Ngatjumay

The Ngatjumay, better known as the Ngadju or Ngadjumaya, are an Aboriginal people of the arid Goldfields-Esperance country of southern Western Australia. Their traditional lands covered roughly 53,000 square kilometres, running from Goddard Creek south to Mount Ragged and Israelite Bay, from the Fraser Range in the west to Point Culver in the east. Their language belongs to the Pama-Nyungan family; the southern bands were called Malba, while Buljigu was the dialect of the northern groups.

Like their neighbours they observed initiation rites of circumcision and subincision and lived by hunting and gathering across a land of salt lakes and scrub.

When the Swan River Colony was founded far to the west in 1829 their country still lay beyond the colonial frontier, and explorers and pastoralists only reached it decades later.