Nyikinan

The Nyikina, also spelt Nyigina, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Kimberley region of Western Australia, whose country runs along the lower Fitzroy River — the mardoowarra in their own speech — from Yeeda upstream to Noonkanbah on both banks. Their language is an eastern member of the Nyulnyulan family, closely related to Warrwa and Yawuru, which some linguists treat as dialects of a single tongue.

In pre-contact times the Nyikina expanded down the Fitzroy and drove a wedge between the Warrwa clans living around King Sound. That sound was the first stretch of their coastline reached by Europeans: William Dampier explored it aboard the Cygnet in 1688, and Phillip Parker King surveyed the same shores in 1821.