Watjarri

The Watjarri, also spelt Wajarri or Wadjarri, were an Aboriginal people of the Murchison country in the Mid West of Western Australia. Their traditional lands covered an estimated 91,000 square kilometres, reaching the hills around the upper Lyons and Gascoyne rivers in the north and the Roderick and upper Sanford rivers in the south.

Their language belonged to the Kartu branch of the Pama-Nyungan family, and their word Yamatji, originally meaning a Watjarri person, later became the name for all Aboriginal people of the Murchison region. When the Swan River Colony was founded far to the south in 1829 this dry inland country remained beyond the colonial frontier, and pastoral leases only spread into it in the later nineteenth century.