Nukunu

The Nukunu are an Aboriginal people of South Australia whose traditional lands lie along the eastern side of Spencer Gulf. Their language belongs to the Thura-Yura branch of the Pama-Nyungan family and shares roughly ninety per cent of its vocabulary with the neighbouring Ngadjuri.

Nukunu country was dense with sacred sites and formed the starting point of the Urumbula songline, said to run from a great tree near Port Augusta, identified with the Milky Way, north to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The British navigator Matthew Flinders surveyed Spencer Gulf in 1802, and after the colony of South Australia was founded in 1836 pastoral leases and wheat farms enclosed Nukunu lands; epidemics had already thinned the people, and within a generation only a handful survived. The remnants intermarried with Narungga, Barngarla and Wirangu families while retaining a distinct Nukunu identity.