Badimayan

The Badimaya, also written Badimia, are an Aboriginal people of the Mid West region of Western Australia. Their traditional country covered roughly 29,000 square kilometres, from the later gold towns of Cue and Mount Magnet in the north to Paynes Find in the south, bordered by Western Desert peoples to the east, the Noongar to the south-west and the Watjarri to the north-west; the name Wardal recorded by early ethnographers was a Badimaya band name.

Their language belongs to the Kartu branch of the Pama-Nyungan family, and like other peoples of the region they practised circumcision and subincision in initiation.

When the Swan River Colony was founded on the coast in 1829, Badimaya country lay well beyond the settled districts, and pastoralists and gold miners only entered it in the later nineteenth century.