Wik Mungkan - History And Cultural Relations

While the Cape York region could originally have been a major route along which migration into the Australian landmass occurred, little detailed archaeological or prehistoric Research has been conducted in the area occupied by the Wik. Linguistic and other evidence demonstrates the existence of links between various Wik groups and their neighbors on the coasts and inland. Direct contact with Macassan fishermen or with Torres Strait Islanders appears to have been minimal on the west coast of Cape York. The first Europeans known to have contacted Wik people were the Dutch, early in the seventeenth century. Pressures from the outside world began in earnest for the inland Wik with the encroachment of cattlemen in the latter part of the nineteenth century and a consequent history of dispossession from lands and punitive expeditions that continued well into the present century, in living memory of some of the older Wik. Along the coasts, there has been intermittent contact with itinerant timber cutters for many years, but it was the bêche-de-mer fishermen working in the Torres Strait and looking for labor who caused the greatest depredations. Partly in response to public disquiet about the situation, missions were established in the remote areas of Cape York from the early 1900s, operating under the assimilationist policies and legislative framework of the Queensland government. These saw the gradual sedentarization of the Wik, with systematic attempts to inculcate a Social, political, and economic regime based on settled village life rather than the precontact pattern of dispersed semiNomadic groups. A fundamental set of changes was set in train in 1978 with the institution of a secular administration under the state local-government model and by a concomitant massive increase in funding, capital development, and bureaucratic involvement—all of which have led to severe pressures on Wik internal social mechanisms.