In 1970, an Indigenous Australian (Lardil) man named Goobalathaldin, more commonly known today as Dick Roughsey, completed the manuscript of his autobiography, Moon and Rainbow. In it, he recounted many of his ancestors’ stories, including those about the time when the North Wellesley islands, where his people had lived for thousands of years, were once connected to the Australian mainland. These are his words:
In the beginning, our home islands, now called the North Wellesleys were not islands at all, but part of a peninsula running out from the mainland. Geologists … thought that the peninsula might have been divided into islands by a big flood which took place about 12,000 years ago. But our people say that the channels were caused by Garnguur, a sea-gull woman who dragged a…