Badtjala/ Butchulla
While Norman Tindale's Aboriginal Tribes of Australia refers to K'gari/Fraser Island's traditional custodians as the Batjala — alternatively Badjela, Badtala, Batyala (Waka Waka term applied to coastal people), Badyala, Patyala, Bidhala (Kabikabi term applied to coastal people), Butchulla, Dulingbara (group of hordes), Ngulungbara (group of hordes at north end of K'gari who claimed to be a separate tribe), Thoorgine (name of the island) — recent usage tends to favour Butchulla.
Tindale places Batjala Country on 4,400 square kilometres of territory on the island formerly known as Fraser or Great Sandy Island and along the mainland coast from Pialba to Noosa Head. Shawn Foley defines the mainland territory as "from Double Island Point in the south, west to Bauple Mountain and north to the mouth of the Burrum River (Badtjala People, p. 7). However, regardless of its geographic limits Batjala country was "one of the more densely occupied areas in Australia, exceeded only by the Kaiadilt of Bentinck Island" (Tindale, p. 165). Their location on K'gari and the sheltered waters of Hervey Bay ensured a plentiful supply of fish and reef products.
The AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia largely concurs, including today's mainland population centres of Maryborough and Hervey Bay in Badtjala Country, but only extending it as far south as the entrance to the Great Sandy Strait, with the Gubbi Gubbi as their mainland neighbours.
The discrepancy between the two sources can be explained by dividing the nineteen permanently resident groups on K’gari into three distinct units. Tindale (above) identifies the Ngulungbara in the island's north, and their claim to be a separate entity, the Batjala in the island's centre, and a third group of hordes called the Dulingbara. They were "either a separate tribe, a horde of the Kabikabi, or of the Batjala" (Tindale, p. 125), occupied the southern third of the island, moved down the mainland coastline as far as Noosa, and "behaved much as if a separate tribe with some affiliations with the Kabikabi". All three groups spoke dialects related to Gubbi Gubbi.
While Tindale notes Batyala and Bidhala as alternatives to Badtjala used by neighbouring groups to indicate "sea folk", he also notes an alternative derivation from the group itself: ba = "no" and['tjala = “tongue” so, possibly "people who say ba for 'no'. The two alternatives would not be mutually incompatible.
Having once numbered around 2,000 —as noted above, one of the densest pre-contact populations on the Australian continent — the Badtjala people faced a dramatic decline due to frontier conflict introduced diseases and other factors. In 1897, 73 Badtjala survivors were mustered and relocated to a 1,280-acre, sandfly-infested Anglican mission at Bugimba Creek on K'gari's west coast, where they were joined by remnants from 25 localities around southeast Queensland, speaking 19 different dialects. Seven years later, in 1904, 117 survivors from all those groups were transferred to Yarrabah; Tindale and others "studied" them there in 1938. Twenty remained on K'gari. (Shawn Foley, p. 16)
Sources:
Butchulla Aboriginal Corporation: Home
Fiona Foley, Biting the clouds : A Badtjala perspective on The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897
Shawn Foley, The Badtjala People, Hervey Bay, Thoorgine Educational and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, 1994
Native Land Digital: Badtjala
Norman Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, pp. 165-166.
Wikipedia: Butchulla
