Warumungu

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the Australian Indigenous group. For their language, see
Warramunga (grasshopper)
.

The Warumungu (or Warramunga) are a group of

Tennant Creek and Alice Springs
.

Language

Main article: Warumungu language

Their language is

Indigenous Australian languages, the Warumungu language is undergoing rapid change. The morphology used by younger speakers differs significantly than the one used by older speakers.[2] An example of a Warumungu sentence might be " apurtu im deya o warraku taun kana ", meaning " Father's mother, is she there, in town, or not? ".[3]

Warumungu is classified as a living language, but the number of speakers seemed to be decreasing quickly and by the mid-1950s, Australian linguist Robert Hoogenraad estimated that there were only about 700 people who could speak some Warumungu;

Kriol since 2007.[5]

Country

In Norman Tindale's estimation, the Warumungu's lands once extended over some 21,300 square miles (55,000 km2), from the northernmost reach at Mount Grayling (Renner Springs) southwards to the headwaters of the Gosse River. The eastern boundary was around Alroy and Rockhampton Downs. The western limits ran to the sand plan 50 miles west of Tennant Creek.[6]

History

Designs used during the performance of a snake totem ceremony (pub. in The commonwealth of Australia; federal handbook, prepared in connection with the eighty-fourth meeting of the British association for the advancement of science, held in Australia, August, 1914 by George Handley Knibbs.

In the 1870s, early white explorers described the Warumungu as a flourishing nation.[7] However, by 1915, invasion and reprisal had brought them to the brink of starvation.[7][8] In 1934, a reserve that had been set aside for the Warumungu in 1892 was revoked in order to clear the way for gold prospecting. By the 1960s, the Warumungu had been entirely removed from their native land.[7]

"The post contact history of the Warumungu people is an unvarnished tale of the subordinaton of an Aboriginal society and its welfare to European interests... European settlement meant forced dispossession. This was not a once and for all process, but continued with the Warumungu being shunted around, right up to the 1960s, to accommodate various pastoral and mining interests."[9]

Tennant Creek is the urban centre of Warumungu country. During the 1970s, the era of

Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. The original land claim was lodged in 1978, for a decade the Warumungu fought for the return of their traditional lands. The ruling was made in 1988 and the hand back of the claim areas began soon after.[10]

At the telegraph station to the south at

Lake Nash. Eastern Warlpiri people fled after the Coniston massacre in 1928, many onto Warumungu country.[10]

By the 1890s it is estimated that 100 people were living at camps around the

rations, while some worked for the station. Many came to the site during the 1891-93 droughts, to the perennial waterholes along the creek, which Warumungu people traditionally used in drought years. An area of dry country to the east of the Telegraph Station was gazetted as a Warumungu Reserve in 1892, to be revoked in 1934 to allow mining in the area.[10]

In the 1930s gold was discovered, starting a

strike and staged a walk-off.[10]

The life histories of most people include their experiences living on cattle stations, which eventually surrounded the original site of European settlement. Vast tracts of Warumungu country had been granted as

hunting and gathering practices and people were forced to settle on stations or the reserve. Many men worked as stockmen, drovers, butchers and gardeners, while women carried out domestic work in the station houses. Payment was generally in rations only and conditions were generally very poor.[10]

Native title

Further information: Native title in Australia

In 1978, the

litigations eventually went to the High Court of Australia. Fifteen years later, in 1993, most of the land claim was finally returned to the Warumungu.[7] The Warumungu Land Claim is made up of ten separate parcels of land, which together make up 3,090 square kilometres (1,190 sq mi).[11] In March 1993, Michael Maurice, a former Aboriginal Land Commissioner, said of the ordeal:

The problem with the Northern Territory Government then, was it didn't accept the underlying principles of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. It didn't accept that it was for the Commonwealth to determine the conditions on which Aboriginal people could acquire land in the Northern Territory, so its attitude was one of resistance.

— Michael Maurice, March 1993[7]

Mythology

Further information:
Aboriginal Australian mythology and religion
The Totemic Ceremony: Warramunga Tribe, North-Central Australia diorama at the Milwaukee Public Museum

creation stories.[12]

Alternative names

Notes

Citations

  1. ^ Simpson 2008, pp. 71f..
  2. ^ Simpson 2013, p. 238.
  3. ^ Scholar Sceptic.
  4. ^ Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project.
  5. ^ a b Warumungu at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  6. ^ a b Tindale 1974, p. 237.
  7. ^ a b c d e The Warumungu.
  8. ^ Simpson ?
  9. ^ Maurice, M. Warumungu Land Claim. Report No.31. Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr Justice Maurice, to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and to the Administrator of the Northern Territory. Australian Government Publishing Service. Canberra, 1988
  10. ^ a b c d e The University of Melbourne School of Language and Linguistics (n.d.). Tennant Creek. Retrieved from http://languages-linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/past-acla1-regions
  11. ^ Land title grant 1993.
  12. ISBN 9780511751202. Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain
    .

Sources

External links

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