The Nauo were a people of the Eyre peninsula. Their principal centres were around the scrub gum forest areas of the southwestern coast. According to Norman Tindale's estimate, their combined territory covered approximately. Their western frontiers lay around Cape Radstock, northwards to beyond Minnipa. Their eastern extension ran close to Darke Peak, and took in the areas west of Cleve and halfway between Carrow and Franklin Harbor. Port Lincoln, Mount Hope, Coffin Bay, and Elliston were all part of Nauo territory.
They affirm that the Nauo tribe was once entirely cut off by a great and powerful warrior, styled Willoo. This formidable individual attempted to possess himself of all the women, and destroyed every man except two, who escaped by climbing into thick trees. Their names were, Karkantya and Poona. Willoo climbed after them, but they broke off the branch upon which he sat, and he fell to the ground; that instant a dog deprived him of his virility, when he immediately died, and was transformed into an eagle-hawk. A small lizard is supposed to be the originator of the sexes. The men distinguish it by the name of ibirri, the women call it waka: the men destroy the male lizards, and the women the females.
History of contact
It is thought that, before the advent of white colonisation, the Nauo had a more northern boundary extension from the Gawler Ranges to Port Augusta. They were pressed to move further south by the time white settlement began, as the Barngarla's relocation brought pressure to bear on them from the north. At the same time, devastation came in from the south with the establishment of sealing stations along their southern coastal frontiers, whose men, together with escapees from Tasmanian prisons, kidnapped many Nauo women, beginning with raids in the first decades of the 1800s from their bases on Kangaroo Island. The violence of these early encounters may explain the hostility of the Nauo to later settlers. The Waterloo Bay Massacre, near Elliston, which is said to have taken place around 1846, is still a contentious historical issue. Tindale summarised the rumour as follows:
Following the killing of a shepherd named Hamp, and the wife of another immediately afterward, it is claimed that 160 well-armed men drove a large group of aborigines, said to have numbered 260, over a cliff into the sea. According to this entirely unconfirmed report, only two aborigines survived.
Whatever the truth, some Nauo were still in that area years afterwards. As late as 2017, agreement between the successor Wirangu community and the Elliston municipal council on the terms to be used to describe what happened were still stalled, with representatives of the latter stating that "massacre" was too stronga word to describe what has been traditionally called the "Elliston incident", where "something happened" but the details are unknown.
