The Winninninni Tribe, lost in the mists of time

“Aunty” Kerrie Doyle is an academic in the public health field, and she is currently inaugural Associate Dean of Indigenous Health at Western Sydney University, where her background is described as a:

Winninninni woman

Previously she worked at RMIT, as Associate Professor of Indigenous Health and the Coordinator of Indigenous Health, and she was also described there as a:

Winninninni woman

Continuing backwardsly in time, she became qualified for these positions by obtaining an awfully impressive sounding piece of paper called “Master of Science in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy” at Wolfson College, Oxford, UK, after having received a Roberta Sykes Scholarship in 2012, a scholarship which is reserved for Aboriginal people. On the Roberta Sykes Foundation website she is described as a:

Winninninni woman

The curious thing is that no one has ever heard of the “Winninninni” tribe, except Aunty Kerrie Doyle.

There is no mention of “Winninninni” in anthropologist Norman Tindale’s seminal study “Aboriginal Tribes of Australia“, 1970, nor on this 1940 map.

No one is talking about this, except one journalist/columnist, Andrew Bolt, and the part Aboriginal, former Crown prosecutor, and all round hot lady Josephine Cashman:

Does anyone know what a Winninninni is??? 🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/5ZIDa3eWaJ

— Josephine Cashman (@Josieamycashman) March 2, 2021

Bolt is a notorious Dutch autist-libertarian who has been successfully sued before for questioning the Aboriginality of individuals, and it appears from his piece that Aunty is threatening him with lawyers as well, and asking him for 100 year old maps of tribes.

Here we believe women, their truth is valid to us, and if saying they are Aboriginal helps them get scholarships and tickets to Oxford University and jobs in the rich fertile ground of the indigenous health field then we say good luck to any one who takes up these opportunities, whatever the maps and the facts say, and whether their ancestral tribe existed or not.