The Scottish settler Alexander Kennedy then took up land in the area in 1877. Brown at Bridgewater in 1874 experienced, like Palmer, no difficulties with the indigenous owners of the land. He successfully enlisted some Kalkatungu people to work one of these mines. Ernest Henry arrived in 1866, discovering, with the assistance of Kalkatungu guides, copper deposits the following year, and founded the Great Australia Mine. His station lands did not cover any Kalkatungu sacred sites, he did not object to their presence in the vicinity, and found no problem in his relations with the Kalkatungu. Palmer was critical of the use of native police and interested in indigenous tribes. Decades later, Palmer described the natives as a peculiar people of which little was known. Walker, a former commander of the Dawson native police, shot 12 natives dead and wounded several more, just to the north east of Kalkatungu territory.Īnother early European settler, Edward Palmer, who was described by George Phillips as 'one of that brave band of pioneer squatters who in the early sixties swept across North Queensland with their flocks and herds, settling, as if by magic, great tracts of hitherto unoccupied country', settled on the edge of Kalkatungu country in 1864, at Conobie, on the western bank of the Cloncurry River. Three parties sent out to search for Burke and Wills, led respectively by John McKinlay, William Landsborough, and Frederick Walker, passed through the general area. Though their journals make no mention of the tribe, their passing through is said to have been recorded in Kalkatungu oral history, and in their language they coined the term walpala (from 'white feller') to denote Europeans. The first Europeans to visit the area were explorers Burke and Wills who crossed the Cloncurry River in 1861. In 1884 they were massacred at "Battle Mountain" by settlers and police. Their forefather tribe has been called 'the Elite of the Aboriginal warriors of Queensland'. The Kalkadoon (Kalkatungu) are descendants of an Indigenous Australian tribe living in the Mount Isa region of Queensland. This was also a warning for other Aboriginal clans not to pass these boundaries. The Kalkadoons would mark their territory boundaries with an emu or cranes foot that was either painted onto rocks and trees or carved into the hard granite rock. On the southern side of their territory the Kalkadoons were touched upon by the Pitta-Pitta tribe of the Boulia district, and on the northern side by the Mittakoodi of the Fort Constantine country. The Kalkadoon People owned vast tracts of land extending from McKinley’s Gap in the east where they joined the Goa tribe of the Winton district to Gunpowder Creek which was the territory of the Waggaboongas. The Kalkadoon People, also known as the Kalkatungu, Kalkatunga, or Kalkadungu, ruled what is called the Emu Foot Province and have been living on these lands for over 40 thousand years.
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