Whadjuk, alternatively Witjari, are Noongar (Aboriginal Australian) people of the Western Australian region of the Perth bioregion of the Swan Coastal Plain. Name The ethnonym appears to derive from whad, the Whadjuk word for "no". Country The traditional tribal territory of the Whadjuk, in Norman Tindale's estimate, takes in some of land, from the Swan River, together with its eastern and northern tributaries. Its hinterland extension runs to Mount Helena and a little beyond. It includes Kalamunda on the Darling Scarp and Armadale. It encompasses the Victoria Plains to the north, the area south of Toodyay and reaches eastwards as far as York and a little beyond. Its southern coastal frontier extends to the vicinity of Pinjarra. Their northern neighbours are the Yued, the Balardong people lay to their east, and the Pindjarup on their southern coastal flank. Culture and pre-history The Whadjuk formed part of the Noongar language group, with their own distinctive dialect. Culturally they were divided into two matrilineal moieties: Wardungmaat, from wardung ("crow", that is, the Australian raven, Corvus coronoides) and maat ("lineage"; literally "leg") and; Manitjmaat, from manitj ("sulphur-crested cockatoo, Cacatua galerita ") and maat. Moieties were endogamous, and children took the moiety of their mother. Each moiety also contained two "sections" (or "skins"): in the case of the Manitjmaat these were Ballarok and Tondarup and for the Wardungmaat, they were Ngotak and Naganyuk. The Whadjuk also preserved many stories of the Wagyl, a water-python held to be responsible for most of the water features around Perth. This may have been a cultural memory of an extinct Madtsoiidae python-like serpent, a water dwelling ambush predator, part of the extinct megafauna of Australia that disappeared between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago. Coastal dwelling Whadjuk have an oral tradition describing the separation of Rottnest from the mainland, which occurred between 12,000 and 8,000 BCE, technically a post-glacial Flandrian transgression. Seasonal divisions Like other Noongar peoples, the Whadjuk seem to have moved more inland in the wetter weather of winter, returning to the coast as interior seasonal lakes dried up. The Whadjuk, like many Noongar people, divided the year into six seasons. Birak: November to December, was the "fruiting", characterised by the onset of hot, easterly winds which blow during the day. Noongar people used to burn mosaic sections of scrubland to force animals into the open to hunt, and to open the canopy and allow the few