Bilinaran

The Bilinarra, also spelt Bilingara or Bilinara, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Victoria River District in the Northern Territory. Their language, whose name probably comes from bili, meaning rock or hill, is an eastern Ngumbin tongue of the Pama-Nyungan family, mutually intelligible with Gurindji and Ngarinyman and treated by linguists as a dialect of the latter.

European explorers first entered their Victoria Downs country in the late 1830s, and later in the nineteenth century the Victoria River Downs station was laid out over Bilinarra and Karangpurru lands.

Dispossession brought introduced disease, punitive massacres and forced station labour: at Gordon Creek captured people were shot and their bodies burned, while a strychnine-laced stew gave Poison Creek its name, and the survivors fled into Ngarinman country.