One Guugu Yimithirr word has travelled further than almost any other Aboriginal term. In 1770, when Cook's crew beached the Endeavour at the river mouth nearby, the naturalist Joseph Banks asked the local people what to call the large grey animal bounding through the scrub. The answer was gangurru. It entered the ship's journals, then the English language, and today 'kangaroo' is spoken on every continent. This was a genuine first: Guugu Yimithirr became the earliest Australian Aboriginal language ever written down, captured in a wordlist of more than a hundred terms by Banks and the young artist Sydney Parkinson. Banks, straining to describe what he heard, wrote that it sounded 'more like English in its degree of harshness, though it could not be harsh neither.'

The absolute-direction system is more than a grammatical curiosity - it is a different way of being in the world. Because speakers must always know which way is north to say even the simplest thing, they keep a precise, unconscious bearing from earliest childhood, a sense of orientation that astonished the researchers who tested it. The Guugu Yimithirr compass is even rotated slightly clockwise from true north, perhaps tuned to the line of the coast or the arc of the sun. A 2010 New York Times feature on the language asked the question the country had quietly proved: does your language shape how you think? Here, the answer seemed to be yes.

Guugu Yimithirr once held the country around modern Cooktown and reached north to the mouth of the Jeannie River, south to the Annan, and inland to the territory of neighbouring peoples. It was never a single uniform speech. Two main dialects survive: the coastal dhalundhirr, 'with the sea,' and the inland waguurrga, 'of the outside.' When Lutheran missionaries translated hymns and Bible stories in the late nineteenth century, they worked in the coastal dialect, so a handful of its words still carry religious shadings the inland words never took on. The everyday vocabulary remains vivid and concrete: bubu for land, buurraay for water, birri for river, ngalan for the sun.

Most fluent speakers today live at Hope Vale, the Guugu Yimithirr community about 46 kilometres from Cooktown - home, too, to the Aboriginal leader and lawyer Noel Pearson, who grew up there and wrote his university thesis in part about its history. Of roughly 1,400 Guugu Yimithirr people, only about half still speak the language, and the most fluent are now mostly grandparents. The community is not letting it slip. Elders at Hope Vale have recorded teaching videos and posted them to YouTube, and the local school runs a language program. During the pandemic, with classrooms closed, parents and younger children ended up learning together at home from those same videos - a whole community, once more, learning to count the world by north and south.