Worrorra

The Worrorra often written as Worora are an indigenous Australian people of the Kimberley area of north western Australia.

The Worrorra language is now considered to be on the verge of extinction. The British-born Australian linguist Robert M. W. Dixon's career in Australian Aboriginal languages was first stimulated by his being informed by his tutor Michael Halliday of the extraordinary complexity of the indigenous languages spoken in the Kimberley region, and, on reading up on the topic, was particularly fascinated by descriptions of the intricacies of Worrorra which reportedly had 444 forms of the verb 'to be'. Though the Worrorra have not as highly developed a system of gestural language as many of their tribal neighbours, they do have a rich repertoire of manual signs to indicate a great many species of fauna, to the point of distinguishing the sex of the animal or bird alluded to.

The Worrorra were a coastal people, whose land extended from the area around Collier Bay and Walcott Inlet in the south, northwards along the coastlands of Doubtful Bay west of Montgomery Reef to the area of the Saint George Basin and Hanover Bay, encompassing Rathsay Water and Mount Trafalgar, running inlanld some 25-30 miles, as far as Mount Hann and Mount French. Seawards it included Heyward and Augusta islands. On their southern boundaries lay the Umida and Unggumi people; to their west the Ngarinyin, and northwards, west of the Princess May Range, the Wunambal. The zone is consistently affected by tropical heat, with three seasons defined by the Worrorra: aajaajirri, the monsoonal season running from mid-December through to April; mawingki, in June–July, with a slight night-time cooling of temperatures, and then mirringunu, the torrid months from October to mid-December. The landscape is hilly sandstone terrain, quilted with spinifex and loose stands of bloodwood eucalypts, woollybutts and boabs.

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