Yugambeh people
The Yugambeh, also known as the Minyangbal, or Nganduwal, are an Aboriginal Australian people of South East Queensland and the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, their territory lies between the Logan and Tweed rivers. A term for an Aboriginal of the Yugambeh tribe is Mibunn, which is derived from the word for the wedge-tailed eagle. Historically, some anthropologists have erroneously referred to them as the Chepara, the term for a first-degree initiate. Archaeological evidence indicates Aboriginal people have occupied the area for tens of thousands of years. By the time European colonisation began, the Yugambeh had a complex network of groups, and kinship. The Yugambeh territory is subdivided among clan groups with each occupying a designated locality, each clan having certain rights and responsibilities in relation to their respective areas.
Europeans arrived within their proximity in the 1820s, before formally entering Yugambeh territory c.1842. Their arrival displaced Yugambeh groups, and conflict between both sides soon followed throughout the 1850/60s By the 20th century, they were being forced onto missions and reserves despite local resistance. Other Yugambeh people found refuge in the mountains or gained employment among the Europeans. The last of the missions/reserves in the area closed in 1948 and 1951, though people continued to occupy them. Throughout the 70s-90s, the Yugambeh founded organisations and businesses in culture/language, housing and community care, wildlife and land preservation, and tourism. It is estimated there were between 1,500 and 2,000 Aboriginal people in the watersheds of the Logan, Albert, Coomera and Nerang before the 1850s. The 2016 Australian census records 12,315 Aboriginal people in the four local government areas, a portion of these are non-Yugambeh Aboriginal peoples who have moved into the area for work, or as a result of forced removals.
Name and etymology
Yugambeh is the traditional language term for the Aboriginal people that inhabit the territory between the Logan river and the Tweed river. Their ethnonym derives from the Yugambeh word for "no", namely yugam/yugam, reflecting a widespread practice in Aboriginal languages to identify a tribe by the word they used for a negative, this is typical of the area, as Kabi, Wakka, Jandai, Guwar all mean "no" as well. Yugambeh refers to people descended from speakers of a range of dialects spoken in the Albert and Logan River basins of South Queensland, stretching over the area from the Gold Coast west to Beaudesert, while also including the coastal area just over the border into New South Wales along the coast down to the Tweed Valley. Tindale listed a number of alternative names and spellings for the Jukambe including: Yugambir, Yugumbir, Yoocumbah, Yoocum, Jukam, Yukum, Yögum, Yuggum, Jugambeir, Chepara, Tjapera, Tjipara, Chipara. The Yugambeh use the word Miban/Mibanj /Mibin meaning wedge-tailed eagle to denote an indigenous person of the group, and is the preferred endonym for the people; Gurgun Mibinyah being used to describe their dialects; Yugambeh, Nganduwal, and Ngarangwal.Bundjalung misnomer
Yugambeh descendants state that the name Bundjalung, applied by Europeans and adjacent peoples, is a misnomer. The Aboriginal dialects spoken from Beenleigh/Beaudesert south to the Clarence River are said by linguists to be a single language or linguistic group. In traditional culture, there was no general name for this "language", this being noted as early as 1892. Smythe, writing in the 1940s in the Casino area, noted that some of his informants stated "Beigal" was the tribal name, others though stated there never was a shared named in use. As "Bandjalang", aside from being a specific group's name, was offered as a cover all term, Smythe did the same, calling the entire linguistic group "Bandjalang" for convenience Each speech community originally had their own distinctive names for their dialects, and adopted the term "Bundjalung" in the period after European arrival with Crowley believing that originally, Bandjalang was only the name of the dialect spoken on the South Arm of the Richmond River, but in time, other group local groups amalgamated under the term in the face of the European invasion. Bundjalung would eventually supplanted most other local dialect names. The Aboriginal people who lived in the area that became Queensland never used the name Bundjalung, and northern groups have maintained their dialect names. While some Bundjalung people refer to the Yugambeh as Bundjalung, local Aboriginal people emphatically prefer to use Yugambeh.Other misnomers
There are terms used for more than one group, like "Minyangbal", – those who say minyang "what", which is used to refer to the Yugambeh, Galibal, and Wiyabal people, while also being the self-name for the Minyungbal people at Byron Bay and on the Brunswick River. Discussion about the correct names for dialects is difficult because there are who groups stopped using names altogether. This was compounded by the fact that what one group may call itself may be different from what another group calls it, which may again be different from what a third group uses. Margaret Sharpe noted that one group which said gala for "this" might refer to another as Galibal, because they pronounced the word gali. Similarly, a group which said nyang for "what" might call the "Galibal" group Minyangbal, because these "Galibal" said minyang for "what". Such was the case for the Gidhabal people at Woodenbong who referred to the Beaudesert and Logan people as the Yugambeh or Minyangbal, because the Gidhabal people said yagam for "no" and nyang for "what", while the Yugambeh people said yugam for "no" and minyang for "what". Other terms are not tribal names, like "Chepara", used by the 19th century anthropologist Alfred William Howitt, which is actually "Gibera" – a first-degree initiate, the initial consonant being realised as a fricative. When asked who the local people were, the informant, who at the time would not have had a very effective command of English, had simply told him the group he was meeting were all first-degree initiates.Language
The Yugambeh language is a dialect cluster of the wider Bandjalangic branch of the Pama–Nyungan language family, which is neutrally called the Tweed-Albert Group.Yugambeh was included in the Australian Standard Classification of Languages as Yugambeh in 2016. Results from the 2021 Census indicated there were 208 Yugambeh speakers, up from the 2016 results of 18 speakers.The northern dialects represent a distinct homogenous linguistic group, one of their distinctive features being a high percentage of Yagara language words. The language varieties spoken on the Gold Coast across to the Logan River could more appropriately be termed the Mibin dialects, according to Jefferies, the difference of Mibiny and Baygal for the word for "Man/people" is due to socio-political developments and not simply dialect splits, with Bannister commenting that the Yugambeh differed from the Bandjalang proper and Gidabal, due to distinct terms for basic concepts such man and woman, while grammatical studies show that the Yugambeh dialects did differ in some degree from other Bandjalang groups both lexically and morphologically.'
Dialects
The particular number of dialects are differently described depending on the source.- According to Terry Crowley, the branch has 7 dialects.
- * Margaret Sharpe, drawing on Crowley, additionally includes the Geynyan dialect.
- * Anthony Jefferies, also drawing on Crowley, refers to Yugam, Ngarangwal/Ngarahkwal, Nganduwal, and Minyungbal of Byron, as the 'Mibin Dialects'
- Shaun Davies, reperforming Crowley's original analysis, finds a single language with two mutually intelligible regional varieties and excludes Geynyan and the Byron Bay Minyungbal from the branch.
- Archibald Meston, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, writing in 1923, identifies a single "dialect" spoken in the area from the Nerang to the Logan, which he identified as Yoocum/Yoocumbah.
- The Yugambeh Museum say their language is spoken in the Logan, Gold Coast, Scenic Rim, and Tweed areas.
The Logan area ran along its western edges, while its eastern limits were on the Tamborine Plateau, Canungra and just short of the Coomera River. It was first recorded in substantial form by the Jimboomba schoolteacher John Allen on the basis of a vocabulary supplied to him by the Wangerriburra clansman Bullum in 1913, and later described in more detail by Margaret Sharpe who took down detail notes from her informant Joe Culham, one of the last speakers of this variety of the dialect. Nils Holmer completed his Linguistic survey of south-eastern Queensland in 1983, a chapter of which included vocabulary and an analysis of grammar of the language as spoken by the Manandjali'' living in Beaudesert and the surrounding area.