Yiwaidjan

The Yiwaidjan languages are a small non-Pama–Nyungan family of the Cobourg Peninsula and the adjoining islands at the western end of Arnhem Land. Its two principal tongues are Iwaidja, originally spoken at the base of the peninsula and later on Croker Island, and Maung of the Goulburn Islands.

Dutch surveyors coasted these shores as early as 1636 and Abel Tasman charted them in 1644. Through the eighteenth century Makassan trepangers from Sulawesi visited every year, leaving Macassarese and Malay loanwords in all the Yiwaidjan languages. In 1824 the British founded Fort Dundas on nearby Melville Island, their first settlement on the northern Australian coast.