Jawoyn

Jawoyn, known as Kumertuo, is a non-Pama–Nyungan language that belongs to the Macro-Gunwinyguan group of languages of Arnhem land. (It has recently been established that the Gunwinyguan and Pama-Nyungan languages are both branches of a proto-Macro-Pama–Nyungan language.) At one time, Kumertuo was a group of several closely related spoken dialects, but since resettlement in the post-war period, these dialects have been tending to converge into a single standardized language.

Historically, the land occupied by the Jawoyn, which Norman Tindale has estimated covered about , were in the Katherine Gorge area in the Northern Territory. The Jawoyn call this area Nitmiluk, a name derived from the word nitmi (which refers to the cicada song that Nabilil the crocodile is said to have heard when he set up camp at the entrance to a particular gorge) and the word luk, which means "place". “Nitmiluk” specifically denotes a 12-kilometre stretch there, consisting of a chain of chasms and ravines. It has been suggested that the Jawoyn people refers not only to those who speak a Jawoyn language, but also to those who are associated with the landscapes inscribed in the Jawoyn language according to their foundational mythology of the Dreamtime. The language itself, in several varieties, was spoken along the Katherine River system as far as the Mainoru River.

A widespread belief in Aboriginal thought holds that each language emerged during the formative time of creation when a demiurgic totem figure moved through the landscape crafting it and, simultaneously, endowing each topological feature with its proper word. The creative being changed the language at certain transit points which then were taken as boundary markers between tribes speaking different languages. Thus, in Jawoyn thinking, the landscape of the Katherine Gorge was created in the primordial time (burr) by Nabilil (Crocodile), who named all of the area's distinctive features in the Jawoyn language. He came from the sea, furnished with his firestick and moved through what became Dagoman and Nangiomeri lands before reaching the gorge.

Many Jawoyn moved to Tandandjal on the ridge affording spring water of a grassy plain 44 miles east-north of Maranboy in November 1948 when a short-lived government settlement for Aborigines had been established. The surrounding hills were thickly forested with lancewoods and eucalypts. While exploring the area in June of that year Ivan Frazer came across a cave littered with stone artifacts, whose walls were adorned with paintings.