Wunambuli

The Wunambal, also known as Wunambal Gaambera, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the northern Kimberley in Western Australia, whose country — their Uunguu — surrounds York Sound and runs north from Brunswick Bay to the Admiralty Gulf and the Osborne Islands, covering roughly 9,800 square kilometres. Norman Tindale judged them perhaps the most venturesome of Australian Aboriginal peoples: partly from Makassan visitors they learnt to build rafts able to ride tides of up to twelve metres, and the Laiau and Wardana bands sailed out to reefs and islets in the Cassini and Montalivet archipelagoes. With the Worrorra and Ngarinyin they form the Wanjina Wunggurr cultural bloc, whose law and dreamtime mythology centre on the Wanjina and Wunggurr spirits.

In September 1820 Phillip Parker King, on his third Australian voyage, beached HMS Mermaid for repairs at Careening Bay on Coronation Island and stayed eighteen days. His crew met no Wunambal, but King noted bark shelters on the beach, more substantial buildings on the hill above and the remnants of sago palm nuts eaten along the coast, and he had the carpenter carve Mermaid 1820 into an ancient boab tree.