Wilcannia is located 948 km north west of Sydney via the Great Western, Mitchell and Barrier Highways. After all, many of them are Barkindji people who have been living in this region for 40 000 years. Sadly very few travellers get out of their cars, have a look around this genuinely fascinating historic port town and talk to the local Aborigines, who are, almost without exception, very friendly and only too happy to chat about this interesting township on the banks of the Darling River.
The potent mix of the local Barkindji with Wangkumara, Danggali, Barindji and Malyangapa people from surrounding areas was deeply divisive and racially insensitive. It was not dissimilar to creating a camp in the Balkans and putting a mix of Croats, Serbs, Macedonians and Greeks together because they all look white and surely they will all get along with each other. Historically there was a major problem because very ignorant government officials used Wilcannia as a dumping ground for Aborigines from surrounding areas with no thought (or knowledge) that they belonged to different language groups and were not necessarily going to all live happily ever afterwards. And it is very common to hear locals advising visitors not to stop in Wilcannia because it is a dangerous town. It is not uncommon to hear, in White Cliffs, Cobar or Broken Hill, people declaring that they drove through Wilcannia and did not stop because it looked so dangerous. There has long been a perception, fuelled by newspaper reports and images of groups of local Aborigines standing around outside the pubs in the main street, that the town is a hotbed of violence, dysfunctional behaviour and "problems". It is impossible to write about Wilcannia without discussing what white visitors describe as "the Aboriginal problem".
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