Wadjela

"Wadjela" in a Sentence (2 examples)

It was the wadjelas that created the ‘one drop’ rule, that defined anybody with a single bla(c)k ancestor as black. […] ‘Traditional’ is such loaded language, enshrining a belief that we are stuck in the past rather than being one of the most adaptable cultures in history, that some of us are using ‘classical’ instead when referring to any part of Aboriginal culture that appears similar to what it is imagined we produced before wadjela came.

Finally, the colonisers were attempting genocide, they wanted us all dead. If I identified with my wadjela ancestry at the expense of my Aboriginality, the colonisers win.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.