Know about the Referendum to Recognize Indigenous Australians. U of New South Wales P, 2015.

Gge, Katharina Dellbr. Forms and Functions of Aboriginality in Kim Scott’s Benang: From The Heart. GRIN Verlag, 2013.

Haebich, Anna. For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the South West of Western Australia 1900-1940. U of Western Australia P, 1992.

Hampton, Ronald, and Maree Toombs. Indigenous Australians and Health. Oxford UP, 2013.

"Noongar History." Government of Western Australia, 21 July 2020, www.wa.gov.au/organisation/department-of-the-premier-and-cabinet/noongar-history. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.

"Noongar." South West Aboriginal Land & Sea Council, www.noongarculture.org.au/noongar. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.

Scott, Kim. Benang: From the Heart. Fremantle, 1999.

Scott, Kim. That Deadman Dance. Picador, 2010.

Sculthorpe, Gary, et al., editors. Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilizations. British Museum Press, 2015.