Kaanju homelands (ngaachi)^[5] stretch from the township of Coen in the centre of Cape York Peninsula to around the former Moreton Telegraph Station to the north (Fig. 6.1), covering the headwaters of the eastern and western-flowing river systems that run off the Great Dividing Range. The Aboriginal people of this area spoke and owned^[6] the Kaanju language, which they considered to have been emplaced in their ‘country’ through the actions of mythological, ancestral hero figures (called ‘Stories’ in the region’s Aboriginal English). However, neither this area, nor the Kaanju-speaking people who owned and occupied it, were considered as a homogenous group. Rather, particular Kaanju people identified with places and areas within the wider Kaanju bloc, and exercised particular rights with regard to such places on the basis of these identities. These identities were in turn based upon the actions of the ‘Stories’, which shaped or left various named ‘Story-places’ across the regional landscape. Several such places—along with other named sites—were considered the joint property of sets of close kin. Anthropologists often identify these sets of people as ‘clans’, but they were locally identified by the use of the suffix –thampanyu (‘associated with’—see Thomson 1933; Chase 1980) attached to the name of a place, an associated totem, or another signifier of conjoint place-based identity. These –thampanyu identities formed the basis of a regional system of property rights. They were also closely tied to other aspects of regional Aboriginal governance, which was enacted primarily between sets of senior men from across the region.

This regional system of land-ownership and governance—and the associated use of Kaanju ‘country’ by hunter-gatherer bands—was disrupted by the arrival of white settlers in the central Peninsula in the late 19^th century. Following the discovery of gold at several locations in the wider region, miners flooded into the central Peninsula, followed by pastoralists who took up large cattle runs to supply the miners and the townships that they established. Kaanju people experienced considerable social and cultural impacts following the establishment of the township of Coen—at the southern limit of Kaanju country—and the mining fields and camps near Birthday Mountain and on the upper Wenlock River (then called the Batavia River), which were also established on their homelands (Fig. 6.1). In addition, a number of cattle stations—including Mt. Croll, Pine Tree, Rokeby, Merluna and Batavia Downs—were established on Kaanju homelands, with the majority of Kaanju country being taken over for the running of cattle. Displaced from their hunting grounds and subject to disease, malnutrition and settler violence, Kaanju people were forced to live in fringe camps close to the major centres of white settlement, or to move to the mission stations on the land of their coastal neighbours at Lockhart River, Weipa and Mapoon. As the cattle industry grew, increasing numbers of Kaanju people worked on cattle stations on their own homelands or in other parts of the Peninsula. Significant numbers of Kaanju people—including a number of mixed-race children—were also removed^[7] to the missions and penal settlements at Cherbourg, Woorabinda, Yarrabah and Palm Island. Those so removed (and their descendants) have subsequently formed part of the Peninsula’s Aboriginal diaspora or ‘stolen generations’ (Smith 2000a, 2006).

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a decline in pastoral employment was exacerbated by the recognition of Aboriginal citizenship and the granting of award wages. As a result, Kaanju people living in the central Peninsula found themselves centralised in places like Coen, a small township in the centre of the Peninsula, as well as at discrete Aboriginal settlements like Lockhart River and other former mission or government settlements. This situation persisted until the late 1980s, when the establishment of a series of Aboriginal corporations in Coen, and the increasing possibility of access to traditional land through claim, transfer and purchase processes, allowed Kaanju people to re-establish permanent living spaces on their country.