Mbarbaram
Located just to the west of the Great Dividing Range and the Atherton Tablelands around the upper reaches of the Walsh River, concrete details concerning the Mbarbaram (alternatively, Barbaram, (Um)Barbarem, Barbarum Mogmbabarum (['mok] = man), Wumbabaram (Ijapuka), Oombarbarum, Woombarbarram, Booburam, Balbarum, Woombarrmbarra (Wakara), are relatively few compared to the hypothetical constructs erected around them.
Their territory icovered 2,600 square kilometres and extended south to Irvinebank and the northern vicinity of Mount Garnet, north to Mareeba and west to Almaden, Koorboora and Petford. However, there are suggestions that they were formerly rainforest dwellers, forced out of their previous locations onto more sterile and rugged granite ranges with the Kuku-Yalanji to their north, the Agwamin/Ewamain to their west, the Dyirbal people to the east and the Warungu to their south.
Linguistically, they appeared to be significantly different from their neighbours, with an anomalous monosyllabic vocabulary that seemed unrelated to neighbouring dialects — Agwamin, Djangun (Kuku-Yalanji), Muluridji (Kuku-Yalanji), Djabugay, Yidiny, Ngadjan (Dyirbal), Mamu (Dyirbal), Jirrbal (Dyirbal), Girramay (Dyirbal), and Warungu — that were mutually intelligible, to varying degrees, between neighbours. However, none appeared partially intelligible with Mbabaram. While its speakers could learn their neighbours' tongues reasonably easily, the neighbours found Mbabaram 'difficult', which was interpreted as an indication of a reclusive rainforest remnant of an original 'Barrinean' Negrito population.
The notion reinforced a late 19th-century thesis that posited three waves of prehistoric settlement. The first wave—subsequently labelled 'Barrinean' with around a dozen groups identified in the North Queensland rainforests—was supposedly thrust aside by successive waves of immigrants with superior hunting technology—the light-skinned Murrayians and the darker Carpentarians with a pronounced brow ridge, who were supposedly related to ancient Indian tribes.
A 1941 paper by Norman Tindale and American anthropologist Joseph Birdsell identified a dozen Negrito tribes in the Cairns hinterland characterised by short stature, curly hair, and yellowy-brown skin. Six spoke Dyirbal — including the Jirrbal, Girramay, Gulngai and Djiru in the Murray Upper/Tully Area. Two — beyond Cairns — spoke varieties of Djabugay. Another three spoke dialects of Yidin. That left the Mbabaram, whose language, as far as it had been reported, diverged substantially from the others.
Following a phonetic suggestion from Kenneth Hale, Robert M. W. Dixon established Mbabaram words dropped initial syllables present in neighbouring languages, but the language was otherwise a regular Paman language with an identity concealed by phonological changes.
Much of the confusion surrounding the Mbarbaram can be traced to Willie Jack and John Newell's discovery of tin in their territory in 1880. By the time Dixon began his linguistic fieldwork in the 1960s, an original population that probably numbered around five hundred eighty years earlier had been reduced to "three old tired men."
Sources
AIATSISAustLang Project: Mbabaram (Y115): https://aiatsis.gov.au/austlang/language/y115
Norman Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia p. 165
Wikipedia: Mbabaram people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_people
Wikipedia: Mbabaram language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language
