Warnindilyakwan

The Warnindilyakwan were the Aboriginal people of Groote Eylandt and the neighbouring Bickerton and Woodah Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The name properly denoted one clan of the south-eastern Dilyakburra peninsula; the fourteen clans of the archipelago were also known as the Anindilyakwa. Their language, Anindilyakwa, was unrelated to the Pama-Nyungan family and had an unusually complex grammar.

Long before Europeans arrived, Macassan traders from Sulawesi sailed to the islands each monsoon, exchanging goods for trepang, beeswax, ironwood and pearls bound for the Chinese market. In 1803 Matthew Flinders encountered sixty Macassan praus under the chief Pobasso nearby; Macassan words for tobacco, cloth and alcohol, and the tamarind tree, entered island life through these voyages.