The Butchulla, also written Butchella, Badjala, Badjula, Badjela, Bajellah, Badtjala and Budjilla are an Aboriginal Australian people of K'gari, Queensland, and a small area of the nearby mainland of southern Queensland. Language The Butchulla spoke Badjala, considered to have been a dialect of Gubbi Gubbi, like other K'gari dialects. Their ethnonym, variously transcribed as Butchulla, Batjala, Badjala and other variations, has been etymologised as signifying "sea folk", though Norman Tindale suggested that the word better lends itself to an analysis as combining ba ("no") with the suffix tjala, meaning "tongue". In the 1800s there were reported to be 19 groups that lived on the island permanently, with the island split into three sections. The people in the northern part of the island (Ngulungbara) were a separate group from the other two and did not want to be associated with the Badjala people, when they were pressed into the same mission. The people of the lower part of the island (Dulingbara) also moved along the coast line to Noosa area. All three groups -Ngulungbara, Butchulla and Dulingbarra- seems to have spoken dialect variations of Gubbi Gubbi. The Batjala language was spoken in the Hervey Bay region inland towards Maryborough and Mt Bauple; as well as along the Fraser Coast, including K'gari. Country Butchulla lands were concentrated in the centre of the island of K'gari (a name which refers to the former Fraser Island as well as surrounding waters and parts of the nearby mainland), and extended over to the coastal mainland (Cooloola) south of Noosa. The Butchulla route to the mainland ran through the lower waters of the Tinana Creek and their territory ran north to Pialba in Hervey Bay, and their borders to the west ran parallel to the upper Mary River. To the southwest of their mainland territory were the Gubbi Gubbi, with the territories of the Butchulla, Gubbi Gubbi and Dulingbara sometimes marked as meeting at Mount Bauple. Some two decades after the arrival of Europeans, the original population of K'gari was estimated to be in the range of approximately 2,000 people, according to Archibald Meston, a figure which, if true, would mean that the ecology was sufficiently rich in food resources to sustain one of the densest pre-contact populations of the Australian continent, paralleling only the Kaiadilt of Bentinck Island. Social organisation K'gari's abundance of fish resources made it rank, with the Kaiadilt homeland of Bentinck Island,