Bardi

The Bardi are an Aboriginal Australian people of the northern Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley, whose traditional country of roughly 300 square miles covers the Cape Leveque tip. Their language is the northernmost member of the Nyulnyulan family and is mutually intelligible with the Jawi.

Bardi life follows a calendar of six seasons, from the monsoonal mankal, when turtle eggs are gathered, to the cold southeasterly barrgan, the season for hunting dugong. In 1688 the English buccaneer William Dampier described the coast off Cape Leveque, the first European account of Bardi waters; the French captain Nicolas Baudin later named the cape after his hydrographer Lévêque.