Wikan

The Wik are closely related Aboriginal peoples of the western Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland, occupying coastal floodplains and forested inland country. They speak Paman languages within the Pama-Nyungan family, in which wik means speech; the Wik-Mungkan, whose language means roughly speech of eating, were the largest branch.

Traditionally they were organized into some thirty patrilineal clans, each holding its own country and one or more totems, called pulwaiya or old forebears. The totems' places of origin served as ritual sites where the dead were believed to return.

The clans lived by hunting, fishing and gathering on the seasonally flooded plains. Dutch ships charted the Gulf of Carpentaria shoreline in 1623 without founding any settlement, and for the two centuries that followed the Wik country remained beyond the effective reach of Europeans.