Qualla: Borroloola

Borroloola: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P Barden, CC BY 4.0. Some 3,000 books once arrived in a town that had no library to put them in. The volumes came to Borroloola early in the twentieth century after a police corporal wrote to the Carnegie Trust asking for something to read, and the courthouse became their only shelter. Plutarch ended up in the hotel lavatory; a fine edition of Shakespeare was torn up to light campfires. That a town this remote — a cluster of buildings on the McArthur River, a day's hard travel from anywhere — became briefly famous for a flood of literature it could not keep tells you something about Borroloola. It is a place where the unexpected washes in, and where the deeper story belongs to people who have read this country far longer than any book.

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Image: P Barden | CC BY 4.0

Borroloola: Burrulula, Where the Kangaroo Danced

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Mara and Gudanji, the town is Burrulula, and the name belongs to a small lagoon just east of the present caravan park. The story says the Hill Kangaroo Ancestor, Nangurrbuwala, danced his ceremonies here. The white-barked gums scattered through the area are re...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Borroloola: A Decade That Changed Everything

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robin Smith Collection, Public domain. The town was declared in 1885, but the change had already begun. Cattle drovers pushed herds from north-west Queensland to stock new stations, following — without ceremony or permission — paths Aboriginal people had walked for generations. The historian Tony Roberts records what ...

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Image: Robin Smith Collection | Public domain

Borroloola: The Man Taken at Four

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit albinfo, CC BY-SA 3.0. John Kundereri Moriarty was born here around 1938, a full member of the Yanyuwa, his Dreamings the Rainbow Serpent and the Kangaroo. At four years old he was taken from his mother under the policies that created the Stolen Generations, and he did not see her again for a decade. H...

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Image: albinfo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Borroloola: The Longest Wait for Home

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P Barden, CC BY 4.0. In 1977, the Yanyuwa became the first people in the country to lodge a claim under the new Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, over Borroloola and their Pellew Islands sea country. What followed was not swift justice. Centre Island came back in 2006. A surveying...

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Image: P Barden | CC BY 4.0

Borroloola: Saltwater People, Freshwater Town

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Nihilobstat at English Wikipedia., CC BY 2.0. Borroloola sits upriver, but its heart reaches to the sea. The Yanyuwa call themselves li-Anthawirriyarra — people whose spiritual origin is the sea — and their hunters once ranged the seagrass beds out to the islands after dugong and turtle. The McArthur estuary below town runs ...

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Image: The original uploader was Nihilobstat at English Wikipedia. | CC BY 2.0