The Bakanambia's lands covered the southern and eastern shores of Princess Charlotte Bay, and extended inland as far as the tidal limits of the Normanby and north Kennedy rivers, and included Lakefield.[2][page needed] The coastal zone is swamp ridden and covered by mangroves, which means that the Bakanambia mainly lived along the aforementioned rivers.[3] Their territory is estimated to have covered an area of around 1,100 square miles (2,800 km2).[1]
The Bakanambia were one of the "mobs" (the others being the Kokowara and Mutumui) that attacked Edmund Kennedy's exploratory party as it passed through their territory.[5] The principal informant for the language of the Princess Charlotte Bay area, as jotted down by a local resident, W. O. Hodginson and cited by Edward Micklethwaite Curr, and indexed as bearing on the Bakanambia by Norman Tindale, was a 10-year-old boy nicknamed Mal by the couple who kidnapped him. Curr notes the circumstances and adds that:
it is not at all an unusual circumstance in North Queensland for a boy of tender years to be seized by a White man, taken away from his tribe and country, and brought up ass a stockman or station hand, in which capacity his excellent sight and powers of tracking animals render him specially useful.[6]
Alternative names
Wanbara
Kokolamalama (exonym applied to them by more southern tribes)
Lamalama
Lamul-lamul
Kokaoalamalma (either a corrupt reading or a typo)
Hodginson, W. O. (1886). "Princess Charlotte's Bay, North Queensland"(PDF). In Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (ed.). The Australian race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia and the routes by which it spread itself over the continent. Vol. 2. Melbourne: J. Ferres. pp. 389–391.
Sayers, Barbara J.; Godfrey, Marie P. (1964). Outline description of the alphabet and grammar of a dialect of Wik-munkan. Summer Institute of Linguistics. pp. 49–78.