Ngadjuri

The Ngadjuri people are a group of

Their ethnonym is derived from two words: ŋadlu, meaning "we" and juri signifying "man", hence "we men".^[1]

Language

Wilhelm Schmidt proposed that, together with the languages of the Kaurna, Narungga and Nukunu, the Ngadjuri language formed one of the elements of a subgroup he called the Miṟu languages.^[2][3] It is now classified as a member of the Thura-Yura language family.^[4]

Elements of the vocabulary were recorded by Samuel Le Brun,

Country

The Ngadjuri homelands covered roughly 11,500 square miles (30,000 km²), embracing Angaston and Freeling in the south and running northwards to Clare, Crystal Brook, Gladstone up to Carrieton and Orroroo in the Flinders Ranges.^[6][a] Their territory coincides quite precisely with the range of the peppermint gum, which explains why the Kaurna people's exonym for them was Wirameju, meaning in Kaurna "peppermint gum forest people".^[1][6]

To the northeast, they took in the area Waukaringa and Koonamore. The districts of Peterborough, Burra and Robertstown are in Ngadjuri territory. The eastern boundaries coincide with the area of Mannahill.^[6]

Alternative names

Source: Tindale 1974

Social organisation

Before European settlers reached the area, after British colonisation of South Australia, the Ngadjuri, who practised circumcision, were aggressively moving eastwards towards the Murray River, insisting that tribes there adopt the practice.^[7] According to anthropologist Norman Tindale, the Ngadjuri were composed of several "hordes", some of whose names are known:

• Burra Burra
• Abercrombie (a name conferred on one Ngadjuri horde)
• Mimbara (the horde on the northernmost reaches of Ngadjuri territory)^[7]

History of contact

The Ngadjuri are virtually invisible in the histories of colonisation of, and their dispossession from, the traditional tribal lands.

The Ngadjuri used petroglyphs, body art, and other art forms to express their culture and beliefs. and examples of the first can be found at Firewood Creek, just a little to the northeast of Burra (in Ngadjuri, this place is known as Kooringa).^[13] Parallel striations (lines) are a very familiar theme, but other familiar features of Indigenous Australian art, such as hand prints, and kangaroo and emu footprints were also used.

Culture

The Ngadjuri practised formalised burial practices with bodies sometimes smoked or dried before burial and many buried skeletons were uncovered during the construction of the Spalding railway line. Large groups of up to a hundred men would hold mass possum hunts through the timbered hills. Although ceremonies were usually male-only private events, by the 1860s they had begun to commercialise them with the increasingly dominant European culture spectators; through whom they solicited donations.^[9]

Mythology

One myth recorded from Ngadjuri informants appears to reflect historic circumstances related to a precolonial thrust by starving Barngarla and Kokata peoples from the Western Desert regions around Lake Eyre down towards the Eyre Peninsula, which put peoples like the Ngadjuri on the defensive. The story runs as follows:-

A woman accompanied by two dogs, one red, the other black, both with a human appearance, came down from the northwest and passing through the Flinders Ranges site of Buðajerta ('snow country'), namely Mount Patawerta, they began to kill and eat any human they met. Word spread quickly of the imminent threat and people fled from their path. As the cannibal woman drew near to the game-rich and well-watered camping grounds at Karuna, the Ganjamata hill people decided to make a stand and try to kill the intruders. To this end they chose two warriors, Kudnu, the jew lizard, and Wulkinara his brother, to face the trio. Armed with boomerangs, they set a trap near the woman and her dogs, with Wulkinara suggesting to Kudnu that he take up position in a tree, and, on sighting the woman and her hounds, make some noise to draw their attention his way, while he, Wulkinara would lay in ambush in scrub nearby. At first the dogs failed to hear the noise, but, on his brother's insistent whisper that he yell out more audibly, Kudnu managed to inveigle the red dog to leap up into the tree, and, just as he did, Wulkinara swung the boomerang in his right hand and, flying truly, it sliced that dog in two. Kudnu then shouted again, and the black dog charged his hide-out, which Wulkinara also managed also to cut it in half, throwing the other boomerang in his left hand. They then killed the cannibalistic woman and burnt her. The blood spilled by the slaughtered dogs left two deposits: that of the red dog became the invaluable red ochre deposit at Parachilna Gorge, harvested by the Ngadjuri also for its medicinal properties. The black dog's blood formed a wad of the same colour, which was used both in smearing the bodies of youths during their initiation and in dancing performances.^[14][15]

A further element in the tale suggested to Tindale that the story might be inflected with an historically verifiable dating. Following the killings, something odd occurred, with the sun, which, up to that time, had never been known to set:

The sun set in the west after the cannibal woman and her hunting dogs had been eliminated, and extraordinary happening that made the frightened tribespeople burst out wailinhg. Every endeavor to get nit to rise up failed. Kudnu however, during these attempts, stayed soundly asleep, but once his frustrated kinsmen also fell asleep in sheer exhaustion, he rose and hurled a boomerang northwards where it circled and then returned to earth. This had no effect, so he tried again and again, successively aiming single throws, west, then south, to no avail. Persisting he threw his fourth boomerang eastwards. He pricked his nears attentively, listening to the sound made by the whirling wood, and gazing, saw it circling back from that direction, and as it drew back near to him, the sky began to shed light, and the day broke. He roused his tribesfolk, who joyously gave him many gifts out of gratitude. In Ngadjuri lore, those gifts, rugs, spears and clubs, remain marked emblematically on the jew lizard's back.^[16]

Tindale thought that this may reflect, or have been inflected by, the last solar eclipse that took place over the Parachilna Gorge area on 13 March 1793.^[15]

The Ngadjuri also had a version of the widespread Eagle and Crow myth, which Tindale recorded from both the Ngadjuri and the

Crow, while joining Eagle in hunting was jealous of the latter for refusing to share the game it caught, and because it was powerful enough to smash the nests of the

porcupine grass at the mouth of the cave, and, hearing the family inside choking, marched off triumphantly, certain they would be suffocated to death. Turning into a bird, he swooped back down three times to the cave to feast on the blackfellow Crows, only to find his father always there, who blocked him, and kept throwing him some meat instead. From that day onwards, the eagle swoops to earth for its prey, while the crow, descended from the smoked-out family, is black even to the point of bearing smokey eyes.^[19]

When

• History of Adelaide
• Mimbara Conservation Park

Notes

Citations

Sources