Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia 9780226032634, 0226032639, 0226032647, 9780226032641, 9780226032658

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diane austin-broos

Arrernte Present Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia



Arrernte Past

arrernte present, arrernte past

Figure 1. The Finke River, an Arrernte highway. Photograph by author.

G arrernte present, arrernte past

Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia

diane austin- broos

the u niv ersit y of chicago pr ess chicago a nd london

diane austin-broos is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Sydney. She has written extensively on issues of culture, change, and marginalization. Born in Australia, she did her early research in the Caribbean, where she authored two books, Urban Life in Kingston, Jamaica and Jamaica Genesis. On the topic of remote indigenous Australia, she has published with Gaynor Macdonald the book Culture, Economy, and Governance. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-03263-4 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-03264-1 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-03263-9 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-03264-7 (paper) This book has been published with the assistance of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Austin-Broos, Diane J. Arrernte present, Arrernte past : invasion, violence, and imagination in indigenous central Australia / Diane Austin-Broos. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-03263-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-03263-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-03264-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-03264-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Aranda (Australian people)— Missions—Australia —Hermannsburg Region (N.T.) 2. Aranda (Australian people)—Land tenure. 3. Aranda (Australian people)—Cultural assimilation. 4. Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission Station—History. 5. Lutherans—Missions— Australia—Hermannsburg Region (N.T.)—History. 6. Land reform—Australia— Hermannsburg Region (N.T.)—History. 7. Hermannsburg Region (N.T.)—Social conditions. 8. Hermannsburg Region (N.T.)—Race relations. I. Title. DU125.A73A87 2009 305.899⬘915—dc22 2008013585 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

G contents

Maps and Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Orthography Abbreviations

vii ix xiii xv

Introduction

1

Part One: Remembering the Mission 1.

Encounter at Ntaria

27

2.

Kaporilya, a Big Place

51

3.

The Meaning of Pepe

77

Part Two: Life as a Standing Fight 4.

Home and Away: The Dislocation of Identity

105

5.

Living with Kin

130

6.

Honey Ants and Relatedness

154

Part Three: Outstations and Being Remote 7.

Factionalism (or, The Secret Life of an Outstation Movement)

179

8.

When Imaginaries Collide

205

9.

A Very Remote Emergency

238

v

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contents

Conclusion Appendix A: Kaporilya Song Appendix B: Glossary of Western Arrernte Terms Notes References Index

259 271 273 279 299 317

G m a p s a n d i l l u s t r at i o n s

Maps 1.

The Arrernte and surrounding language groups 3

2.

Region of the Western and Upper Southern Arrernte 14

3.

Lutheran missionaries’ route to Hermannsburg 33

4.

Western Arrernte land trusts 106

5.

Places in the Robinya range 111

6.

Western Arrernte estates, circa 1949 123

7.

Ntaria Township, circa 1998 132

8.

Western Arrernte outstations, circa 1996 211

1.

Finke River, an Arrernte highway ii

2.

Carl Strehlow’s church and bell 40

3.

Kristian and Auguste Pareroultja, circa 1922, with children 43

4.

Helmut Pareroultja’s sand drawing 44

5.

The Kaporilya Cross 55

6.

Road train with pipe fittings at Hermannsburg, 1935 68

7.

Albert Namatjira’s Kaporilya Boomerang 71

8.

Joyce Robinya Malbunka with Aaron, Roger, and Faith, 1999 82

9.

Title page of Carl Strehlow’s Western Arrernte primer 94

10.

Moses and Sofia Tjalkabota with Maisie and Eugene 98

11.

Joyce’s mother, Elfrieda, at Henbury, circa 1925 107

12.

An example of multiple kinship identities 134

13.

A Malbunka ramerame wurle (family group) 138

14.

Relatives attend an Australian rules football festival in Alice Springs 150

Illustrations

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viii

m a ps a nd illustr ations

15.

Vivienne Meneri and old Della Malbunka digging for honey ants 155

16.

Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre sign on the Areyonga road 195

17.

Land claim hearing in Palm Valley, 1994 197

18.

David Mowaljarlai, The Body of Australia 207

19.

Kayi Kayi Nampitjinpa, Untitled 208

20.

Denis Ebitarinja, 1994 215

21.

A water hole at Gilbert Springs between Inthorrita and Ltalaltuma 227

Note: This book contains both photographs and names of people who have passed away. Where possible, their use has been discussed with the relatives concerned and permission has been granted. Nonetheless, the book should be used with care by indigenous Australians.

G ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

I

t was Joyce Robinya Malbunka’s wish that I should write her story for the ketyeye mape, the kids—her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and those who will follow them. I have sought to intertwine her story with an account of Western Arrernte experience through the twentieth century, especially with reference to two crucial transitional moments: from hunting and gathering to mission life and from the mission to modernity in the form of outstations on country. It has been a rocky road for most Western Arrernte. Although this project has taken time, that alone does not explain why half the indigenous people cited in the text have already passed away. Joyce died in 2001. The rigors of being remote and Aboriginal today led me to place her experience in a context that she shared with others at Ntaria. Although the responsibility for this work is entirely mine, including inadvertent errors, there are many people I wish to thank. First, Joyce and her children and their families and affines, and her sisters and brother, for the privilege of knowing them and their patience and warmth over many years. Next, many other Arrernte and Luritja people at Ntaria, among whom I name the following: Joyleen Abbott, Judith Inkamala, Rosemary Ratara, Arfa Inkamala, Sylvia MacNamara, Denis and Nancy Ebitarinja, Nahassan and Rahel Ungwanaka, Herman and Mavis Malbunka, Gus Williams, Joseph Ronji, Greg Armstrong Sr., Elva Cook, Carol Ebitarinja, Alice Ngalkena, Amy Pareroultja, Miriam Tucker, Helmut Pareroultja, Marcus Wheeler and Marlene Wheeler, Lottie and Traugott Malbunka, and Eli Rubuntja. Many of them have passed away. Thanks also to Joe Braedon, Gilbert Forbes, Helen Stewart, Mark Fly, and Gwen Inkamala. I ask forgiveness from those I might have overlooked who traveled with me, taught me, hid from me, played jokes, or were kind about my singing. Those involved in honey ant hunts,

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ack now ledgments

fishing, mustering camps, sports and football festivals, choir trips, and shopping in Alice Springs, you know who you are. I would also like to thank a number of people associated with the Lutheran Church of Australia who have been most generous with time, conversation, and assistance. They include Hans and Glenda Oberscheidt, who gave me friendship and support when I began my research. We are now lifelong friends. In later years, Glen and Julie Auricht made me welcome both at Tjuwanpa and in Alice Springs. I am deeply indebted to Glen for his insights regarding Arrernte people, as I am to Gary Stoll, Paul Albrecht, and Lilly and David Roennfeldt. This book would not have been possible without their encouragement and help. At the Lutheran Church Archives in Adelaide, thanks are due to the late Phillip Scherer and to Lyall Kupke. Lyall has been especially patient. To this group of generous Lutherans, may I say that if we do not agree on all aspects of this work, let it be understood that the book is written with great respect for those involved both directly and indirectly with the Finke River Mission to the Arrernte people. There are others in Alice Springs who have been very helpful. These include Brett Galt-Smith, Scott Mitchell and Graeme Shaughnessy at the Strehlow Research Centre (SRC), David Avery and Lee Sackett at the Central Land Council, Gavan Breen at the Institute of Aboriginal Development (IAD), Bill Muddle and Richard Preece of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), and all the ATSIC and Australian Archives staff who helped me access the early Department of Aboriginal Affairs files pertaining to the Western Arrernte outstation movement. Funding for this research that took me to Alice Springs and Ntaria came from three grants provided by the Australian Research Council. Without this support, the field trips involved in this research would have been difficult to sustain. Six Australianists deserve special thanks for the generous help they have provided, including advice, information, and reader’s comments, or through just being sounding boards. They are Gaynor Macdonald, John Morton, Fred Myers, Nic Peterson, John von Sturmer, and Peter Sutton. But for John von Sturmer’s help in the early days, I might never have gone to Ntaria. John Morton, the Arrernte’s land claim anthropologist, has been most generous with his insights and interest. I did not see a great deal of Dick Kimber, but the conversations we did have, mainly at the SRC, were very helpful. Other colleagues in and beyond my department also gave support. I would like to give special thanks to a number of past students who provided me with a constant flow of conversation about indigenous Australia. They included Alberto Furlan, Anna Kenny, Nina Nichols, Rosemary O’Donnell, and Noah Pleshet. Jeanne Ellard read early chapters and encouraged me.

ack now ledgments

xi

I am indebted to a number of people for technical assistance and other advice. These include my colleague Sheleyah Courtney and also Nina Nichols. Sheleyah read the entire manuscript and gave me early, systematic comment. Nina kept me abreast of the media debates. In the latter part of this project, the experience, skill, and calm of Katie Pittard were invaluable. Thank you, Katie. Very special thanks to Peter Johnson, who, at a distance, did an excellent job of redrawing all the maps in a most professional manner. Also thanks to Laura Avey, David Brent, and Ruth Goring at the University of Chicago Press. My manuscript editor, Lori Meek Schuldt, has made this a better book. I am grateful to her. Finally, let me thank my husband, Frank Broos, for his patience and support during my many trips to Central Australia. And thanks to Harry Broos, my son, who came with me, at age nine, on the first trip to Ntaria. Like his father, Harry has always responded to my work with a generosity that I feel few could match. The three of us have been on a journey together. We have all grown as our engagement with the Arrernte has deepened. To Frank and Harry, thanks so much. Diane Austin-Broos Sydney, 2008

G n o t e o n o r t h og r a p h y

T

he orthography that I have used throughout this text is that employed in the Introductory Dictionary of Western Arrernte (2000), compiled by Gavan Breen for the Institute of Aboriginal Development (IAD) in Alice Springs. Pastor Eli Rubuntja and Gregory Armstrong Sr. were central contributors to the dictionary. Other cultural advice was provided by John Pfitzner. Unlike the Central and Eastern Arrernte, the Western Arrernte do not have a major published dictionary of their language (see Henderson and Dobson 1994). Various Lutherans associated with Hermannsburg (including A. H. Kempe, Carl Strehlow, and T. G. H. Strehlow) have compiled word lists, dictionaries, or grammars of the language. In addition, members of the church have produced a contemporary grammar, revised in its second edition by Hans Oberscheidt (see Pfitzner and Schmaal 1986, 1990). Lilly Moketarinja and David Roennfeldt developed a word list for teaching Western Arrernte literacy in primary school. Later, this list was expanded into a Western Arrernte Picture Dictionary produced by IAD for use in schools (see Roennfeldt et al. 2005). Its orthography differs from Breen’s and is more like Lutheran orthographies of the past. These various dictionaries and lists, but for Carl Strehlow’s unpublished one, are cited in the references. My choice of the IAD version is governed in significant part by the fact that it was done by and with the advice of dedicated linguists and is in a published form accessible to a larger readership. It is also the orthography in common use by consultants to the Central Land Council in land claim reports concerning Western Arrernte people. Where I have quoted from or cited texts that use different orthographies, often those of Carl Strehlow or T. G. H. Strehlow, I have let their spellings stand. Similarly, I have not sought to respell place-names or surnames

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note on orthogr a ph y

that have appeared in print in other orthographies (for example, diagrams or maps). Sometimes, however, I have standardized the spelling of place-names for the purposes of this book. Once again, my criterion is accessibility for a broader audience. A glossary of most terms in my text spelled according to Breen’s orthography is provided in appendix B.

G a b b r e v i at i o n s

AA, NT

Australian Archives, Northern Territory (of the Commonwealth of Australia)

ABS

Australian Bureau of Statistics

AIATSIS

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

ALC

Aboriginal Land Commissioner

ATSIC

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission

CA

Commonwealth of Australia

CAEPR

Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research

CCAC

Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission

CDEP

Community Development Employment Project

CLC

Central Land Council

DAA

Department of Aboriginal Affairs

DEWR

(Commonwealth) Department of Employment and Workplace Relations

DSS

(Commonwealth) Department of Social Security

FRM

Finke River Mission

HMSR

Hermannsburg Mission Superintendent’s Report

IAD

Institute of Aboriginal Development (Alice Springs)

LCA

Lutheran Church Archives

SRC

Strehlow Research Centre (Alice Springs)

STEP

Structured Training and Employment Project

TORC

Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre

xv

G introduction

invasion /ın’veı(ə)n/ noun. LME [Old&mod. French, or late Latin invasion(n), from Latin invas- pa, ppl stem of invader see INVADE, -ION] 1a The action of invading a country or territory, esp. with armed force; a hostile incursion. LME. b fig A harmful incursion of any kind; e.g. of the sea, disease, moral evil, etc. E16 c MEDICINE The spreading of pathogenic micro-organisms or malignant cells that are already in the body to new sites. L19 2 An assault, an attack on a person, a building etc. 3 Intrusion; encroachment upon a person’s property, rights, privacy etc. LME 4 ECOLOGY The spread of a plant or animal population into an area formerly free of that species. E20 . . .

I

remember driving through Belgium in 1998 and almost by accident spying some old concrete tank traps, sometimes known as “dragon teeth.” They were lying partly hidden in a grassy field. My husband, a Dutchman from the south, explained that these contraptions were placed in the ground to obstruct the foreign tanks as they made their westerly advance in 1940. Prior to his remark, my eyes had rested on a small stone house. For an antipodean like myself, it seemed a timeless, quiet place. Knowledge of the dragon teeth changed my perception. I realized I was passing through the site of an invasion. My sense of tradition, the oldness of Europe, was compromised in that moment. Was the house really old, or had it been rebuilt? A drive west from Alice Springs presents another timeless land framed by lines of purple ranges. I pass the hill before Jay Creek and turn the truck 1

2

introduction

slightly south, catching a glimpse of a totem kangaroo lodged in the landscape. Further on, undulating hills embody an ancient snake. Houses built of concrete blocks are hidden by the snake and in other folds of land across the plain. Around yet another bend and there, on the road ahead, I see a stalled car and a Western Arrernte mob. They wave me down: greetings, laughter, matted hair, and the acrid smell of sweat, fried food, and alcohol. A laughing girl with dusty feet and the skinny legs of former hunter-gatherers asks me for petrol. As I turn to my jerry can, this scene too reminds me of invasion—more than a century ago, and with technology that might seem simple now. Yet this invasion brought effects that more than match events in Europe. In the 1860s and 1870s, when explorers, pastoralists, missionaries, and workers on the telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin reached Central Australia, there were no tanks and no tank traps. At least initially, there was no organized armed force. Yet in terms provided by the OED, settlers invaded Central Australia. These newcomers usurped land through the power of their tools and cultural precepts, visiting extreme, deleterious effects on the indigenous people and their desert environment. In this change wrought by invasion, Aboriginal people acquired new knowledge and skills, and maintained their identities. Yet the changes were immense and undermined a way of life. As a result of this nineteenth-century invasion, the twentieth-century Arrernte of Central Australia have faced an ontological shift: change so great that one can speak of passage “between worlds.” This book employs ethnography and history to recount this ontological shift as it unfolded through the twentieth century. In this introduction, I attend first to some issues of analysis. Then I introduce the Western Arrernte and discuss their significance in European scholarship. Finally, I provide an overview of my fieldwork and the structure of the book.

Two Moments of Change The changes that I relate are summarized in two historical moments. The first concerns the invasion and the Arrernte’s and Kukatja-Luritja’s response to pastoral settlement. Quite rapidly, Southern and Western Arrernte were prised off land that seemed suitable for pastoralism.1 As the disruption grew, the Arrernte, like their Luritja neighbors to the west, were first repelled by these strangers and then brought rapidly into their aura. Once their land was usurped, the power of settlement goods and safe haven drew them in. By the end of the nineteenth century, with land to the east, north, and south claimed by pastoralists and only the poor terrain of the Luritja to the west

introduction

3

Map 1. The Arrernte and surrounding language groups. Adapted from J. Morton 1992a.

remaining, Arrernte who lived between the Western Macdonnells and the lower Finke fell back to the Hermannsburg Mission. Located on a dry expanse later named Missionary Plain, the Lutherans occupied the land that pastoralists had rejected, at least as a first choice. By the turn of the century, the missionaries faced the task of tending more than one hundred Aboriginal people who had no previous experience of permanent settlement (Hartwig 1965, 627). This began the transition for Western Arrernte from a hunter-gatherer society to a local economy centered on the mission. It involved a transition from regional band society based on a system of locatedness and kin and ritual relations to one in which the missionaries and the Arrernte between them sought to invent a new local order supported by the state. This order was built on Christian conversion, the exchange of rations for service, and the mission’s authority. The mission secured and developed itself through the greater part of the twentieth century. Change came a second time in the late 1950s when policy toward Ab-

4

introduction

original people was restyled in an expansion of Australia’s welfare state. A nationwide referendum in 1967 enabled the federal government to legislate for Aboriginal people and include them in the census. Previously, lawmaking for Aboriginal groups had been the province only of state governments. Concurrently, discussions began concerning federal land rights legislation for the Northern Territory. Finally, this extension of citizens’ rights involved a broad and significant policy shift from assimilation to self-determination for indigenous people. The social upshot of these changes can be gauged in the events that followed. The first change brought a radical depletion of the indigenous population and a sedentary life to the Western Arrernte. These were awful effects mediated to some extent by the missionaries. Hermannsburg became in fact a small domestic economy lodged on the periphery of Australia’s market society. The second major change, which followed World War II and has taken more than forty years to unfold, has been as great as the initial invasion. Until recently, however, its scale has been masked by its contradictory nature. Land rights, when they came, brought a social corollary—a state-financed return to country in the form of outstations on the Western Arrernte land that had been a mission lease. Outstations were built and supported mainly by government transfers in the form of pensions, welfare, and small development grants. The deep contradiction that lay in land rights and the outstation movement was that modernity came to the Arrernte in the form of a state-sponsored return to tradition. With land rights came inclusion in a cash economy but also marginalization in Australian society. Dire consequences and extraordinary innovations flowed from these moments. They frame the Western Arrernte’s circumstance today. The degree to which the Western Arrernte have maintained continuity is remarkable. At the same time, it would be misleading and even cowardly to propose that Arrernte ingenuity has simply triumphed over these moments. Their cumulative effect on indigenous Central Australians has been searing; one of the world’s great object lessons in forms of violence visited on a Fourth World people in the wake of an invasion by industrialized Europeans. In this, the recent outstation movement is as consequential as the initial invasion. In this second moment, Western Arrernte left the mission—a way station, one might say, on the road to modernity—and, while receiving land rights, also were confronted directly by both market society and its bureaucratic state. Seeking belonging and identity as indigenous Australians, the movement to outstations also left the Arrernte marooned and unemployed as market individuals. This more recent clash of imaginaries, as much as that involved in the initial invasion, underlies the current violence of Western Arrernte life.

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5

Change as Ontological Shift An abrupt overturning of an economy by another more powerful one grabbed the Arrernte and framed their world. As I have noted, the change that invasion brought had two major moments: usurpation of the land that brought a sedentary life, followed fifty years later by a state-managed return to country that also entailed radical marginalization. The magnitude of these events has led me to adopt a phenomenology of the subject—an analysis of the way in which the world and being of the Arrernte have changed through the course of a century. One way to summarize this change is to think in terms of hunter-gatherer life, which is kin-based and emplaced, and compare it with market society, with its bureaucratic state and its cash and commodities. The Arrernte’s passage between these forms has not been easy, clean, or complete but rather a gnawing tension over time between two regimes of value and their unequal power. Market society’s sheer productive capacity has shaped the change without a doubt. This has meant that the tug has been away from hunter-gatherer life, but at an uneven pace. After the initial invasion, the domestic moral economy of the mission, a small and relatively closed concern, dampened the influence of cash and portable property on Western Arrernte life. Ironically, at that very moment when the mission withdrew and the Arrernte turned to “tradition,” they were for the first time encompassed entirely in a cash economy and marginalized in the larger society; marginalized and not simply peripheral because the forms of value they brought from the past could no longer redefine their circumstance. This marginalization reinforced the experience of being not simply culturally different but also unequal and disparaged within Australian society. When I argue that this course of change has involved “ontological shift,” I do not mean by that simply changed conditions. Rather, I have in mind Heidegger’s idea that the very materiality of life, including both the natural environment and things of social life, is defined by particular acts, “concernful dealings.” These dealings make both things and strategies “readyto-hand,” with value that is taken for granted.2 In turn, this value is realized in practices that make discriminations between things and acts so that value occurs as “regimes” or relational orders (see Appadurai 1986, 4, 14–15). When such orders are disrupted, in this case by invasion and subsequent forms of change, things and strategies start to lose sense. At the same time, other phenomena become apparent or “present,” waiting to be invested with value as social practice changes course. It is my proposal that this process has marked Western Arrernte life throughout the twentieth

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introduction

century, and with particular intensity at two notable moments. Further, this form of change concerns both social environments and the human subject, so that embodied identity, the very meaning of what it is to “be,” can be redefined. A central part of understanding Western Arrernte today is understanding the magnitude of this process manifest in a people moving from the milieu of hunter-gatherers to participants in market society and the state. Two dimensions of this change are central. To begin with, the introduction of sedentary life, including the power to be resourced and remain in one place over time, set Western Arrernte on a course that changed or relativized previous notions of value that linked social life to localities. As hunter-gatherers, the Arrernte retained little movable property. The value that informed their world was invested in place, and their property was in fact the practical and ritual knowledge, as well as the relatedness, that gave them access to or authority over places. For the Western Arrernte, this knowledge and relatedness stretched across the region of the Western Macdonnells and the Finke and Hugh river basins. It defined a home place and a primary identity for each clan.3 These “countries” were also anchors that allowed groups to travel in the region and engage in exchange. Travel varied in duration, and the composition of local groups altered over time. A passage from a social order where value was invested in place to one in which value is invested mainly in capital and movable property has been the Arrernte’s lot, initially conferred by sedentary life. This shift has brought even more ramifications as, following the mission’s departure, the Arrernte engaged more readily with cash and commodities. In the face of this momentous change, and in the context of contradictory policy concerning outstation life, the Arrernte have become “reluctant consumers” of movable goods (see Peterson 2005). Their investing of value in vehicles, clothes, and manufactured goods and in health and education services remains at variance with other Australians, as does the manner in which they value place and define identity. This tension between values can be creative and cause suffering as well. It makes the Western Arrernte enigma in their own land. Change as ontological shift has another and equally important form: the passage from a context in which the human subject is first and foremost a relative (kin) to one in which the subject becomes more a market individual. The Arrernte still ask, “To whom are you related?” whereas nonindigenous Australians ask, “What do you do (for a living)?” An example of the former would be a first encounter with an Arrernte person in Alice Springs, perhaps at a seminar. We would try to find a shared link; someone who’s a relative, a “skin” relation, or a shared associate.4 Our initial remarks would concern the “where” and “with whom” we have been

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7

in the past. Our respective identities would be defined in terms of patterns of association that have realized relevant forms of relatedness. An example of the second encounter might involve a party in Sydney. A mutual friend acquaints me with someone previously a stranger. Left to our own devices, we provide each other with brief career narratives—accountant, nurse, academic, or carpenter—that help to work out “where we stand” in terms of status, interest, and associations. Each of these engagements involves interlocutors “placing” one another so that sociality can flow. Yet the selves that they summon are different subjects that call on different orders of value and ways of being in the world. For we two members of mass-market society, the reach of our kinship networks generally tells us little about one another. We turn to another, less personal system, that of workforce classifications. In addition, we might note dress and other features of personal style. In a small-scale and local Aboriginal society, kin relatedness still tells most of the important things; work roles, not so much. Variations in consumption choice also have limited salience. Western Arrernte juggle these competing orders that shape a major part of a life foisted upon them by the unequal power that came with invasion. (It is generally the less powerful who are forced to be bilingual.) Moreover, this juggling act is more than simply the product of incorporation in a state. It is also a result of the way that incorporation was done. Marginalized on the social and spatial periphery of market society and the state, incorporation has been a stop-go and involuted process of innovations, misfires, and discrimination. In fact, Australian society’s lack of interest in the Arrernte as workers, and in their region as a site for development, has meant that the Arrernte have maintained various salient forms of value from the past. As they engage a market society, they still rely on relatedness and their emplaced identities within a local region. This means that the “disembedding” from kin-based community and locality that philosopher Charles Taylor (2004) has ascribed to modernity is only partly realized for the Western Arrernte.5 As the chapters that follow will show, this circumstance presents a fertile ground for imaginative dealings in local milieus. At the same time, this historical condition, shaped by a century’s careless use of power, has also made the Western Arrernte subject to all manner of violence.

Violence and Imagination If ontological shift has unfolded for a century, the violence that accompanies it has waxed and waned with changing state policy. As I write, remote indigenous Australia is known beyond its boundaries as the site of sub-

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stance abuse, premature death, and domestic violence against women and children; an awful crisis of masculinity among anomic youth who now, as they become husbands and fathers, spread their own desperation further. The pressure on grandmothers—always major carers—is immense, and few men reach old age. Those who do have little chance to assert authority. As my discussion shows, this circumstance can bring malnutrition for the young and the old. Moreover, the mobility of outstation life has often found young adults traveling the region with small kids plunging headfirst into illiteracy. This physical and social violence of the everyday—“social suffering,” as Kleinman (2000) calls it—is integral now to Western Arrernte life, a fall from grace, some might say, in the wake of the mission’s withdrawal. And yet to grasp this particular violence, it is well to recall that among Western Arrernte, violence is hardly new. The initial invasion and its aftermath brought violence in its own right. Disease followed loss of land. There was an influenza epidemic in 1896 and measles in 1899. Another large influenza epidemic occurred in 1919. Hundreds were killed in these rounds of disease while unrecorded others died of venereal disease or did not reproduce. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, mounted police in the service of pastoralists hunted and shot various Arrernte people. In the 1920s, the camps that surrounded the rail line construction to Alice Springs brought further disease and demoralization.6 Between 1926 and 1930, a great drought denuded the Western Arrernte landscape and bore witness to the intersection of pre- and postinvasion forces. The demise of indigenous burning practices took away a source of regeneration. Moreover, pastoralism on marginal land and the introduction of rabbits exacerbated periodic drought. In and about the Hermannsburg mission, infant mortality was 85 percent. Others died “out bush.” These were the experiences that led the Western Arrernte, in engagement with the Lutheran missionaries, to shape a precarious settlement life based on pastoralism, craftwork, and gardening. It was a life encompassed by the status order of the mission in which literacy was for ritual purposes and women were mainly domestic servants; a life in which the Western Arrernte became wards of the state and subject in comprehensive ways to the authority of the mission. Exit from this order has brought new violence of the type I have described and for reasons I have noted. The Western Arrernte’s return to tradition, after fifty years and more in a Lutheran mission regime, has been a return that also involved full inclusion in the cash economy but marginalization from the forms of organization that facilitate engagement with market society and a transnational world. Largely unemployed and depen-

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dent on welfare, people such as the Western Arrernte have been unable to reproduce either the status order of the mission or their ancient forms based on an emplaced social life. Largely bereft of coherent status orders, except in the negative sense of being on welfare, authority is hard to maintain. In Western Arrernte life, where kin relatedness is primary and most of life is lived within a local group, the result has been imploding domestic milieus, often violent and fueled by emotional tensions within and between genders and generations (see Sutton 2001). In the final chapter of this book I discuss state intervention in this circumstance. More to the point, in an introduction that frames an account of Arrernte life, I turn to some analytic guides to address this circumstance. Anthropologists write about two aspects of violence. One I have mentioned: the violence of the everyday and the social suffering that comes with disordered conditions within and between individuals, families, and neighborhoods in milieus that are insecure and changing (Scheper-Hughes 1992; Das and Kleinman 2001). New to remote Australia perhaps, this circumstance is a common one for contemporary marginalized communities around the world, whether they are in the North and South America, the erstwhile Soviet Union, parts of the United Kingdom, or South Africa. Each of these locales has forms of violence specified by local histories. There is, however, a link between marginalized sites as ones at which the place or people lack interest for finance capital and labor markets, and the states that administer them. Pushed to the margins, these populations suffer, albeit in the particular ways conferred by their regions. Paul Farmer calls this condition “structural violence,” a term he uses to address the systematic suffering of peoples at the margin. Farmer places his focus on illness—beginning with his studies of AIDS in Haiti—and uses the concept to underline “violence exerted systematically” on a people and not simply the product of their individual acts (see Farmer 2002, 307; 1992). He also describes structural violence as that “visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress” (Farmer 2002, 308). The Western Arrernte’s historical position—held on the invading society’s periphery by policies vacillating between ideas of difference and assimilation—has made them vulnerable to this condition by virtue of being “remote” to the larger society. Just as invasion was no accident of nature but a product of policies realized in governmant, so the responses of Arrernte and Lutherans to constitute a local domestic order were feasible only with government grants. Again, the recent policy that encouraged a return to country but without due reflection on ensuing marginalization for a modern people has been an active force in shaping present condi-

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tions. Structural violence more often than not rests on unintended effects as much as intended ones. Yet, as James Ferguson notes, the unintended is not always authorless. “Planned interventions” with “unintended outcomes” also have “political logics” (Ferguson 2002, 401). For the purposes of this account, it is sufficient to note that the cumulative structural violence of invasion, mission rule, and poorly conceived policies for a transition to modernity provides the context for the Arrernte’s current social suffering. Anthropology underlines this circumstance, that structural violence often frames the everyday variety. Nonetheless, individuals attend first to the everyday and in that way begin to define their experience (see Feldman 1991; Bourgois 1995; Das 2000). The Western Arrernte have done this with imagination—that peculiarly human capacity to respond with foresight and reflection to events that shape new practices. This symbolic rendering of a circumstance in order to respond to it is more than investing things with value. It also involves finding representations of practice that motivate and cultivate hope. In the context of Arrernte life, two types of imagining stand out.7 The first involves maintaining continuity in the face of change. The Arrernte have done so using metaphor (see Cassirer 1955; Fernandez 1991). Maintaining continuity through metaphor brings a poetics into play; in this case one that includes the use of homology and ellipsis.8 Homology involves locating identity in unlike things—a Western Arrernte propensity exemplified in kinship calculations when it is noted that things are “same but different,” for example, “We are same but different, same mother different father.” The intention here is to elide or discount a difference in order to assert an identity. When metaphor is used to maintain continuity, the identity asserted is between the present and the past. History is brought into the present; for example, when “walkin’ round” is used to describe both knowing the country in a hunter-gatherer’s way (“We used t’ walk around this place”) and bearing up in settlement life (“That one, he’s still walkin’ round”).9 The scope and content of activities has changed—walking between town camps and across country, one involving modest knowledge and the other an extensive repertoire. At the same time, the term also points to a homology—that being up and on one’s feet is a sign of continuing well-being. Further, that perambulation, movement through space, remains a way to know. A fundamental change in life becomes a continuity. Things are made the same or at least similar through the use of metaphor to locate homology and subdue difference. Thus identity is maintained in the course of changed experience. A second way in which imagination works is to project the future and

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thereby facilitate hope by creating new certainties. Charles Taylor would call this process the forging of new social imaginaries. He describes a social imaginary as a way in which “we collectively imagine . . . social life,” pretheoretically. He means that a social imaginary is always implicit and diffuse. It embodies a view of life with no “clear limits” (C. Taylor 2004, 25, 50). Imaginaries rely on representations that capture and stabilize contingencies using them as vehicles to convey regimes of value. The “concernful dealings” of a life are presented as natural, as a given aesthetic in the world. In his discussion of the genesis of value, Hans Joas draws our attention to the fact that social imaginaries can be recast (2000, 163–64). New orientations produced in practice can gradually be objectified and projected beyond the self. Self and value are thereby captured and stabilized in representations. The Bible or pepe, cowboy paraphernalia, and the “block” or country on which outstations were built all involve such artifice.10 At different times in the course of change, symbols act to suggest a contingent event as something separate from the self, noncontextual and enduring. In the Western Arrernte world, each of these three representations has been a vehicle for imagining new ways to be. In sum and in an old formulation, imagining can re-present the past and link it with the present. It can also produce new models of reality, new social imaginaries (see Geertz 1973). I move from violence to imagination in order to underline that change is always interpreted. Imagination mediates violence and makes it livable. It fosters a certain forgetting as it also shapes memory. Nonetheless, there is no reason to assume that imagination never flags or that hope cannot prove elusive; that sometimes representations fail to grasp a world and metaphors don’t come “ready-to-hand.” In the face of structural violence and its daily manifestations, forms of imagination bring new strategies. Yet, as my account suggests, recent decades have tested the Western Arrernte. A passage from the mission into market society and full engagement with the bureaucratic state has brought unusual challenges to a previously local people.

Ethnography and History Currently, two genres of ethnography bookend the field of indigenous studies in Australia. One of these genres is a classical form that addresses cultural continuity (see, e.g., Myers 1986; H. Morphy 1991; Povinelli 1993a; Keen 1994). Among these classical works, especially Povinelli’s and Keen’s propose an openness to change among Aborigines. Myers, on the other hand, provides the most insightful account of the institutional conflicts

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confronted by a people, the Pintupi, who reside northeast of the Arrernte. Nonetheless, all these scholars tend to assume that continuity is found in an enduring culture rather than worked at through imagination. A different type of study proclaims a “modern blackness” for indigenous Australians. With this portrayal comes the proposal that indigenous identity is principally the product of the shared experience of racialized relations (see Cowlishaw and Morris 1997; Cowlishaw 2004; Lea, Kowal, and Cowlishaw 2006). The latter studies tend to discount the impact of tradition, and the struggle to reproduce it, on contemporary indigenous life. Some imply a growing and pervasive cultural amnesia. Neither the classical nor the modern viewpoint captures Western Arrernte experience, which has involved a commitment to some past ways, cultural innovation, and a wary sense of a racialized world. Among older generations, the latter includes misgivings and some anger at youth who increasingly figure themselves as “black” and seem to subdue a Western Arrernte past (see also Austin-Broos 2005b). This study addresses social transformation and the cultural maintenance of identity in the face of prevailing and sometimes overwhelming power (see also Morris 1989; Rose 1991; Merlan 1998; Cowlishaw 1999). I take my cue from Sahlins’s proposal that these days, tradition is best addressed as “a culturally specific mode of change” (2000, 476). However, I have inserted into Sahlins’s quite pacific view a type of change that has challenging ontological dimensions accompanied by periodic and confronting forms of violence. This means that the mechanisms of reproduction and transformation, the strategies that the Arrernte adopt and the imagination that propels them, assume unusual importance. In the context of Western Arrernte life, the mechanisms of imagination, the symbolic capacities that they involve, sustain an identity within the state, a process that Sahlins observes entails constant cultural work (476). Yet this is not the Other’s history in a grand ethnographic style but rather the product of modern people in a marginal and involuted world. It records a Western Arrernte experience that is turbulent, messy, ironic, and wry. Attempts to manage social suffering and conflicting values are the heroics in this account. If this perspective diverges from Sahlins, it also diverges from historical studies of indigenous Australia. In the introduction to her account of first contact at Sydney Cove, the historian Inga Clendinnen (2005, 3) commented, “Historians’ main occupational hazard is being culture-insensitive, anthropologists’ is insensitivity to temporal change. Both can be insensitive to the reciprocating dynamic between action and context. Together, however, they are formidable.”

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No one could write truer words. And yet historians as diverse as Reynolds (1982), Windschuttle (2002), and even Clendinnen herself have seemed reluctant to consult anthropology’s twentieth-century ethnographic corpus as a route to interpreting historical text. As a consequence, the nature of indigenous society as a knowledge system, but emplaced, has been largely ignored and with it the horrendous confrontation between one sophisticated people and another—the latter literate, powerful and blinded by its technological dominance (see Austin-Broos 2006a). Again, who among the historians who have not done fieldwork will be able to bring to light the dilemmas of a modern people living remote who now face the experience of poverty as well as cultural difference? In the writing of another’s history one must, as Windschuttle suggests and then seems to forget (2002, 104), strive for Weber’s verstehen. This form of interpretive understanding tries to grasp an experience from the other side and, in the case of remote indigenous Australians, an experience generally not recorded in the text. Verstehen led me to interpret texts in terms of a phenomenology built through fieldwork and Western Arrernte reflections on the past; the application of evident idioms to the interpretation of events. Clendinnen is right to underline culture, for in its provenance lies the key to the magnitude of the Arrernte’s experience: not simply a change in social context or even environment but in the very coordinates of the self.

Introducing the Western Arrernte The Western Arrernte of the Finke River and the Macdonnell Ranges once described each other in just these terms: as lhere pirnte, ”salty river” people, or as tyurretye, “legs stretched out,” like the Western Macdonnells. They identified according to region and topography and were linked by marriage and travel for social, ritual, and economic ends. Their country is the richest in Central Australia due to the ranges that draw rain to the center of an arid continent. Clouds travel from the coast of West Australia across a vast terrain and dump their rain around the Macdonnells and the James Range. Sometimes the turbulence creates dramatic electrical storms portrayed in Western Arrernte song. These storms make the rivers run, albeit once or twice a year, and nurture the underground wells. Following the invasion, people who lived along the middle Finke, the Ellery Creek, and the Hugh River, as well as in the Western Macdonnells, became known as the “Western” dialect group of the Central Australian Arrernte. Speakers of Western Arrernte

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Map 2. Region of the Western and Upper Southern Arrernte.

today number about twelve hundred, scattered among Ntaria, various outstations, Alice Springs, Papunya, Larumba and other sites, down to Port Augusta on the coast (see Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] 2004, 50).11 Geologic findings record paleoflooding and subsequent climate change in Central Australia. Hard as it is to imagine today, the Finke River system was once a complex watercourse. These rivers and their flood plains are mirrored in the fact that Western Arrernte myth classifies the marriage moiety, penangke/pengarte and peltharre/kngwarreye as water dwellers, while the moiety of pwerrerle/kemarre and ngale/mpetyane are known as land dwellers. This myth tells of ancestors, curled up like foetuses under a muddy and featureless plain, emerging to travel and shape the land. They came out and generated both the people and the species that would live in intimate association on and in the land. Another trace of past events is the view that the Western Arrernte’s moiety sections were a traveling system that came from the northwest. By the time the Lutheran missionaries arrived, Western Arrernte had adopted the system, though their southern neighbors had not. While the Southern Arrernte (or Pertame) had only four sections, others to the west had none at all. They married “in the dark” and lacked the Western Arrernte’s way of drawing both people and country into an expanding system of marriage and sociality. So fundamental is this sub-

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section system to a Western Arrernte imaginary that old women asked me how Adam knew that Eve should be his wife. How could this ancestor of Judeo-Christian peoples marry an unclassified woman, marry in the dark? More subtly, if we human beings live in emplaced social orders, how could there ever have been just two—and a serpent? h In the early nineteenth century, Adelaide’s free settlers had aspirations to rival the wealth and power of Melbourne and the penal colony of Sydney. Located on Australia’s south coast, Adelaide needed a fertile hinterland to match the pastoral resources of the east. Explorers were sent north, across the pebbly expanse, and returned reporting pastoral land in Central Australia.12 The historian Mervyn Hartwig contends that John McDouall Stuart in particular encountered the Center in seasons that were unusually good (1965, 100–101). Stuart’s optimistic tidings in the mid-1860s drew the interest of pastoralists and also of German Lutherans in the Barossa Valley. The race for pastoral leases began in the 1870s and was accompanied by the trek of the Lutherans toward the Center. Both were encouraged by the construction of a telegraph line that by 1872 ran from Adelaide through Central Australia to Darwin. The telegraph station of Stuart—named after the explorer—became a nascent service center for Central Australia. In 1933 it was renamed Alice Springs. Established in 1877 by recruits from Hermannsburg in Germany, the first Lutheran mission was a precarious enterprise. Within ten years it fell apart. In 1894, the mission had a fresh start when Carl Strehlow arrived from Neuendettelsau via the Bethesda Mission at Lake Eyre in South Australia. As pastoralism and new mining initiatives took up Arrernte land in the south, east, and the north, leaving only inhospitable desert in the west, Western Arrernte and proximate Southern Arrernte came in to Hermannsburg’s Finke River Mission (FRM).13 Drawn by available goods, Luritja also came from the west. The small mission station became a refuge from poorly disciplined pastoralists and from a constabulary prepared to use force. Pastoralism supplanted the Arrernte on the fertile runoffs north of the Macdonnells and to the south of the James and Krichauff ranges. Rapidly, cattle began to subvert the environment, and the arrival of rabbits further undermined the grasses that fed and anchored a plethora of species on erstwhile Arrernte land. Meaning and value also played their part. For Central Australia’s Aborigines, flour and tea—the one to satisfy appetite and the other to suppress it—were indexes of new and tantalizing powers. These

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powers were confirmed by the arrival of cattle herds, sugar, and new forms of shelter and transport. The missionaries had little appeal to the Western Arrernte prior to the expansion of pastoral leases. It was only with displacement and the impact of technology that the Arrernte came in. At first they had simply left the old and infirm at cattle camps. As time passed, the ablebodied became more sedentary as well. The Lutherans sought to ameliorate the impact of invasion and establish a civilizing mission. The 1920s drought saw a culmination of these events. The Western Arrernte’s population was cut by a third as the drought snatched away the country on which they had hunted and foraged. The drought also brought consolidation of the pastoral leases as settlers lost faith in the Center. In lieu, the Lutheran mission received more, albeit meager, support from government. It became the agent of the state in a world that now very rapidly became peripheral to the interests of investors. As the Australian state and its citizens turned away from Hermannsburg, these German missionaries and desert Aborigines turned in to forge their own domestic order. Among their notables was Moses Tjalkabota, the blind and brilliant evangelist. Moses and other converts took a Christian message to the pastoral stations. He embodied the Christian way while others became pastoral workers, laborers and tradesmen, and domestics at the mission. The consolidation of pastoral leases and the construction of a railway, first to Oodnadatta and then on to Alice Springs in 1929, had an additional impact. Like the telegraph line before it, the railway with its construction camps attracted Aboriginal people seeking work, food, and other articles of interest.14 Some moved on to Hermannsburg, already the locale for Western Arrernte and smaller numbers of Southern Arrernte (Pertame), Luritja, and Pintupi people. Western Arrernte became their lingua franca. During World War II, an army base was established at Alice Springs. It brought new settlers to the region and drew more of the Arrernte into urban ways. This period acted as a launching pad for Alice Springs as a modern service center. Though still a town of less than thirty thousand today, “the Alice” services Aboriginal settlements, pastoral leases, various mining enterprises, and a fluctuating interest in cultural tourism. Pine Gap, a legacy of cold war anxiety, is a United States satellite tracking base located just outside Alice Springs. It too contributes to the town’s economy. Friedrich Albrecht, who followed Carl Strehlow as mission pastor in 1926, was impressed by the vulnerability of indigenous people in the face of white settlement. The drought made him aware that neither foraging nor rations could be an economy for the Western Arrernte, whom he hoped, nonetheless, could be kept out of Alice Springs. Like others before him, Albrecht

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thought that Aborigines in Alice Springs would become debased, “intelligent parasites” as Elkin described them, of the European order.15 Therefore he supported conversion, literate education, and apprenticeships in trade and pastoralism. It was during this period from the 1930s to the 1950s that the mission became an institutionalized order, a domestic moral economy and “home” to Western Arrernte speakers. This was also the world of Albert Namatjira, watercolor painter and Arrernte man “between worlds” (see Jones 1992). His rise and fall due to racism, alcohol, and loyalty to kin offers the tragic motif of indigenous Australia’s mid-twentieth century—the image of the “desert Aborigine” who fails at modernity and thereby justifies the limited provisions of the state. It was at the height of the mission’s development that the second major change came. Good tidings preceded it. Following World War II, Australia’s welfare state expanded and with that growth came greater benefits for indigenous Australians as well. The 1960s and 1970s saw the extension of family services, unemployment benefits, and, most important, land rights for Aborigines in Australia’s Northern Territory, including Central Australia. As the rumor and then the reality of land rights spread, two further developments marked Aboriginal lives—a homelands movement away from settlements and back onto country, and an emerging policy of selfdetermination. Aborigines would have their own federally funded local administrations, preferably staffed by indigenous people. The atmosphere was one of hope and expectation that, having been pulled into European settlements and subject to assimilation, people were free now to return to country. At least, they were free to return to erstwhile Crown land and land under leases that could lapse or be bought out. A Central Land Council (CLC) was formed to manage the process. As the outstation movement grew, so did support for an elected peak indigenous organization—based in Canberra. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC), with its network of regional offices, was established in 1989. It replaced a previous federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) and its forerunner, the Welfare Branch. Civil rights, land rights, and self-determination also meant the comprehensive incorporation of remote Aborigines into the orders of market society and the Australian state. The mission at Hermannsburg had paid some wages to indigenous people, but on balance it remained a rations-for-service regime. Payment was in kind as often as cash, and the distinction between “payments” and “rations” was unclear. Male evangelists and pastors were among the most rewarded, though not always in cash. As the outstation movement grew in the 1970s, “training wages” were introduced to teach

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people about cash. This gesture to a managed progression was intended to address the fact that Arrernte would live with cash and also with limited avenues for employment. The strategy soon gave way as unemployment benefits spread to communities throughout Central Australia, along with a range of outstation grants for vehicles, housing, enterprises, and the like. Grants, welfare and redistributed royalties16 were the vehicles for the Arrernte’s entry into market society. With these changes came administrative ones as well. The mission departed as an arm of state in 1983 and was replaced by an Ntaria town council and a Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC). Through ATSIC and other regional channels, the practice of governance expanded. Selfdetermination has meant a heavy bureaucratic load in communities made “remote” by the state and its economy. Owing to the fact that, especially in desert areas, “remote” mostly means “marginal,” outstations that grew to be autonomous remained in the minority. Operations at TORC waxed through the 1980s and early 1990s and then waned as services were centralized again at Ntaria. Most families with small children found that their activities came to revolve around Ntaria and Alice Springs, where services were available. Many adults remained unemployed or at best partly employed in government-funded schemes. Initially managed by ATSIC, these schemes have had limited success in shifting remote Aboriginal workers into mainstream employment. In 2003, this factor among others prompted the federal government to disband ATSIC. In fact, outstations, ATSIC, and land rights—pillars of a self-determining “Indigenous Sector”17—have all suffered adverse scrutiny as government has moved toward service-delivery privatization and free-market policies for remote communities. The contradictions of the outstation movement have been used to savage predecessors in government, although the outcomes of recent change are themselves unclear. Given the legacies of invasion and now extreme marginalization, effective policy remains elusive in the context of fleeting public interest in the larger society. The issues are cultural and economic but also a matter of political will. In the meantime, the Western Arrernte are still emplaced and immersed in relatedness. They retain a unique indigenous history and speak their own language first. They trace a beat between outstations, Ntaria, and Alice Springs. Many circulate regionally as well. They interpret the state and market society in terms of their marginalized position and according to their experience as an indigenous people. The Arrernte also live with violence and weather it with the toughness born of desert hunter-gatherers.

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The Arrernte and European Scholarship It was not the pastoralists or Lutheran missionaries, and certainly not recent events, that made the Arrernte famous in the European academy. It was the scholars who studied them in the early years of Central Australian settlement. By the late nineteenth century, with indigenous life in New South Wales and Victoria greatly affected by Europeans, the route through Adelaide to scientific research in Central Australia beckoned. State governments in South Australia and Victoria supported expeditions, creating a further “rush” up the Finke River as scholars followed the pastoralists and miners. In the English-speaking world, the better-known works are those of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, an Englishman and Irishman. Spencer was professor of biology at Melbourne University and Gillen held the post of telegraph officer in Stuart from 1891 to 1899. They met in 1894 in the course of the Horn Scientific Expedition, of which Spencer was a member (see S. Morton and Mulvaney 1996).18 Their collaboration continued for years thereafter as Gillen collected material while Spencer did the analyses and wrote for publication. Spencer and Gillen gave their major attention to ritual performance and produced a celebrated classic of early ethnography, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, in 1899. Their focus was on people known today as the Central Arrernte whose country lies in and around Alice Springs to the east of the Western Arrernte. Owing to the common inability of British ethnographers to read German, Carl Strehlow’s work is less well known.19 Strehlow served as Lutheran pastor at the Hermannsburg mission from 1894 to 1922, and his seven volumes detail the myth and song of the Arrernte and Luritja, translated with great care and a Euro-Christian nuance. He lived among the Finke River Western Arrernte and Pertame for almost thirty years and studied the commonalities and differences between the Arrernte and their western neighbors, the Kukatja-Luritja. This ethnography and especially that of Spencer and Gillen were disseminated in Europe through the work of James Frazer, classicist and comparative religionist, and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Carl Strehlow’s literary agent, von Leonhardi, brought the former’s work to the notice of the Scottish scholar Andrew Lang, who passed the reference on to Frazer (Kenny 2005). Frazer was Spencer’s mentor, and the latter more than once expressed his hostility toward Strehlow. Spencer questioned Strehlow’s view that the Western Arrernte, and indeed the Arrernte in general, had a notion of a high god. On the other hand, Strehlow’s grasp of Arrernte language was outstanding. Entirely fluent, the missionary produced a small

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primer for Arrernte literacy instruction in the 1910s, recorded indigenous myth, and did a Bible translation.20 By contrast, Spencer and Gillen’s engagement with Arrernte semantics was a puny thing. Both authors wrote about “totems,” a popular nineteenth-century rendering of indigenous Australian religion. The Arrernte are cited in Frazer’s comparative work, Totemism and Exogamy (1910) and Freud references this work in his Totem and Taboo ([1913] 1938). Quite soon after that, Durkheim treated Arrernte totemism as a paradigm in his notable work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life ([1915] 1957). For Durkheim, the Arrernte realized primordial religion; for Freud, the beginnings of morality. In their hands, the “Arunta” rapidly became Europe’s icon of the primitive, the people on whom the West could project its own theories of genesis. Inspired by Freud, the Hungarian anthropologist Géza Róheim pursued the relation between ontogeny and ontology in Western Arrernte life. His psychoanalytic account of the Dreaming as separation anxiety writ large deploys Freud in provocative ways.21 Not long after Róheim’s publications, Lévi-Strauss (1973) debunked “totemism” as the account of Australian cosmology and also drew on the legacy of Central Australian research. Lévi-Strauss’s critics, and Spencer’s as well, all used Arrernte ethnography.22 The continuing prominence of the Arrernte in mainstream anthropology has been due in significant part to the enigmatic person and career of Carl Strehlow’s brilliant son, T. G. H. (Ted) Strehlow. A challenging identity, possibly Ted Strehlow thought of himself as Arrernte as much as European. As an infant, he had an Arrernte nurse and a gift for languages. He played with Arrernte children and spoke the language fluently. After his father’s death in 1922, Strehlow lived in Adelaide and excelled as a scholar of classical languages. His later, extensive recording of the Arrernte’s songs and “totemic geography” was one of the earliest and among the greatest breakthroughs in Australian ethnography. At a time when ethnographic eyes were turned to social systems, T. G. H. Strehlow explored the poetic imagination in indigenous man-land relations. His work was promoted by Ronald Berndt (see R. Berndt and C. Berndt 1965; R. Berndt 1970) and cited subsequently by other Central Australianists (see, e.g., Munn 1986, Myers 1986, J. Morton 1987a). Notwithstanding its ponderous style, the sheer scholarly weight of the younger Strehlow’s corpus, unequaled in modern ethnography, makes it a priceless repository for anthropologists engaged in the study of experience.23 Spencer, Róheim, and T. G. H. Strehlow now command a hagiography of their own.24 Among them, Strehlow and his relations with the stern Lutheran father—relations that he seemed to liken to the Arrernte’s—have

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received the most attention in a burgeoning genre of commentary on commentary. This corpus reflects two things. First, it indicates that the experience of father and son, over the better part of one hundred years in Central Australia, has struck a chord in modern debate on the nature of culture and communication. If the Arrernte are the icon of Europe’s primitive, then the Strehlows are an icon of intercultural experience. Second, the corpus reflects an anthropology that to date has been more interested in the past and in continuities of tradition than in the experience of modernity. In part, this gaze of Australian anthropology has been shaped by the imperatives of land rights procedures that demanded, as part of a politics of difference and identity, that ethnography record authentic tradition in forms that law courts would accept. In the context of this scholarly work, who the Arrernte are by virtue of invasion and their subsequent history remains unknown. The Western Arrernte—people made sedentary, proselytized by Lutherans, and marginalized as indigenous moderns with land rights—have been frozen in the European gaze, circa 1900. Their culture then has become the culture of a people lodged in mythical time. A century and more after the invasion, the task of anthropology is to dislodge them from that time and address their experience.

A Book in Three Parts The Arrernte’s extensive ethnographic corpus provides much to “think with” about Western Arrernte and their experience of change. It has also encouraged me to try a different method of ethnohistorical study. Often a reliance on continuous narrative, common in this form of study, makes renditions of indigenous experience hard to position effectively. The local and the intimate are muffled by the weight of event. This study of the Arrernte employs a different strategy. In preference to historical narrative—the much loved “through line” of publishers—I have sought to write a series of ethnographic arguments; “soundings” of Arrernte change and experience that travel both through time and through levels of intimacy. These soundings have been accessed through fieldwork and are referenced to current events. Nonetheless, the chapters address the two major moments of change that have shaped Western Arrernte life. Part 1 of the book shows how Western Arrernte in the 1990s remembered the mission and its continuities. They did so by employing an indigenous poetics to connect the present with the past. The three chapters in this section also confirm that the Arrernte rendered Christianity in accordance with central values of their world. One might say that in their

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circumstance, the Western Arrernte reimagined the Christian message. The chapters in part 3 describe the context in which, postmission, a Western Arrernte social imaginary collided with that of market society, and its welfare bureaucracy, in the outstation system. Chapters in this section address the contradiction involved in a return to tradition that was also modernization; the paradox of land rights and citizenship in the midst of economic marginalization. Positioned between these two historically oriented sections, part 2 explores dimensions of microsociality today. The section contains three ethnographic essays on identity, the subject, and everyday violence. In these chapters, I pay attention to the dislocation of identity caused by sedentary life and the pressures that bear on relatedness as settlement and cash and commodities provide new contexts. The final chapter in this section explores the impact of everyday violence on the nature of the Arrernte subject. In these accounts, I try to get to the heart of Western Arrernte social suffering. In sum, three essays on identity, the subject, and everyday violence are flanked by portraits of the two major historical moments that have shaped Western Arrernte life. The chapters can be read in sequence or as individual sections. Together, though, they aim to grasp indigenous experience. Initially I went to Ntaria to study vernacular Christianity, to determine what the Western Arrernte had made of the Finke River Mission. Accordingly, I asked a senior Lutheran woman to be my language teacher and principal consultant. Her name was Joyce Malbunka (née Robinya). Joyce and I worked together during the numerous field trips I made to Ntaria between 1989 and 2002. She passed away in 2001. Much of the ethnography presented here grew out of my association with this elderly Lutheran woman with Southern Arrernte roots who had lived among Western Arrernte all her life. She became my language teacher because, on my arrival, many said that Joyce’s language was among the best. She prided herself on her accomplishments in language and chided me for my own “stiff tongue.” In a more general way, the chapters of this book are based on my life with Joyce between Ntaria, her children’s outstation,25 Alice Springs, and travels north and south of the Center. We talked a lot, and she showed me a host of things as well as introducing me to a vast array of relatives. Especially in part 2, I refer to particular moments with Joyce that brought an issue to mind and made it the focus of analysis. When I arrived at Ntaria in 1989, people were absorbed in the outstation movement and in a highly contentious land claim. Both factors shaped my research. I began to travel back and forth between Ntaria and various outstations as a matter of everyday pragmatics. People, including Joyce, did not live in one place but rather

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moved between outstations and their camps in Ntaria. Soon I became accustomed to this practice and also realized that, given the politics of the outstation movement, there was no definitive break in people’s minds between mission settlement and federal land rights leading to outstation life. The passage from one regime to the other was a continuous affair of “shifting” that brought hope but also looming crisis. The shift from historical “mission” to contemporary “outstations” was then not a major shift of research focus. Rather, it reflected a growing awareness that this transition provided the nexus of Arrernte life. My study is positioned accordingly. When I first arrived at Ntaria, a land claim for the adjacent Palm Valley national park had been in the making for about five years. The claim was heard on site in 1994. A final report was tabled in 1999 by Aboriginal land commissioner, Justice Gray.26 The progress of the claim brought some particular families and their leaders into head-on conflict. They represented factions aligned with the departing Lutheran order and the secular state, respectively. A detailed study of this conflict in terms of everyday Ntaria dynamics would be a classic. It is not the study that I could or would write due to the nature of the court procedures, many of which were exclusively male. A deep politicization of life accompanied this land claim and led me to emphasize my interest in the mission, the everyday, and outstation life. Working with an elderly woman and within a domestic milieu therefore entailed survival as well as choice. Nonetheless, echoes from these events which I observed as a bystander over a decade surface at various points, especially in chapters 4 and 7. Ntaria’s politics affected fieldwork in another way. To use a tape recorder in a circumstance where anthropologists were assumed to work for organizations was problematical. For whom was the information intended? Over the years, I became known as an “independent” and my work as being for “a university book”—a project that has taken time. In a different vein, I was also known as Joyceke kwarre (Joyce’s girl) and therefore not independent at all. Rather, I was an anomalous part of a local group with a skin name, expectations, and duties. These became clearer as my return visits grew in number and I felt the need to check with more and more people concerning their and others’ well-being. In neither context was it appropriate to use a tape recorder and I didn’t. However, my notebooks were public and ever present. This study places field material in the larger context of invasion, settlement, and marginalization. Naturally, the framework is critical. The position from which I write is evident, if not before, in my concluding chapter. There I turn an ethnographic lens on a recent federal intervention in remote

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communities, including the Western Arrernte’s. In this proposed emergency and the discourse that surrounded it, the emphasis was placed on individual moral pathologies among Aboriginal people. My argument is that this perennial focus on pathology in discourse about indigenous Australians masks the violence that invasion and subsequent policy have brought.

G pa r t o n e

Remembering the Mission

Following the pastoral invasion of Central Australia, the Finke River Mission at Hermannsburg provided a new way of being and ritual order that propelled the Arrernte toward sedentary life. These structural effects occurred notwithstanding the personal commitments that many missionaries had toward Arrernte. The mission’s form of transcendentalism and social order—a sole God for a stratified world—transformed the Arrernte in concert with pastoralism, modern communications (the telegraph in 1872 and the railway in 1929), and the growth of Alice Springs. The next three chapters draw on events and discussions mainly in the 1990s to tap this historical process as some Western Arrernte recall it. Chapter 1 begins with an analysis of three modern Arrernte myths of contact. It counterpoises a mission account to these three stories and compares and contrasts them. In chapter 2, the mission’s impact and Arrernte responses to it are explored in terms of a politics of water that revolved around a particular place, the Western Arrernte’s rainmaking site of Kaporilya. Chapter 3 explores the meaning of pepe, the Lutheran ritual complex and social order, as it was interpreted in the 1990s and in the past by Western Arrernte people. These three chapters address missionization in the context of the violence to a hunter-gatherer world that pastoral settlement brought. Taken together, they also offer an account of the way in which the Western Arrernte fashioned a Christian vernacular using their own forms of social imaginary.

G chapter 1

Encounter at Ntaria

I

n July 1876, Western Arrernte people who were resident in the area now called “Missionary Plain” may have sighted the first Lutherans on their land. These tensed and quiet indigenous observers could have come from several locations: from Jalpalpa, Ljaba, or Pmokaputa, among other places on the edge of the plain or along its waterways. It was in July that a forward party from the missionary group set out from Dalhousie Springs, some 285 miles south. The party inspected the church’s lease on either side of the Finke River where it crosses a flat stretch of land. Initially, they traveled north to the foothills of the Western Macdonnells, close to Jalpalpa (Glen Helen). Then the party turned south and traveled down the Finke to a point just below the Ntaria water hole. Later they would sink a well and build a community at the place they called “Hermannsburg” in honor of the institute from which the missionaries came. The various local groups that resided near this part of the Finke would have heard of the Lutherans’ progress in their region. As they settled in, probably the Lutherans were observed by people from Kaporilya and also from Nguamina inside Palm Valley.1 Other explorers, including Gosse and Giles, had been this way before, and certainly the Western Arrernte would have known of the cattlemen at Owen Spring. Yet these newcomers were different in notable ways. Their retinue was unusually large, including a covered wagon, horses and cattle, and a herd of sheep. Notwithstanding heavy rains that meant good seasons ahead, they were aggressively on the move. They were also distinguished by their presence in areas that had not been host to settlers before. The Arrernte had not been consulted by these strangers, and probably they were surprised. Why were these newcomers on the move? For the Lutherans’ part, there is no indication that the missionaries had a sense of occupying previously named and exploited terrain. The missionaries were required to cross 27

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land designated by the South Australian government for pastoral stations at a rate not less than five miles a day. The government set no such requirement for land on which Aborigines were the sole inhabitants.2 These initial acts of invasion presaged the events ahead. Yet whether or not the Arrernte saw the missionaries as invaders remains a moot point. Arrernte today say the relhe (people) were frightened and inclined to hide. They met the missionaries without resorting to violence (cf. H. Morphy and F. Morphy 1984). The Lutherans give the date on which they sank the well as June 8, 1877. In August of that year, a dwelling house and stockyard were completed. A kitchen would be erected the following year. By August 1877, the principal missionary, Hermann Kempe, had had some contact with Arrernte men, but the progress of the missionaries proved a slow affair. Impressed at the outset by the bearing, physique, and intelligence of the men, the missionaries over time became less optimistic. Slow progress in evangelism made them critical of Arrernte culture. This displeasure was heightened in 1887 when some of the first baptized Christians proved disappointing to their Lutheran tutors. Sexual congress with heathens, gambling, and “walkin’ round” made them seem poor acolytes (Schmiechen 1971, 69–82). After 1888, the rate of baptisms declined. In 1891 the mission recorded just two Aboriginal converts.3 The first pastors became discouraged and all left Hermannsburg by the end of 1891. Administrative and financial disputes among the Lutheran synods in South Australia hastened their departure.4 Kempe was the last to leave, having lost a wife and son to illness in the course of his endeavor. In 1894, when zoologist Baldwin Spencer passed by Hermannsburg in the course of the Horn Expedition to Central Australia, he observed that the mission was “more or less in ruins. A few blacks, the remnants of a larger number . . . remained, living in a squalid state in dirty wurlies”5 (cited in T. Strehlow 1979, 29). Spencer’s judgment was confirmed by the Lutheran pastor Carl Strehlow’s assessment in October of the same year. Lohe recounts the situation that Strehlow encountered when he first arrived at the Hermannsburg station: “No Aboriginals were to be seen, not one baptised Christian was there to welcome them. . . . As no clothing had arrived for a considerable time, the children and adults were in dire distress. A number of the Aboriginal male Christians had married heathen women. Employed whites had indulged in promiscuity. Strehlow found packs of playing-cards and immediately consigned them to the fire” (Lohe 1977, 24). Near the end of 1894, Strehlow reported sixty-six Aboriginal people resident around the station, of whom eighteen adults and eight children were baptized Christians. Fourteen of the unbaptized had indicated their willingness to attend the mission school and become baptismal candidates. By 1900, however,

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Strehlow reported an average attendance at weekly worship of one hundred people (Lohe 1977, 24–26). A good year for baptisms, 1900 saw sixteen Aboriginal people formally avow their Christianity. From the beginning of the twentieth century, there was an exponential growth in the mission station’s capacity to engage and incorporate those who lived in and about Missionary Plain. This growth was a product not simply of familiarity and the drawing card of rations.6 It also bore witness to the process whereby Arrernte people moved off land as it was taken for cattle leases north, south, and east of the mission. The leases, all established by 1879, had their full impact through the following twenty years as groups moved from the Glen Helen area into the plain and also from the areas leased south of the mission by Henbury and Tempe Downs cattle stations. Especially in the case of Henbury and Tempe Downs, this process continued into the twentieth century. Over time, a significant intercourse developed between Aborigines from the mission and those resident on pastoral leases.7 This is not to say that previously the Arrernte were stationary. Marriages within the Western Arrernte dialect group led people to relocate and engage in long-term visiting relations. These paths traced across the region were strategic for economic as well as social and ritual ends. Farther afield, intermarriages with Luritja (Matuntara in the southwest, and Kukatja due west) and with the Central Arrernte dialect group were infrequent but not unknown.8 T. G. H. (Ted) Strehlow, pastor Carl Strehlow’s son, recorded extensive travel for ritual purposes in the Central Australian region along song lines hundreds of miles long. These trips could involve periods of temporary relocation stretching out well over a year (T. Strehlow 1970). He also suggests that the arrival of Europeans, with their ignorance and disdain for Aboriginal ways, gave the opportunity for power plays, both between Western Arrernte themselves and between the Arrernte and other language groups that bordered them. In the disruption that white pastoral settlement brought, there was a desire on the part of some to move from poorer to better land if others’ misfortune, and politics, allowed (T. Strehlow 1979). People resident in Ntaria today still speak of Pertame people from the south and the mape (mob) from Nkapartjia north of the Macdonnells. Some of these migrations are now more than a hundred years past.

Invasion as Travel Story The growing presence of settlers on Western Arrernte land brought the initial shock of invasion. Both the historical record for Central Australia and its ethnography underline the discontinuity that the Western Arrernte people

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experienced. For T. G. H. Strehlow, this was a prolonged and tragic moment that ended in cultural collapse (see T. Strehlow 1964). Strehlow has been criticized for this account, and yet the impact was certainly major. Therefore it seems more apt not to deny change but rather to focus on things that did endure and on present ways in which the past is remembered. Together these types of link shape Arrernte identity today. I propose to show this process of identity formation by discussing some modern myths of contact with the missionaries. These stories relate events of dramatic change and yet in a way that includes them in known motifs. They present a mix of inherited conventions in storytelling and modern imaginaries in which the past is sustained in the present through continuing interpretation. Narrative history and representation meet in insightful ways. Before I proceed, however, let me make one further point. In the shadow of T. G. H. Strehlow’s (1971) masterful study of traditional myth, it may seem rash to begin an account of the Arrernte today using modern myths of first contact. The honed, highly variegated and integrated world that Strehlow’s ethnography describes—a world that gives a lie to the view that “civilisation” must include literacy—stands in stark contrast to the poorly integrated and sometimes violent world of the Arrernte today. Moreover, owing to the radically different histories of proximate groups including the Warlpiri and Pintupi, until recently this contrast could be made not only between the present and past but also among consociates. The relatively well-watered land of the Western Arrernte was also their vulnerable point. Pastoralists and missionaries were drawn to their milieu and not to the proximate land of the Warlpiri or the more remote domain of the Pintupi. Farther north, leases were taken up on Warlpiri land in the 1880s, but not with the same alacrity that marked pastoralism on Arrernte land. As a consequence today, the best acrylic painting for the Warlpiri and Pintupi shows an intimate connection with esoteric culture that is absent in the case of Ntaria’s major recent art form, Hermannsburg pottery. This is so notwithstanding the potters’ own tradition that includes the Hermannsburg watercolor school (Isaacs 1999, 17–24, 29–44). The former’s intricate sense of past tradition has been lost to the Arrernte due to the impact of invasion in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Yet facing the extent of cultural dislocation experienced by the Western Arrernte also underlines the tenacity of a local culture when some coordinates do remain; in this case, language, a sense of locatedness, social scale, and immersion in a world of kin. It is these elements that sustain an Arrernte poetics and allow it to be deployed in the present rendering of past events. This form of remembering creates continuity through a symbolic imagining.

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First and foremost, among Western Arrernte, stories of invasion become travel stories within the immediate environment. Missionaries are interpreted as particular strangers with particular impacts, some of them on the land and others on social relations. A second feature of the stories is that they reflect the Arrernte’s gift for homology through metaphor; for locating the likeness in events and disparate acts that allow their incorporation into known experience. Thus, guided by Southern and Western Arrernte, the missionary strangers travel and look for water. They make water holes and give gifts to those they meet. They distribute meat and create shaded areas. Rather than simply rejecting the strange, narrators use homology to connect the unknown with the known in a fashion that assimilates the missionaries to imagined practice in the past and to ancestral events. Yet this homology also builds on ellipsis, the artful suppression of difference or troubling change, and this is the third feature of the stories. In these accounts, a confronting fact is barely mentioned—that the strangers did not ask permission to be on land that was not their own.9 This ellipsis is most apparent when Western Arrernte describe the missionaries as bewildered strangers who need indigenous help. Homology and ellipsis work in tandem so that stories that seem to deny dramatic change are also devices for responding to it. Poesy mediates the experience of invasion in order to summon comment on its meaning. A final poetic device involves, however, occasionally naming elided events so that the larger impact of invasion is revealed. Western Arrernte describe the cataclysmic using quiet shock. I propose to discuss four accounts of the arrival of the Lutherans on West Arrernte land. Three of these accounts come from Arrernte people who have held quite diverse positions in their society. The remaining account is taken from the official Lutheran history of the Hermannsburg mission, and it conveys some themes common among Lutherans associated with Hermannsburg, past and present. I begin with the Lutheran story and establish it as a counterpoint to the other three. Its interest lies mainly in its identification of a generic event of nineteenth-century missionary endeavor: the experience of suffering that legitimates presence and inter alia lays claim to land. The Arrernte stories employ the poetics of continuity—and, in one case, discontinuity—in order to render the invaders as traveling strangers in an Arrernte world. The impact of engagement with an Other is explored in the realm of social relations and also inscribed in place. Variations in the Arrernte stories point to an Arrernte politics, which I discuss subsequently in terms of the stories and then in terms of theories of myth. The Western Arrernte stories are charters for an equal and intercultural world as projected by the Arrernte. The Lutheran account, on the other hand, is the orthodox

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rendering of Central Australian history. In my conclusion, I remark on the hierarchical relation between these contrasting forms of story.

Stories of the Encounter The Lutheran story is provided by Lohe in his contribution to Hermannsburg: A Vision and a Mission (1977). This set of essays on the Lutherans at Hermannsburg was published in the centenary year of the mission’s founding. Lohe writes: At long last, it was “journey’s end” after one year and nearly ten months on the way. No wonder that at the evening devotion the party sang the hymn, “The Lord Hath Helped Me Hitherto,” and recited psalms for the faithfulness and goodness of God . . . On June 5, [1877], Schwarz and Kempe10 saddled the horses and rode upstream in search of a suitable site; . . . they chose a site on the north bank of the river when they dug and struck good, fresh water . . . When one reflects on the long journey, well over 1,000 miles from Bethany in the Barossa to their present site, one can only be filled with amazement at the courage, determination, and devotion of the missionaries, as well as of the laymen. . . . With the vicissitudes, privations, trials and tribulations, food and water shortage, one is compelled to praise God for his guidance and preservation to these devoted men. In the annals of missionary endeavours in all parts of the world, this journey stands alone. Above all, one admires the missionaries because of their determination to suffer trials for the sake of bringing the Gospel to the Natives of Central Australia. (Lohe 1977, 13)

In this narrative, the missionaries and their lay assistants travel alone through wilderness supported only by their God. The representation of the journey in cartographic form is similarly sparse; a lonely line that traces a path into the unknown. As the line moves north, the marked settlements decrease until, finally, the isolated site of Hermannsburg is reached (see map 3). The overwhelming sense is of movement into uncharted land, yet to be interpreted. It is this sense that makes the journey fearful and calls on faith in God. It is God’s plan that explains the suffering brought by loneliness and a strange environment. The cartographic line up the map also mirrors a sense of one-way movement: the missionaries bring the gospel “to the natives” in the sight of an admiring world. There is no return gift from the Arrernte or hint that the

Map 3. The Lutheran missionaries’ route to Hermannsburg. Adapted from Lohe 1977.

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country had been previously interpreted. Missionary narratives for southern Africa have similar features. Jean and John Comaroff remark, “What distinguished the reports of the evangelists from most travel narratives was their assertively personalised, epic form. . . . Here was history told . . . as the autobiography of heroism. For its part, the African landscape was presented as virgin, devoid of society and history. . . . The texts . . . both personalised nature and naturalised humanity, portraying the ‘dark continent’ as a vacant stage” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 172). Still, although the Comaroffs’ account fits Lohe’s description, in fact his story reflects morecomplex issues. As I will argue in the following chapters, Ntaria/Hermannsburg drew its uniqueness from the fact that Arrernte and missionaries together, in their unequal positions, strove to make a local world on the periphery of the state. Through both their scholarship and their relative intimacy with indigenous people, some of the missionaries became also the Arrernte’s most respectful white acolytes and thereby surpassed the ethnographic achievements of many a university-based anthropologist. Nonetheless, in speaking to a larger world, neither the Lutherans nor those commissioned by them have found a way to supersede a knowledge of the Arrernte locked in ethnography and a knowledge of mission events locked in settler history. What is notable about Lohe’s story is its exclusion of the Arrernte in spite of the Finke River Mission’s history of engagement—at once destructive but intimate and loyal over the better part of a century. This speaks most to the weight of nonindigenous discourse in a larger society that, through distance and ignorance, cannot imagine the ways in which Aboriginal people in their particular milieus might have shaped a history. Western Arrernte narrators present a different view, albeit framed within travel stories. Arrernte accounts employ their poetics to populate the landscape. They emplace descriptions of social relations and find homology in travel and acts of exchange. The setting for this first Arrernte story was a morning conversation with Joyleen Abbott, an elderly Arrernte woman.11 Her associations ran south from the site called Irbmankara (or Running Waters) and into the country taken up by the Henbury pastoral lease. Joyleen’s early years were spent on Henbury and then, with her husband, she stayed among the Kaytetye, northeast of the Macdonnells. Through his mother’s mother, Joyleen’s husband was linked with Uruna, now known as Waterhouse Range. His own country was farther north, but his close associations were around Ntaria and Uruna to the east. Leaving the north, they settled with their children at Ntaria. In 1974 Joyleen took the initiative and moved her family away from an increasingly troubled Hermannsburg mission to

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the Uruna site of Wallace Rockhole. Established as an outstation of Ntaria, Wallace Rockhole later became a town. At the time we spoke, Joyleen was a powerful woman among Western Arrernte. She had some ritual knowledge, a canny personality and a central place in Ntaria’s Lutheran church. Although by origin Southern Arrernte, or Pertame, she spoke quite confidently of Western Arrernte life. That day, our conversation began with clarification of some links between herself and my friend and teacher Joyce Malbunka, cousins on their mothers’ side. We had had such chats before in which regional and family links unfolded as she spoke. This time, though, talk of relatedness strayed to the missionaries as we passed our time on the veranda at the general store. Joyleen was flanked by women relatives who listened as she spoke. First she identified Aremala, brother-in-law to a male antecedent, and then Kwalba, her mother’s father. Next she observed that Aremala’s mother came from Kaporilya, a site not far from Ntaria, and that Aremala’s wife came from a site called “Easter Bunny Hill,” close by Ntaria.12 In short, Joyleen proposed that notwithstanding her association with the south, her family had links into Western Arrernte country. During the early 1890s, both Aremala and Kwalba worked for Constable W. H. Willshire, whose station was located at Alitera (Boggy Hole) south of Ntaria and north of Irbmankara. Troopers were kept there to stop cattle stealing, and Joyleen’s relatives were among their guides. These men were ritually associated with the Ungwanaka group who were Irbmankara’s custodians and some of whom had run from Willshire’s men. Alitera was known as the site of violent encounters, but Joyleen, like Joyce, steered away from those events. As women with shared white antecedents, there seemed little point in dwelling on some aspects of the past. Instead Joyleen focused on the missionaries’ arrival: Aremala and Kwalba, they here at Hermannsburg and work at Boggy Hole. All that Ungwanaka mape, they come in pretty soon too. Aremala, he talk to missionary first. Missionary, they come up from Henbury and Owen Spring before Hermannsburg. Aremala follow ’im with Kwalba; they call ’im [Kwalba] “Policeman Jack.” They follow missionary up to Hermannsburg. Kwalba see ’im first. He went to spear kangaroo. Araye! [Look!] What’s this? Must be monster. ’Im run to Henbury, pmere ikwere [his country]. ’im terirreme [frightened], crying, proper frightened. Missionary coming from Charlotte Water. All sheep come to drink that water, kwatye kernte lanhe [that cold water]. Wagon with water. ’im bin sit down in creek. Missionary kill ’im six sheep for relhe mape [the people].

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Make ’im like kangaroo; cut ’em up with fat. Missionary mape, they take whole pack ’a tea. Make ’im damper.13 Call them people, “Come, have merne [food]!” Kwalba’s brother, he told that story. Relhe mape, they wouldn’t eat. Proper frightened that mape, terirreme. Missionary gave man shirt. [At this point Joyleen demonstrated a man putting a shirt on and clutching at the hem.] He give ’im tea, sugar, flour, all that merne. Man mix ’im up first time. They went away, throw ’im away. [She made a gesture with her arms as though throwing away the sugar, tea, and milk as rubbish.] Itne itye kaltye [they didn’t know]. Six days they stay at Henbury. Missionary try to teach the people. Aremala and Kwalba there. Kwalba mother. One daughter and sister to Kwalba also.

As she spoke, Joyleen took a stick and drew lines and circles in the dust. They represented water holes and the connecting tracks on which Aremala took the missionaries through the Macdonnell Range and, ultimately, to Ntaria. She continued: Missionary follow Hugh River to Owen Spring, Njenkuguna. Had a big mape with them. They follow along ridge [tracing with her stick the Macdonnell Ranges] to Ellery Creek. Aremala take them. Not to Hermannsburg, to Tyurretye [Western Macdonnells] to make well. First Germany that! That’s the first place! At night time, that mape sit down. They see a bright light. They come at night time, see a star. They follow ’im past to Palm Valley. Missed Hermannsburg. Missionary didn’t know. Relhe mape bin there all the time. [She demonstrated by leaning forward that people were crouching in the bushes silently watching the missionaries.] Missionary ask ’im, “Where’s the water? Where’s the water?” [said in a childlike wondering voice, imitating one who does not know]. [Finally] they see that star at Ntaria. He went right, and picked that spot for the church. Aremala there all the time. Aremala brought them up. He knew where to find fresh water. Not saltwater one. They put down plenty wells there [indicating with the stick not only Hermannsburg itself but also the wells and dams spread out across Missionary Plain]. Then they make school, church, mape ’a house, and everything, and shade, lywentye kngerrtye [big shade]. Old Titus’ sister, old Magdalene [from the clan group associated with Palm Valley people] went to range near Palm Valley. Euro place that. Bell ringing. “What’s that noise?” All that relha mape, naked mape that. They were frightened, watch ’em, hiding. [Then] they see [the mis-

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sionary going to urinate]. No, he’s a man, same as us. Only different skin. They watch ’im praying. They say “Relhe, relhe, nwerne petyeme [fig. You mape, we’re coming].” They come down to Finke River. Other one come from Tempe way, looking for food, ceremony. They come to get plenty food, that one. They just come for that big food; just come across country, untherlapeme [“walkin’ around”].

Joyleen concluded by attributing the story—her grandfather had told it and so had old Magdalene. Then she remarked that people didn’t know old-time stories any more. Once children listened at night when grandmothers told them. Joyleen’s story accorded with the Lutheran one at many points. The missionaries came from the south up to Owen Spring. They had stopped at Charlotte Waters and also at Henbury. Sheep were killed along the way (see Lohe 1977, 13). Arriving on the plain, the missionaries sought a reliable supply of fresh water. Searching, they moved from Ellery Creek onto the Finke River. They traveled up and down the Finke looking for a site. Yet absent from the Lutheran account is any mention of Arrernte people. Vitally present in the Arrernte account are members of various clans playing specific roles in relation to the missionaries. Her story was also clothed in a poetics, the tropes in terms of which events were related. Joyleen linked the advent of European colonialism to a generic event in Western Arrernte culture: the searching for water and the sinking of wells that involved both Lutherans and the Arrernte inscribing old places with new social relations, new forms of value. In this, both Aremala and the Lutherans’ forward party became ancestor-like. They simultaneously invested places with value and constituted a social life. This sociality was represented in terms of exchange. At Henbury, the missionaries provided Aremala’s group with flour, sugar, and tea. Joyleen shrugged as she remarked that Arrernte people “did not know” about these things, just as the missionaries, in search of water, were childlike in their dependence on the Arrernte. The point where homology allowed difference in was in her account of the surfeit of meat that the missionaries brought—meat with “fat cut up,” as the Arrernte might prepare it, but six sheep, “plenty meat.” Those present beckoned others to the source. Stars provided a second homology—first a star sighted in Palm Valley and then a star sighted over Ntaria where Bethlehem, the Hermannsburg schoolhouse, would be built. The mythical significance of the star of Bethlehem (see Matt. 2:1–12) is encompassed by a Western Arrernte star that, as related in Dreaming myth, fell to earth at a place called Puka in Palm

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Valley. This was the “borning” place of a senior antecedent of the group who are owners for Palm Valley and Ntaria/Hermannsburg.14 This Arrernte family and the Lutherans maintained a close association over generations. The mission drew lay workers, evangelists, and also a pastor from among them. The star that fell to ground at Puka anticipated the star that marked the Hermannsburg site. It could not be by accident that the missionaries settled where they did. Joyleen’s reference to the star implied an emplaced and ontological order. Nonetheless, her story also played with “same” and “different.” The star as metaphor conjoined locations from two different worlds while the bell that summoned the Arrernte to church and schoolhouse is metonymic for a different social order. Still, these very different strangers were also the same as relhe (Western Arrernte people). Though their skins were different, they urinated too. Stories of the past are also stories of the present, and Joyleen’s story drew its context from Ntaria’s politics. The history of Ntaria as a postmission settlement has been more than usually troubled by factionalism and contests over land. The recognized senior owners of Ntaria are thought by some Arrernte to be properly at home only within Palm Valley or farther south along the Finke. From time to time, other claimed patrifilial associations with Ntaria are canvassed along with discussion about the import of yet other groups’ connections through marriage. Although her own people came from the south, Joyleen made clear claims to links with the recognized custodians. She also emphasized that it was members of her southern group who were central to the making of the Lutheran settlement. In relation to the Lutherans, they acted in a manager, or kwertengerle, role on behalf of the Palm Valley group. As the initial events unfolded, the latter remained naked and frightened. They were unsure, at the outset, what to do. They had to be taught by Pertame with more experience of these strangers how to respond to events. The Pertame coaxed the Palm Valley mape into the Ntaria camp. Another group arrived on the scene, coming “from Tempe Downs.” They had traveled that way before for ceremonial purposes. This time, however, they came for food; for resources at the Ntaria site. In the conflicts over custodianship, a contemporary leader of this group maintains a competing patrifilial claim to Ntaria, proposing that while this was always his father’s father’s place, the other mape had in fact come from the south, possibly in the missionaries’ wake. In sum, each side in this dispute proposes that the other really comes from the south. Joyleen’s story included the latter group only in a cursory and subordinated way, reflecting that she supported the status quo.

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A second Arrernte account of the missionaries’ arrival focused on the motif of the star. The method of this story’s telling was different from Joyleen’s. It came as a brief aside, finished almost before it began, but leading to something further. Joanna Wheeler, about twenty years old at the time, worked as a cleaner at the Ntaria school. She had finished some secondary schooling and aspired to be a teacher’s aide. Her family came from the region of Angas Downs not far from Uluru. They were one among a number of groups that congregated at cattle camps around Glen Helen and later moved to Hermannsburg via the cattle camp at Undandita. Her grandfather’s emu (irleye) story passed by Ntaria, and the senior custodian for Ntaria had given permission to her father to camp in the vicinity of this track. Her father’s repertoire of traditional knowledge and role as a Lutheran evangelist had made him a respected figure and permanent guest. Naturally, he and his family supported the recognized senior custodians. Joanna’s mother was one among a number of granddaughters of the late artist Albert Namatjira. Mother and daughter frequently traveled north beyond Papunya to stay with their relatives. My paraphrase of Joanna’s story is brief. One day all the people were sitting in the shade down by the river. Women were making seed cakes and getting bush tucker [food]. A star fell from heaven on the spot of the old Hermannsburg church. It made a big hole behind two trees. After that, the missionaries came with German and English and tucker that people didn’t know about. Plenty of damper and tea and treacle too. The church grew up on the spot where the star fell, and they put the church bell between the two trees.

Joanna represented the continuities of traditional culture in terms of seedcakes and bush tucker, the provisioning activities of women. This mode of representing the past speaks to the current regime of secular governance in which intercultural transactions at Ntaria tend to focus on health and education, issues that involve women as preeminent caregivers, especially to the young (see also Povinelli 1993a, 126). It has replaced earlier accounts of the “nakedness” of indigenous people in the face of whites and also of exclusively male intercultural engagements (see also Bell 1983). Limited employment for men at Ntaria and the fact that Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC) stands across the river, and the Central Land Council (CLC) in Alice Springs, has meant the feminization of a school-shop-clinic-church domain at Ntaria. Joanna’s rendering of the past reflected these conditions. In her account, the “big hole behind two trees” referred to the place

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Figure 2. Carl Strehlow’s church and bell. Photograph by author.

for the Hermannsburg church etched out by the falling star. Like mission houses and the school, the church was raised by hand. Foundations were excavated and, in the case of houses, involved the construction of cellars as well. These holes produced, in Joyleen’s words, “big shade,” a new form of shelter—both a continuity and a contrast with the shade of river gums beside ancestral water holes. “Damper, tea and treacle” juxtaposed with bush tucker were metonymic for a different social order. Like the bell, they symbolized the new ways of a Christian world. Photographs of Hermannsburg often feature the old mission church framed by two trees that support a platform for the bell, an improvised tower (see figure 2). One of these trees was struck by lightening not so long ago and now has been replaced by rough-hewn timber to support the bell. The church, food staples, and the bell call the mission to mind with its regime of rations for service; a social order that in time replaced women’s foraging. I asked Joanna why the star fell on this particular place, and she said that this was the country where Jesus had been. She suggested that I meet her father’s sister, who would show me Jesus’s track. Some days later, we went with Marlene, Joanna’s aunt, into Palm Valley, where she showed me a popular landmark: a large indentation in a rock on the bed of the Finke

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River known as impatye Jesuake (Jesus’s footprint). We went farther into the valley looking for a similar mark that Joanna’s aunt described as “Jesua, wearin’ R. M. William boots.”15 We did not find this mark, the aunt observed, because a shift in the sand had covered the track. On the way out of Palm Valley, though, we climbed a small hill in order to see two sets of rock markings, one a new moon surrounded by stars and the other a sun. My guide proposed that these markings were made by God so that Jesus would find the way through Palm Valley and up the Finke River. It was he who sent the star to Ntaria because this was the place where “that Bible mape” had been. She explained to me that God had made the country around Ntaria. Noah’s flood had occurred on the bed of the Finke. The Ten Commandments were made on stone north of Ntaria (in the Western Macdonnells). Arrernte people, she said, were the descendants of Cain and Abel through Noah, just as “whitefellas” were. The Lutheran mape, she remarked, knew all these stories. The stories came with the Lutherans. Arrernte people had forgotten the stories, and Jesus sent the Lutherans to remind the Arrernte. In his account of Noah’s ark come to the Kimberleys, Kolig makes the point, paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, “that natural phenomena are not what myths seek to explain, but are rather the medium through which myths . . . explain” (Kolig 1980, 122). Rumsey takes this observation further when he proposes that in indigenous culture, place is the principle mode of objectification through which events are understood. Inscribing significant events in place is a way of incorporating them into a world and the self (Rumsey 1994:126). This inscribing, as Rumsey argues, ensures that events are lodged in a tradition of orality and memory that uses place as its mnemonic. Joanna’s site where a star fell and raised a church in the locale of Jesus’s footprint is a striking use of place as a Western Arrernte mnemonic. It is also an explanation of past events. Why did the missionaries come to this place, to this location just south of the Ntaria water hole? They came because the track was there and therefore to remind the custodians of this story. The Jesus track had been there but forgotten, covered by sand perhaps, like the R. M. Williams imprint. These ideas introduce a further motif: that things go wrong for the Western Arrernte due to the faulty execution of rite. T. G. H. Strehlow (1970) notes this as a view among old men in the 1930s, voiced with regard to totemic ritual. The Arrernte were suffering because the young would no longer accept the discipline of the ritual order. It was equally a view in the 1990s among old people who remembered the mission. They saw the mission’s withdrawal in the 1980s as a product, in part, of Arrernte failure in the Christian domain. Whose failure, though? In its various twists and turns, Western Arrernte politics could make this a failure of the

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current custodians, all Western Arrernte, or the Lutheran missionaries and their paternalism. These arguments notwithstanding, the inscribing of Lutheranism on indigenous land remains a telling objectification of the manner in which the Western Arrernte sought to sustain continuity as the mission also changed their world. Asked explicitly about their “two laws,” older people separate “God’s law” and an Arrernte one. Traditional knowledge, they say, “tells us where we are,” while God and Jesus “look after us.” The latter figures, they suggest, provide a diffuse and bracketing power beyond the phenomenon of emplaced sociality. And this Lutheran view has its Arrernte counterpoint: The proposal that Europeans came because the Arrernte had forgotten knowledge locates all knowledge in an Arrernte world. The story of Christianity itself is brought back to country, objectified in place, and thereby assimilated to Western Arrernte experience. The Lutheran story in Central Australia remains a crucial part of Western Arrernte identity across generations, a change remade as continuity. Yet this continuity came with terrible loss. The fourth and final story makes this loss explicit. It was given to me by a senior custodian of country west of Ntaria. Helmut Pareroultja’s father’s father was baptized by the mission in 1908, at the age of about twenty-four. His name, Pai’arula, came from a site northwest of Ntaria. He was given the baptismal name of Kristian (see figure 3). His first son was baptized in 1914, and in 1916 his second son, father of the narrator, was also baptized. These dates suggest that this clan was slower than some others to engage with the mission. Although their traditional lands were also overtaken by cattle leases and part of the mission lease, this group, which intermarried with Kukatja-Luritja, had the option of dropping back onto poorer land west. Fine artists, patrilineally related to the Namatjiras, the group has had a reputation of diffidence toward the old mission order. Helmut’s grandfather walked off the mission in protest against the disciplinary practices of the regime. At the time, communions were held only a few times a year. People judged unworthy to participate were singled out and often humiliated. More recently, some Lutheran pastors have seen Kristian’s actions as instrumental in changing former pietistic practice. Helmut, Kristian’s grandson, remained at a distance from the church. He became prominent in Central Australia due to various tussles with the CLC regarding a land claim in the vicinity of Lake Amadeus in the south. He had represented himself and won, to the embarrassment of the land council that had, at the outset, discounted his claims. Helmut’s father and one paternal uncle, at least, were recognized as men with significant knowledge. Such

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Figure 3. Kristian and Auguste Pareroultja, circa 1922, with children (back row, left to right) Eva, Monica, Otto; (front) Edwin, Theresa (in lap), Rubin. Reprinted by permission of the Strehlow Research Centre, Northern Territory Museum, Alice Springs.

recognition may have been due in part to their location west of the more intensive European settlement and in part to their historical distance from the mission. Helmut was known to have received some knowledge through patrifiliation and other knowledge from his mother’s side as well. In recent years, Helmut had also become a prominent kwertengerle for Ntaria’s senior custodian. When the latter’s eldest son died, Helmut played a central role during and following the funeral. He assisted the bereaved man at the graveside with other Arrernte senior men and hosted the family for its sorry camp16 that lasted more than a year. Helmut would himself soon die attempting to separate relatives in feuding families. His death ramified at Ntaria for years—a terrifying loss of a leader (see Austin-Broos 1996b). He had asked to see me in order to document a section of his mother’s genealogy. I was camping on Helmut’s country a little distance from his station, and his comment on the mission came as an evening afterthought when I had closed my notebook for the day. Helmut’s narrative was structured as a parallelism, designed for rhetorical effect (see T. Strehlow 1944, 67; and figure 4). Such parallelisms are in fact a paradigm of Western Arrernte homology. The line of a song is repeated a number of times with an ostensibly minor variation; the same line but “different,” with each variation accumulating meaning. For example, in a southern song regarding a

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Figure 4. Helmut Pareroultja’s sand drawing, redrawn by the author from her notes.

band of native cat (tyelpe) men, “The men’s band stretches outward / farflung it stretches outward / The long line stretches outward / long-drawn it stretches outward” (see T. Strehlow 1971, 691). Alternatively, homologous images are used. Strehlow describes a honey ant song in which the ants are marked with “wave-rings” of nectar just as a flooded river leaves rippling “foam-rings” as it recedes (T. Strehlow 1971, 690). In the telling of this invasion story, Helmut sought to deploy this form of poetics to make the story convincing and complete. It was told as a parallel Christian/Arrernte story drawn in the sand. You remember that story, that one begin with Adam and Eve? Adam and Eve, that one livin’ with their children. Mape of children there, all livin’ together that way. [Here he demonstrated, in a typical fashion, parallel vertical lines of descent representing the genealogy of Adam and Eve.] Then the flood came. Lotta people die. Whole lot of people there. Noah, he save some of those people. Take them to another place [drawing parallel travel lines between locations]. Next, those people, they become slaves. They went to Egypt [more lines representing travel and relocation]. Those Egyptian people, they were cruel. That Bible mape, they left Egypt, and they travel, travel, travel that way [drawing travel lines again with fingers in the dust]. That mape shift again, to Babylon. After that, everything mess up. They come up with a whole lot of languages. After that, everyone speak different language.

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Helmut paused here for quite a long time and then said, “Relhe mape, lakenhe ngirre [It has been just about like that for the Arrernte],” gesturing slightly with his hand toward the country, but looking down. First, there was Arrernte and their children. All that mape walk about here, camp all over this place here. Then, Captain Cook come. Some fella say he was a good man. Itne itye kaltye [they don’t know]. First time, Captain Cook step on land, relhe ntyarre, they were finished. Then come the cattlemen. They were really cruel. They shoot people. Those animals, they ate [out] all the land. After that, people couldn’t find any food. Then came the missionaries. People were very unhappy, very frightened. Itne terirreke. So they went to the missionary. When missionary come it was like Babylon. They threw out peoples’ language, irenhe iweme [throw it away]. Everybody start to speak different language that other people don’t understand. Now, everything proper messed up. One fella, he tell CLC he bin born four different places. We all knew where we stay, “where— the—boundaries—are,” before missionary came.

The elided, the “not said” in Western Arrernte accounts, is suddenly said with force. The three previous stories, both European and Arrernte, have identified goods in the form of knowledge, or at least the recollection of knowledge, brought by the missionaries. Engagement entailed an exchange between cultures. Like Joanna, Helmut describes these cultures in terms of language, “different language” or “English and German.” Yet in Helmut’s view, there was no real exchange. Though the Lutherans protected Western Arrernte from the physical assaults of the cattlemen, they brought a destruction as well: the destruction of coherent language or law and thereby of the indigenous culture. Arrernte people commonly explain how the land came to be renamed with the remark that settlers in Central Australia were unable to “say” Arrernte names—“They could not hear/understand.” For Helmut, this good fortune of superior power, the lack of a felt need to learn the names, has caused significant erasure. Helmut’s reference to Captain Cook was provoked by neighbors who planned to execute a rock sculpture showing the “good” Captain Cook and the missionaries, preceding and following the “bad” cattlemen. His view was that this group had extended its claim on country through readiness to evangelize for the mission—opportunists in the context of settlement. Like the dispute concerning custodianship of Ntaria, this particular “boundary” wrangle had endured over many years.

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Notwithstanding Helmut’s focus on violence and disorder, his narration also summoned telling homologies. He began with the Christian creation myth and represented Adam and Eve as descendants attached to a country. This style of using circle and line to draw a site/place/water hole with its human descendants (see figure 4, part 1) is also used by women when they talk relatedness across country, indicating the relation between groups in the sand. Helmut moved from this representation to the story of Noah, the species, and the flood (figure 4, part 2). This story line is a common way in which Christianity is objectified on country by various Aboriginal groups in various parts of the continent (see also Kolig 1980). Often the proposed site of a beached Noah’s ark is at a distance and on inhospitable land (in the case of the Western Arrernte, somewhere over the Macdonnells). The story’s popularity may lie in the fact that Noah, in the face of the flood, secured the animal species for the world. This particular Bible story therefore provides the Christian account of man’s and the species’ joint occupation of place— a crucial theme in Dreaming myth and a charter, in Central Australia, for male ceremonies that increase the species. As I noted in the introduction, the story of Adam and Eve alone makes only limited sense to the Arrernte. Linked with Noah, though, the Bible narrative becomes more familiar. Enslavement (see figure 4, part 3) follows proper constitution of the world and then dispersal (part 4). Slavery entailing the creation of hierarchy is in each case brought by strangers, beyond the domain of known indigenous sociality. The final stage, of dispersal, is notable for its iconicity. Helmut’s drawing suggests that lines unconnected to others, or to circles, are quite literally paths to nowhere. This lack of connection produced Babylon, Babel, and a multiplicity of languages. It is in this context that men argue about boundaries and claim that they come from four different places. In Helmut’s recitation, these were enigmatic images of chaos. Yet as Helmut drew the collapse of design, he also reaffirmed its presence through parallel histories: the history of Judeo-Christian people and the history of the Arrernte. In this regard, Helmut showed a delight in parallelism common among the last generation of men who knew mission culture well. They liked to draw unexpected homologies between the subject-object world of the Arrernte and the Christian order. On another occasion, Helmut appealed to Christian culture to establish the efficacy of ancestors. Even Christians, he observed, understood there were things not wrought by people, that were always there in the world, not made by human beings. He referred to a long, slim “spear” of stone on his country and to impatye Jesuake on Missionary Plain. In discussion with another man, I was once rebuked for the observation that Christianity said “nothing about country.”

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At the time it seemed a safe assumption in view of common remarks made by both women and men. The man replied quickly that the story of Lot’s wife was a story about country. She looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt—a subject-into-object transformation of the type with which Dreaming myth is replete (see Munn 1970). In a fashion similar to Helmut’s, this man presented a Christian story in the light of an Arrernte poetics.

Invasion as Myth and History Western Arrernte stories of invasion are mythical in two ways. Terence Turner has proposed that myth can be distinguished from history in the following terms: “Myth is an attempt to formulate the essential properties of social experience in terms of a series of ‘generic events,’ . . . [while] history, by contrast is concerned precisely with the level of particular relations among particular events” (T. Turner 1988, 252).17 Building on the work of Róheim (1945) and Stanner (1966), Lester Hiatt gives a similar though more specific account. Aboriginal myth, Hiatt proposes, is concerned with ontology, but with ontology that employs ontogeny as its model rather than “figurative” accounts of experience (Hiatt 1975, 14–15). He means by this that myth is more than narratives of social life that rely on particular events and contexts. For Hiatt and for John Morton (1985, 1987b), myth summons the poles of human experience and links the external world with psychogenic experience (see also V. Turner 1968, 18–19). This link presents life as a totality wherein central forms of experience are perennial—embedded in human embodied being and in the totality of nature’s order. These are Terence Turner’s “essential properties” of experience that include but also reach beyond the moral imperfections of social life (see Stanner 1966). How do Western Arrernte stories of invasion conform with this property of myth? In his discussion of some comparable accounts, Ken Maddock provides an answer. His discussion concerns the wide variety of Aboriginal stories, distributed across the continent, that relate Captain Cook’s arrival in Australia.18 In Maddock’s view, stories of Captain Cook are imaginative construal of real events (see also Beckett 1993). They are “symbols of what was real or possible in intercultural relations” as seen by various Aboriginal narrators (Maddock 1988, 27). The stories relate a generic event—the confrontation with an Other that transforms life. They explore the possible in this engagement, bringing to it familiar forms of value from a known world (see also Rose 1984). The actions of strangers are thereby read in ways that create specific links between the present and the past. In the stories to hand, the missionaries are eager to engage the Arrernte in forms of ex-

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change, in this case, food exchanged for the Arrernte’s knowledge; or they have come to remind the Arrernte of knowledge that has been forgotten; or their coming inevitably disrupts Arrernte life and in dramatic ways. More than simply moral tales, these stories canvas ideas about the generic nature of human relations between relhe and lhentere, between the indigenous people and the missionary strangers. Depending on the account of these social relations, different types of homology and ellipsis are employed. There is also another sense in which these travel stories are myth; a sense that some scholars deem incompatible with the idea of myth as generic event. In Roland Barthes’s terms, these stories are “alibis” that involve a “type of speech chosen by history” (Barthes 1973, 123). Alibis present points of view that “outdistance” the ostensible message of the myth. For example, Joyleen’s story relates the missionaries’ arrival in order to propose an enduring relation between a Western Arrernte group and particular Pertame. This alibi also dignifies particular individuals and establishes authority for their descendants in their relations with the Lutheran church. The second story endorses the position of a contemporary custodian both on his country and in his past relations with the Hermannsburg mission. This position is predictable given that Joanna’s father lived as a guest on this man’s land. Helmut’s story distinguishes between the interests of Western Arrernte custodians and white invaders, including missionaries. His group’s more distant relations with the mission—they were pastoral workers more often than evangelists—allowed him to offer a critique. It is also fair to note that all three stories were linked to the status quo as it existed when they were told—to a senior custodian’s group and their allies who were close to the church. Almost certainly, other Western Arrernte less identified with Lutheranism and these groups would bring other stories with different alibis. Barthes’s central argument is that mythology bears witness to historical event. He writes that “mythology can only have a historical foundation, . . . it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things” (Barthes 1973, 110). Yet Barthes’s rejection of structuralist accounts might be too absolute. His view can be reformulated, thus, that though they describe generic events, myths do so in ways that carry present significance. Certainly, these travel stories of invasion seem more interested than many in the corpus of Western Arrernte traditional song. Nonetheless, there has always been a politics of Western Arrernte myth, a history of Dreamings in relation to sites (see T. Strehlow 1947; see also Sutton 1988). This role of Dreamtime myth, as a claim to emplaced authority, was integral to presettlement life. With depopulation, attenuation of knowledge, and migration, this politics of em-

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placed identity has been played out, even more vigorously perhaps, in the adversarial practice of land claims.19 Similarly, Western Arrernte stories of invasion position different groups and individuals in their relations with lhentere (white people). They stake claims to different types of relationship. In sum, these stories of invasion both propose generic events of intercultural engagement and carry alibis for various Arrernte groups. One further comment is in order. Aboriginal myths of contact are not alone in their multiplicity. Forms of Aboriginal relatedness bring diverse interests to a site and produce differing versions of story and song that are the “same song” nonetheless (see, e.g., Keen 1994, 40–61). In contrast, the history of the Lutherans at Hermannsburg, although it too has various versions, presents a univocal theme of settler achievement, including images of the Voortrekker type.20 In this context, the missionaries who sometimes stayed for a lifetime at Ntaria become the captives of a national history that is mainly white and overrides indigenous worlds. The power of the church to tell its story in a simple sequential form that excludes the Western Arrernte—and other Central Australian groups—is the power, in the first place, of Christianity to posit a “truth” beyond culture and, in the second, of a nation-state to project a univocal history. In this context, these two forms of story stand in a hierarchical relation. The mission history has been in print for years and remains a part of Australian popular culture. These Arrernte accounts have been entirely local; travel stories in the sand recorded now in written form.

Conclusion In her discussion of the Hermannsburg women potters, contemporary workers in art and craft, Jennifer Isaacs sums Western Arrernte culture thus: “Theirs is a distinct culture which, for many, blends biblical and ancient Aranda concepts, and places each person within a particular set of interconnected relationships: with each other, with their traditional lands, with the Ancestors (spirit and human), and with the metaphysical world as explained by their Christian upbringing” (Isaacs: 1999, 24). Rather than a simple “blend,” Western Arrernte culture reveals two dynamics. Without doubt, the discontinuity and great loss that T. G. H. Strehlow wrote about has occurred. Forced sedentary life undermined hunter-gatherer ways. At the same time, the Western Arrernte people have maintained, albeit in changed forms, types of practice, language, and organization that inform the poetics of everyday life—embodied style, idiomatic speech, humor, and imagination. Through the use of homology, ellipsis, and bridging symbolic forms,

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including the travel story and its components, the Western Arrernte have maintained their identity. In this way, they created a vernacular Christianity even as pastoralism and mission life changed them forever. This creative process of change that also involved real violence is pursued in the following chapter. It examines events that surrounded Kaporilya, a Western Arrernte rainmaking site not far from Ntaria.

G chapter 2

Kaporilya, a Big Place

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aporilya is another Western Arrernte story. It is also a symbol among Western Arrernte of continuity and change through the twentieth century. Kaporilya is a Luritja word that means “rippling water.” It describes the effect of breeze as it disturbs the surface of a water hole. The word names a place and a rainmaking site in the foothills of the Krichauff Range about seven kilometers (four miles) southwest of Ntaria. Underground springs and the manner in which they bubble up between large rocks to provide perennial water have made it a source of fascination both to the Arrernte and to the lhentere (white people) in their midst. When outstations were being constructed, Ntaria’s senior custodian established an outstation bearing the same name close to the site. Although there are routes around the station to the site, it would be wrong not to ask for permission to go there. In this sense, the outstation guards the site although it is not now excluded terrain in the manner of traditional men’s and women’s sites. Its desacralization according to one code and resacralization in terms of another heighten the interest of Kaporilya. Moreover, Kaporilya is a site at which the mission in the style of the Arrernte sought to emplace Christianity. Since 1936, the Western Arrernte have observed the first Sunday in October as Kaporilya Day. On this day and at the site, a church service and picnic mark the opening of the Kaporilya pipeline.1 The pipeline was laid from Kaporilya’s underground springs to the Hermannsburg mission following severe drought between 1926 and 1930. The drought saw roughly a third of the indigenous people around Hermannsburg die. Many of them were small children, and many died of scurvy, undiagnosed until 1929.2 Citrus and vegetables would provide a remedy for people who had been dependent for some time on only molasses, tea, and flour. Not only had the livestock

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and gardens died at Hermannsburg, but the species that had underpinned a hunter-gatherer life along with the rabbit, an exotic supplement, had also perished in the drought. The postdrought pipeline would be laid to irrigate new and larger mission gardens. Hermannsburg’s gardens in turn would encourage a more intensely sedentary life. Once planning and preparation were complete, the pipeline took about forty weeks to lay. A team of about twenty Aboriginal men was involved, with changes in personnel from time to time. Most of the prominent groups in the mission took part. These events are remembered at Ntaria today and inform a modern mythological rendering of Christian community. In fact, the legacy of these events has eddied out in space and time to pervade the whole of Ntaria life. In 2004, a film entitled The Dream and the Dreaming about the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg was shown for the first time. It opens with a visual sweep up the Finke River and then switches to an Aboriginal man singing a traditional song at a large rock outcrop close to Kaporilya. This rock was once the site of rainmaking ceremonies, a stone from which other rain men would rise in the course of ritual performance. As the man sings, rain begins to splash on the rock—the Dreaming beyond the dream that led the Lutherans to the Western Arrernte.3 Kaporilya is and always was “a big place” for the Arrernte, and its story contains many stories. It is also an example of cultural erasure, reinscription, and the use of homology to maintain continuity in a changing world. Kaporilya does not mean now what it once meant to all Western Arrernte and especially to the group of men for whom it was a major ritual site. Its Dreaming significance is attenuated while new forms of value have been etched in place. Kaporilya is the site of a social imaginary that has been remade. More tangibly perhaps, Kaporilya attests to the real importance of water for any culture locating in the region. The pervasive influence of natural environment on social and cultural relations has thereby nurtured “water” as a homology that evokes both Arrernte and mission ways; a shared vehicle for the different worlds that met on Missionary Plain. In the following sections, I provide first an ethnographic sketch of Kaporilya Day in the 1990s. Second, I draw on the ethnographic record for the Western Arrernte to indicate some of the Dreaming song that informed the presettlement site. An account of the events in Central Australia, including the 1920s drought, that produced Kaporilya’s desacralization and its subsequent reinscription as a Lutheran site comes next. Finally, I detail some ritual and political outcomes of this reinscription and place this account in the context of some other writings on change in remote, indigenous Australia.

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Kaporilya Day In the weeks before Kaporilya Day, the pace begins to quicken around Ntaria and also at the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC) just across the river. In the fashion of any large secular ceremony, preparations need to be made:4 Groups of men clear the site and grade the tracks that will carry Toyota trucks and sedans, buses from other towns, and minibuses to Kaporilya. The preliminaries also include consultations between Ntaria council and TORC and between these service groups and Kaporilya’s senior custodian. While the organizations provide bread, “cool drink,” ice cream, and fruit, the custodian provides the kere, or meat. In the last few days before Kaporilya, bullocks are selected, slaughtered, and butchered, their meat hauled to the site early on the day. If the women’s choir decides to sing, hymns must be chosen and rehearsals started. If there is to be one or more baptisms on Kaporilya Day, the parents or at least the mother is enjoined by the senior women to choose godparents.5 In many family groups, clothes will be laundered or new clothes bought. In the early 1990s, there were still some older women who came to Kaporilya Day dressed “flash” and carrying handbags. Some men dress in cowboy gear, paying special attention to hats, plaid shirts, and cowboy boots. People unsure of a ride approach lhentere to drive them or else check the transport attached to one or another of the service groups: TORC, the clinic, the Ntaria or an outstation school, the Finke River Mission (FRM), or a community store. Still, intense as these preparations are, another precursor overshadows them all. When youths start to hang around Ntaria camps discussing the brumbies (wild horses) they have caught, this means that Kaporilya is nigh. The fencing is mended on the Ntaria corral. Soon male relatives are seen there daily breaking in wild horses. Others sit on the posts and watch. Kaporilya is a celebration of settlement life, and in Western Arrernte eyes it therefore celebrates horsemanship. Both Christianity and pastoralism are central to this settlement ethos. September and October mark the culmination of the dry winter period in Central Australia. Its impact drives the many brumbies descended from pastoral stock out of their usual home in the ranges and onto Missionary Plain. The horses edge toward the water holes and springs, the outstations, and Ntaria itself. Settlement life has been responsible for one intriguing adaptation. Brumbies have learned to turn on taps attached to outstation rainwater tanks or linked by a pipe to a sunken well. Driving far from the main road along an outstation track, occasionally one can see a tap gushing

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water. Brumbies open the taps, drink, and move on. To combat the loss of water, most tanks now are mounted on tall wooden frames. Camping at an outstation, though, sometimes a group will watch a brave and thirsty horse walk up to a household tap, eye the humans, and turn it on. This counterpoint magic of the tame and the wild on Missionary Plain makes brumbies central to the celebration. Male siblings and cousins rehearse their mounts in the days leading up to Kaporilya. Sitting in an Ntaria camp, one can hear the clatter of horses’ hooves on the asphalt roads. On the Saturday evening before the day, a succession of youthful horsemen riding with soft bridle and a blanket—or bareback—parade their dappled and piebald mounts through town. Load-up time on Sunday morning is generally around ten o’clock. The trucks pull out from Ntaria onto the Areyonga road, drive through the Finke, spraying water each side of the vehicles, and climb the short sharp hill at Tjuwanpa on the right, passing the Palm Valley turnoff on the left. As they proceed, kids and parents alike start to look for their young mape (mob) on horseback. Groups of horsemen race back and forth along the Areyonga road waiting for truckloads of relatives to come. Then, as the trucks and cars drive to the Kaporilya turnoff, vehicles and horsemen race each other in a furious kinship of mobility. People identify their young male mob on the track and call them by the name of their place, “Ipolera mape! Arrkapa mape! Camel’s Hump mape!” or perhaps a patronymic “Malbunka mape! Ratara mape!” As the vehicles approach Kaporilya and queue up waiting to park, the horsemen race ahead to find vantage points on the cliffs above Kaporilya. There the mounted horses will stand from time to time throughout the day, their elongated shapes and shadows creating an effect like a natural cathedral. As cars stream into the parking lot, they pass the Kaporilya rainmaking stone that some committed Christians say is now no longer the prerogative of men. Arrkwetye mape (the women) can make rain too. Four features mark the Kaporilya site today. The first is the water hole, with clear, cool water that is darkened nonetheless by lichen on rocks underneath the surface. It is fed by a constant trickle from the rocks, the mystery of Kaporilya. As the day passes, children bathe in the pool and its muddy bottom is churned by their feet and the hooves of horses led down to drink. Second, just above the pool is a large oval shape marked out in concentric circles with sandstone from the area. At the center of these concentric circles, which create the impression of an amphitheater, is a stepped dais built from stone and cement. A metal cross painted white has been secured at its center. Around the edge of the dais a handrail has been attached. A

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Figure 5. The Kaporilya Cross. Photograph by author.

Lutheran pastor conducts the Kaporilya Day service from this spot with the cross looming up behind him. More important, from a vantage point above Kaporilya, this memorial topped with a Christian cross appears to rise out of the circles of stone (see figure 5). Similar patterns of concentric circles are used in tywerrenge (sacred artifact) designs, sand drawings, and acrylic art as signs for water holes–cum–ritual sites with their rings of ramifying power. At Kaporilya, the Christian cross rises out of a tywerrenge design and transcends its significance, or so a retired missionary proposed (see also Petrick 2007, 40).6 Third, east of both these features and accessed by the main track leading to Kaporilya is a large parking lot. Later in the day, it is also the site for picnic races among the kids. Finally, west of the water hole and the amphitheater lies a cleared area with two large barbecue grills, tables, and a square stall covered with shade cloth overhead. From this area the celebrants of Kaporilya Day, big and small, receive their picnic treat—a barbecue with fruit and sweets. The whole is an iconic statement of the Arrernte’s Christian conversion, including the turn to pastoralism, inscribed over a rainmaking site of great ritual significance. At the place called Kaporilya, sacred site, Christian and pastoral rite, and Sunday picnic coincide. Performed entirely in Western Arrernte, the service follows the usual

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morning format. It is called Sunday-aka Pepa, Sunday service or, as it is rendered in the Lutheran Hymnal, the “Service of the Word.” The pastor calls the congregation to worship and then leads a hymn and the confession of sins. Reassurance and prayer from the pastor follow and then three lessons are read, from the Old Testament, the Epistles, and the Gospels, respectively. Following the lessons, the congregation repeats the Apostles’ Creed, which is followed by another hymn. The pastor preaches and an offering is taken. The congregation prays, the Lord’s Prayer is repeated, and the congregation disperses after “table grace,” a thanksgiving for food. Baptisms are performed before the lessons, and the choir offering comes before or after the sermon. The Kaporilya Day service is a standard one but for the theme of the sermon that references John 4:3–42. The passage concerns an encounter between Jesus and a Samarian woman at a well. The message revolves around water. (I will return to this.) Following the service, long queues form for the barbecue. Generally catering is ample, and people with kin links to the custodian’s family can also make their own demands. On one Kaporilya Day, I returned from a visit to another camp to find my friend Joyce Malbunka sitting contentedly with part of a bullock’s bloody hind leg tossed in her blanket and a rib cage shoved in her carryall. As the feasting begins to subside, many of the lhentere leave, including clergy from the FRM office in Alice Springs and their visitors. Later there are picnic races organized by teachers and remaining Lutheran staff. Later still, an Arrernte pastor or evangelist calls together those who remain for a thanksgiving. With the lhentere departed, more Arrernte men appear, and sometimes one of them speaks to the assembled crowd. Most memorable for me was the day on which Helmut Pareroultja rose to say that this was his first Kaporilya in seven years. He exhorted his listeners to remember the sickness and dying surrounding Kaporilya and the hard work of the men on the pipeline, “for old man Albrecht.” He enjoined the Western Arrernte to stand fast (ikerlte, strong) for their own mob in the face of lhentere and the government.7 The group was transfixed, and then it was kele (finish).

A Rain Site: Kaporilya before the Lutherans Both Carl Strehlow and his son T. G. H. Strehlow have recorded fragments of Kaporilya’s presettlement ritual tradition. Spencer and Gillen (1927) and Géza Róheim (1930) provide additional material. Róheim in particular brings together ethnographic observations from elsewhere in Australia, including some by A. W. Howitt and Walter Roth. In his psychoanalytic

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account, Róheim also integrates Australian material with numerous other mythical sources from Europe and North and South America. Although sparse, these sources provide some sense of the initial ritual significance of the site and the poetics of its performances and myth. T. G. H. Strehlow proposes that Kaporilya was a pmere kwetethe, “a ceremonial centre where an important local totemic ancestor is believed to have originated and/or passed to his last rest.” Such a site might also be the “centre of a local totemic clan,” the place that gives identity to a country and a residential place (see T. Strehlow 1971, 760). Carl Strehlow provides a mythical description of the Kaporilya ancestors: At Kaporilya [wave of water], located in the Kirchauff Ranges about 5 miles west of Hermannsburg station, water issues from a spring among the rocks and fills a small rock hole with fresh water. Long ago many rain-men (atua kwatja) used to live at this place, led by two chiefs Tnamina [hailstone] and Kantjira [white cloud]. These rain-men had big bags (taua) in which they stowed clouds (kwatja ankala), lightning (urkulta), hail (inbotna), takula [white shells], etc. With these bags they climbed up to the sky and emptied them while roaring frightfully [i.e., producing thunder], causing rain to cascade to the earth. They also caused lightning by throwing takula to the ground. From time to time the atua kwatja would throw a burning kangaroo tail (ara-parra) from on high and cause the earth to burst into flames [lightning struck]. (C. Strehlow [1907] 1991, 30–31)

T. G. H. Strehlow observes that a big place such as this would have had a number of traditions attached to it; a variety of myths with their linked song performances. Kaporilya, it seems, had a main or central complex and a number of “outer” or lesser ones. Strehlow proposes that his father received one of the latter whereas his own 1940s research with Rauwiraka and Tjalkabota concerned the central complex. He relates two “episodes” from this tradition (T. Strehlow 1971, 275–76). Both stories concern Kantjira, one of the two ancestral figures at the rain site. In the first, Kantjira’s son left his father at Kaporilya and traveled north. Finding that his son had left, Kantjira extracted a strand from his tightly bound hair—bound because were it to tumble down, rain would pour from the hair and flood the land. The plucking of a single strand unleashed a powerful flash of lightning not far from Kaporilya that felled the father’s son and killed him. Soon his body was riddled with maggots and began to rot. Kantjira was sorry. A thunderbolt exploded beside the son and thunder

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rumbled across the sky, as the father sent rain clouds that poured down on the rotting corpse. Floodwater reached the corpse and flowed under the son’s back, recomposing his body and restoring life. The son returned to his father, though they were both very tired (purrke nthurre), and “went in” for the final time to a secret cave near the Kaporilya site. A second story from this complex concerns Kantjira’s younger brother, whom Kantjira killed in a fit of jealous rage after he had decided to leave in the company of a “large host of stormclouds.” The brother was also beset by worms, though “his faithful ghost hovered over his bleached, dry corpse” and chanted the following words: Out of soil putrid with decay grow whole, grow whole! Out of sandy earth grow whole, grow whole! Shedding your shrivelled skin, grow whole, grow whole. (T. Strehlow 1971, 276)

The brother’s body was restored to health. Strehlow notes that the verses that recount the restoration of the son were sung as part of the “Rain Song of Kaporilya,” while those concerning Kantjira’s brother were used by Arrernte shamans to cure the seriously ill, though not as a means of raising the dead. The story recorded by Carl Strehlow in the early years of the century demonstrates the manner in which the Kaporilya site was linked to others in the region. Ltala, a rain man from Ntakatna in the east, close to Owen Spring station and just west of Alice Springs, decided to travel to Kaporilya after he saw continuous lightning there through the night. He camped at various sites until he came to Ragatia on the Ellery Creek. There Ltala sighted old Jalakaka, a prominent rain man. As they embraced, Jalakaka let out a thunderous roar. The two men took to the sky with their rain bags, “causing heavy rain to pour down on earth.” Ltala continued on to Kaporilya and returned with Tnamina and Kantjira. Later, he rose in the sky over Ragatia and emptied his rain bags on the three elders. Jalakaka became solidified. The others lit a large fire and brought him back to life. Traveling farther, first Jalakaka, then Ltala, and finally Kantjira poured rain down on the others at various sites. Finally, Kantjira and Ltala joined forces: “[They] rose to the sky with a terrible roar and opened their bags, causing the rain to fall like a cloudburst and filling all the waterways with an enormous flood of water. Soon a mighty flood came rushing up and swept all the rain-men to Ntakata, where they entered the earth (irbalakalaka) and were changed into

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a large, white and transparent rock which is still located at Ntakata. This rock is rubbed with the hand (turuma) whenever the men of the rain totem wish to make rain” (C. Strehlow [1907] 1991, 31–32).” Carl Strehlow comments that this and other like stories were clearly designed to explain the occurrence of thunderstorms over Missionary Plain; storms that are heralded by lightning in the west and an accumulation of clouds over the region of the Finke River that ultimately results in heavy rain. This myth also explains the advent of rainmaking stones, those “subject-into-object” transformations of ancestral beings that, having “become tired” (purrkirreme), solidify or turn into stone. Such stones are rubbed to produce rain (or, more precisely, rain men who rise to the sky and unfasten their bags). It is possibly because this latter story relates how Kantjira from Kaporilya went into the ground at Ntakata that T. G. H. Strehlow describes it as a minor rather than a major one for Kaporilya (see T. Strehlow 1971, 453). Just as sites were ranked in terms of significance, so too were the ancestral rain men. The story carries within it a counterclaim perhaps concerning the relative importance of ancestral sites. Whatever their standing, all three myths share a central feature: concern with the ambivalent relations between elders and their rebellious junior men who attack and rehabilitate each other in the course of their journeys. T. G. H. Strehlow has published thirty-two verses of the “Rain Song of Kaporilya” with both linear and free translations. Here I cite just a few lines from these very beautiful verses that also demonstrate the Western Arrernte use of parallelism: Among the rippling waters he sits without a move, It is Kantji[r]a himself who is sitting without a move. Moveless like a boulder he is sitting; His hair bedewed with rain he is sitting. On the fissured rockplate he is sitting; On a rockplate welling with water he is sitting. . . . The sky is clouded with watermoss; The sky sends down scattered showers. . . . Shaking the earth, yes, shaking the earth, Calls the voice of the thunder, the voice of the thunder. . . .

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Come, moss-covered one, Come, pour forth your waters! Come, foam crests, Come, spread over the waters! . . . A flash of lightning Shocks and terrifies. . . . Moveless like a boulder he is sitting; His hair bedewed with rain he is sitting. . . . Yes, let river-foam float on the water! . . . The flood rolls down its waves. The power [of the flood] has been broken; It is soaking into the sand. (Strehlow 1971, 454–58)

This song addresses not only thunder, lightning, and downpour but also the rushing floods that come hurtling down the Finke River and other like rivers in Central Australia. In the Finke, the floods are a result of heavy rain over the river’s wellsprings in the Macdonnell Ranges. Western Arrernte today can estimate quite precisely the time at which the water will “come down,” first noting the sky and the scale of the fall farther north and then smelling the water on the way. These furious floods can trap the unwary as they spread, rapidly, out on the plain. They can also disappear just as abruptly, “soaking into the sand.” In T. G. H. Strehlow’s text, one note in particular draws attention to the fact that the song’s meaning stretches beyond the representation of nature’s events. Strehlow refers to the fact that the passage describing Kantjira’s “hair bedewed with rain” employs a term that normally would be understood as the hair or head “dripping with blood.” This bloodied hair is also a powerful source of rain, tied up on Kantjira’s head in order to prevent an accidental deluge. So powerful is this hair that one plucked strand as a lightning bolt felled Kantjira’s son. Strehlow remarks that a dancer acting the part of an ancestral rain man would have had his hair liberally sprinkled with blood. He also notes his father’s observation that, in the course of the “water cult,” decorated elders “sat in the centre of the ceremonial ground, and stabbed their subincised urethras with sharp bones till blood gushed

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forth, symbolizing the expected downpour of rain.” Not simply mimetic of rain, these acts reflect the Central Australian view that “blood shed at sacred sites” had male procreative power, exercised in this case via rainmaking, to increase species.8 Lightning is alternatively described as “rain penis” and, in Carl Strehlow’s text (cited earlier) as a “burning kangaroo tail” (T. Strehlow 1971, 454, 449; see also Róheim 1930, 88). Carl Strehlow notes that Kaporilya ceremony involved dancers wearing a woven item called a “rain womb” (kwatye ilpe) hung from a string dangling over the belly. This male androgynous performance that involves both procreative blood (male) and a vessel/receptor (female) is also suggested in Dieri rite as reported by Howitt and cited by Róheim. Bloodletting is performed among senior men brought together in a hut with a conical shape. Róheim notes, “The blood is made to flow on the men sitting round and the two medicine-men throw handfuls of down into the air, some of which becomes attached to the blood of the men, while some continues to float about. The blood is to symbolise the rain and the down the clouds. Two large stones in the centre of the hut represent the gathering clouds” (Róheim 1930, 86). Spencer and Gillen also report an Eastern Arrernte rainmaking rite in which senior men build “a special bough wurley or hut” from which extends a shallow trench for thirty yards. Young men are made to lie face down in the hut on layers of soft, malleable leaves. Decorated elaborately with white down and pipe clay, the principal dancer positions himself inside but close to the door of the hut, emerging to dance up and down the trench, quivering “his body and legs in the most extraordinary way.”9 When he declares the ceremony ended, the young men rush from the hut “screaming in imitation of the spur-winged plover” (Spencer and Gillen 1927, 164-65). In other words, the hut gives forth its progeny. These data support the view that the rain site of Kaporilya was an important site not simply for rain as such but for rites that read the ontology of an arid region as an ontogeny that also claimed a unique, androgynous, procreative power for men in relation to the land and its species (see Hiatt 1971; J. Morton 1987a). In the time before the pastoral stations and the missionaries, Kaporilya was a “big place” in the Western Arrernte world. T. G. H. Strehlow’s discussion of rain myth is complemented by excursions into verses concerning rainbows and hail. He remarks that the Western Arrernte “dreaded hailstorms” and relates a story told to him by Moses Tjalkabota in 1948. It concerned a storm in the 1890s, in the time of missionary Kempe. As hail totemic ancestors in the form of strange, yellow-green clouds approached Hermannsburg from the west, people were convinced they could see a man turning the clouds back with raised hands.

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The clouds unloaded just west of Ntaria and “birds, kangaroos and [even] bullocks suffered severely.” Strehlow continues, “Hermannsburg, however was spared; and the few converts then on the station triumphantly insisted that the figure which they had seen in the clouds had undoubtedly been the figure of Jesus who had protected them” (T. Strehlow 1971, 459). Through the ample experience of suffering, alien force, and the consequent need to reimagine life, the events in the 1920s and 1930s that made the modern Kaporilya would secure these and other Christian symbols at Hermannsburg.

Kaporilya as a Colonial Site In the 1860s and 1870s, exploration, pastoral settlement, and the construction of the telegraph line had their initial impacts on the region’s indigenous people. Disease, relocation, and other physical violence began the process of depopulation, cultural loss, and a reimagining of the world. This is not to say that Central Australian groups and among them Western Arrernte had not faced demographic crisis before. Kimber explains the manner in which during serious drought people dropped back to semipermanent and then permanent water holes as drought worsened. Nonetheless, Aborigines could be “caught out”—large groups perishing at dried-up water holes too far from anything better (Kimber 1990, 161). Moreover, there is evidence that the Australian smallpox epidemics of 1789 and 1830, linked to Indonesia and the China trepang trade, reached Central Australia “decades ahead of European settlement” (Kimber 1990, 165; cf. Campbell 2002). Yet in March 1890, when missioner Kempe remarked that “Hermannsburg mission exist[s] to dig the Aborigines’ graves,” the additional factor of invasion was involved (Kimber 1990, 166). Kempe’s remark came in the wake of the telegraph line and the consolidation of pastoralism. Still to come was railway construction and its pestilent camps, along with another influenza epidemic (see T. Strehlow 1971, xxxiii–xxxv). Then the drought of 1926–30 came. It denuded the landscape of animals, fruits, roots, tubers, and the grasses used in seedcake production, marking a devastating intersection of pre- and postsettlement forces. Friedrich Albrecht reported an infant mortality rate around the mission of 85 percent between 1926 and 1930 (1961, 68). During that period, forty-nine children under school age died, thirty of drought related causes— mainly scurvy and “general weakness” (F. Albrecht 1931b, 216). Albrecht remarked that the adults who died often did so after “many months of terrible suffering.” He continued, “One morning we found a young man, 18 years of age, whose teeth had fallen out during the night. Strong men and women were stricken and grew weaker and weaker, suffering from swollen

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joints and bleeding mouths so that they could not even swallow food. Some pushed some flour mixed in a little hot water right back into their throat with a little stick and then tried to swallow it” (F. Albrecht 1977, 46). The drought’s impact on mission livestock had reduced the mission’s rations to little more than “flour soup” and treacle. Even in 1931 after a year of good rain, only 280 cattle remained of a herd that had numbered around three thousand, and the mission was killing one bullock a week, rather than the previous four, for weekly rations (F. Albrecht 1931a, 263). In 1931, Albrecht reported that a mission hand had found “the skeletons of 6 dead kangaroos under one tree.” He continued, “It will take years till the natural increase will make up the losses suffered through the drought. After the rain there were millions of grasshoppers about, making up the deficiency of meat to a certain extent. Young birds in the hollow gum-trees, as well as mice were another substitute for meat” (F. Albrecht 1931a 264). In August 1929, J. B. Cleland diagnosed the illness that had killed so many as scurvy and prescribed increased vitamin C. He wrote to the mission board and others in Adelaide (Petrick 2007, 6). Soon cases of citrus were shipped to Hermannsburg and also wheat that could be milled into whole-grain flour. In the wake of these events, and outbreaks of whooping cough and tuberculosis as well, Albrecht determined that the mission must grow more vegetables and would need irrigation to do so.10 Other factors also bore on his emerging plan for Kaporilya. In 1931, Albrecht noted that “wherever the cattle go, the growth of bush-tucker is crippled. Several of the grass seeds and certain small berries growing close to the ground, once trodden down by cattle, seem to disappear” (F. Albrecht 1931a, 265). These hardships of an undermined foraging culture were magnified by another impact of settlement, a change in Aboriginal orientations. Albrecht observed, “Because of the land having been taken up for grazing purposes [the natives’] hunting grounds, if there are any at all left for them, are limited. Moreover, natives who have been or are being employed, even if only occasionally, have lost their bushcraft and have at the same time developed a dislike for their old seeds, berries, roots etc.” (F. Albrecht 1935, 376). At the same time, settlers and governments showed little inclination to expand cash employment for Aborigines. Albrecht opined, “It is tragic . . . to see natives of the settled districts, being restricted from hunting in the old way, denied work, even jobs they easily could do, like road-making. It should be generally recognised that there is a moral obligation towards the natives who through the advance of civilisation and by taking the country from them, are deprived of the possibility of making a living in the old way” (F. Albrecht 1931a, 265).

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Concurrent with this usurpation and marginalization, people from other regions had come to Hermannsburg: Luritja and Pintupi from the west and various peoples from the south moved by government away from contact with “hard-drinking white railway construction workers” (T. Strehlow 1977, 3). Once at the mission, Albrecht observed, women were bearing more children. He noted that fertility seemed highest among those who were now the third or fourth generation at the mission.11 Moreover, the general availability of food in nondrought times and mission strictures against infanticide meant that more of these children were surviving. These developments notwithstanding, among the pastoralists there was no thought of a living wage for an Aboriginal working man and his family. Albrecht opined, “If cattle and natives don’t go together, as has been proved more than enough, the families should be supported, wherever the husband is employed, or the natives are restricted from their natural waters and hunting grounds. In my opinion the solving of this question will decide, whether the native race will survive or not” (F. Albrecht 1931b, 217). During the 1926–30 drought, the mission wells around Hermannsburg became very salty. Water, what there was of it, had to be boiled for use, and gardening was restricted. Kaporilya was known as a perennial source of drinking water, and in the course of the drought, camels were used to cart water from the springs down to Hermannsburg. This was not the first time that the mission station had turned to Kaporilya. After the departure of the first missionaries and before Carl Strehlow’s time, a station manager had used gelignite to increase Kaporilya’s water flow. Reporting this, Albrecht remarked enigmatically, “Old people told us that since then the flow of water had decreased,” a practical remark, and also possibly an acknowledgement of ritual transgression (F. Albrecht 1961, 67; cf. Petrick 2007, 37). In September 1931, H. G. Connell, principal civil engineer for the commonwealth, returned a negative report on a proposal to build a pipeline from Kaporilya to Hermannsburg. Connell proposed that it would be easier to garden at Kaporilya or move the mission there than it would be to pipe water from the springs. Albrecht wrote a detailed rebuttal to the administrator of the territory in December 1931.12 In 1932 William Lange, a farmer and water diviner from Appila in South Australia, provided a report on a variety of underground water sources at sites around the mission and in the creeks crossing Missionary Plain.13 None, however, equaled Kaporilya’s capacity. Raising funds was a slow affair in those early years of the Great Depression. In the latter part of 1932, matters changed after a visit to the mission from artist Jessie Traill and her friend Una Teague, who returned from Melbourne with her sister Violet the following year. They became advocates and fund-

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raisers for the project, calling on artists to donate their work. Among the latter were Rex Batterbee, who also had visited Central Australia in 1932, and Hans Heysen. The Teagues soon raised more than two thousand pounds (see Petrick 2007). The Argus newspaper in Melbourne and the Advertiser in Adelaide published lists of donors. Moreover, with the sisters’ help, Albrecht sought a wide range of advice from various public sources and private firms in Broken Hill, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. Further appeals in Adelaide and Melbourne and among the Lutheran mission board raised an additional 1,140 pounds, which covered the cost of the project (Petrick 2007, 12–20). Work began on December 10, 1934. A former mission works manager, Arthur Latz, was recalled from Loxton in South Australia to supervise the project. During his periods of work at Hermannsburg, Latz usually kept a handwritten diary with remarks, albeit cursory, on each day’s work. Among his entries for early 1935 are the following: January 3rd. Thursday: Koporilya 5 ft. cutting, hot and sultry. January 7th Monday: Albert not well, so went out with 9 boys. Christof, Obert, Henoch, Jeremias, Eugen, Arthur, Ruben, Bob, Henry. Koporilya pipe trench. January 10th–12th Thursday–Saturday: Sent for gelignite and detonators . . . did a lot of blasting this week but got along quite a distance . . . loaded up camp to shift as not sufficient fuse left. Have nearly completed big cutting. January 14th Monday: Shifted camp to Goat Camp. Started on earth as not sufficient fuse left for blasting . . . told to make trench 16in. [inches] by Mr. Mattner. Stock boys to Gilbert Spring re. wild cattle. February 4th Monday: Koporilya pipe trench. 8 boys. Arthur returning from mustering. Started with 10, Kossam and Hugo worked today but left and went with camels to Alice.14

During the period that the trench for the fibrolite pipes was dug by Aboriginal workmen, Latz’s entries are also interspersed with the other business of the mission. “Boys” are sent to muster feral cattle, and mission livestock are moved from one mustering yard to another in accord with the water supply. Both camels and donkeys are used as transport. A truck is fixed. Crowbars are made. Visitors are hosted along the trench, and Latz himself goes to church. On Sunday, April 28, a party including Minister of the Interior Patterson and various federal senators arrived. Latz notes, “Blacks sang and lined up. Received tobacco and lollies, also a donkey bucking exhibi-

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tion. Cars left again at 4 o’clock. Missioner Albrecht going in to Alice with them re pipeline.” In the course of 1935, Latz as a Lutheran also accommodated the mission’s moral business: April 17th Wednesday: At trench. After tea, in per donkeys to station as blacks go to confession tomorrow. August 30th Friday: 3 boys—Henry, Percy, Gerhard of my team, also Cornelius, got dismissed by Missioner Albrecht as they didn’t attend a lecture the Missioner summoned the young fellows to attend re playing cards (gambling).

And there is list upon list of Aboriginal workers, the numbers growing as the work advanced: April 9th Tuesday: . . . Reinhold, Henoth, Jeremias, Hugo, Christof, Kossam, Bruce, Eugen, George, Otto, Arthur, Walter, Niki, Ruben, Teddy boy, Bob—Henry. April 17th Wednesday: Henry [water carter], Kristof, Kossam, Walter, Ruben, Arthur, Otto, Jeremiah, Hugo, Henoth, Eugen, Henry.

Joyce, whose father was not a constant worker in the trench—he was often in charge of the mission truck—nonetheless gave me her account: The mission mape, all the family, workin’, workin’ on that line. Kunye [sadly], all that mape try very hard for Mr. Latz. No-one paid them for that work. They did that work for Albrecht. My father tol’ me that. I was jus’ a little girl when we come to Hermannsburg. My father tol’ that story. He said that lotta people died and relhe mape terirreke [people were scared]. Mission give ’em food and also food for kid. Workin’, workin’ on that line. Just that way, make ’im, make ’im, feed the kid. They made that line all the way, comin’ from Kaporilya to Hermannsburg. Then they kill some kere [meat], feed that mape [of men]. All the Christian people work. Sometime, someone run away. That was hard work. “Where’s Reuben?” someone say. “We don’t know [said with humor in a wondering way]. Maybe, he gone with Lucas in the truck.” That poor mape. My father tol’ that story.

Reuben himself remarked in 1976, “We started when it was summer time and it was very hot. Our hands got hot and swollen . . . using the crowbars” (cited in Petrick 2007, 21). Albrecht notes the demands of the work in a de-

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scription written before the trench was completed: “At many places of the track it was real hard work they had to do, as the trench had to be dug down over 6 feet in lime stone rock. They used about 5 cases of Gelignite so far and nearly two cases of Blasting Powder. The Finke Crossing will have to be treated separately. We intend to take the pipe through underneath, and as the bank at this place is about 12 feet high, it will mean digging down at least 15 feet.”15 In a later account he describes the actual labor involved: “White labour and supervision involved 84 man-weeks; natives worked in all 898 man-weeks. Some of the men worked 40 weeks without a break and some of the trenches at the Station were being dug even at night. In all 2,092 lengths of pipe were laid down each measuring 11⬘. The total weight of the material amounted to 93 tons, 8cwt. 2qrs. Work on the pipeline started on 10th December 1934 and was completed on 30th September, 1935” (F. Albrecht 1961, 74), Arthur Latz records that the water began to run from the Kaporilya spring to Hermannsburg about quarter past six on the evening of Monday, September 30. It reached the station the next morning. His entry for Wednesday, October 3, 1935, is: “Holiday, no work for natives, had church. Opening of water for natives who received cake.” Western Arrernte cosmology and rite point to a keen sense of the ephemeral in human life; a sense entirely consistent with the Arrernte’s harsh environment. In the face of human transience, the ancestral meaning conferred on sites provided a sense of transcendence. Nonetheless, the 1920s and its aftermath brought something more—the cumulative impact of invasion and settlement by a more powerful order. Integral to this impact was a confronting engagement with Western technology in the form of rations, the railway, and the pipeline (see figure 6). This technology had the power to confer life and death. It could rearrange space and time and peoples’ locations. It could also rearrange the natural environment, including the distribution of its water sources. Notwithstanding drought and famine in the past, these were changes of quite another magnitude, in a “dangerous time,” as Conrad Raberaba called it (cited in Hardy 1992, 144). The Kaporilya pipeline brought fibrolite pipes on trucks to feed a large-scale engineering project that established year-round water (see Auricht cited in Petrick 2007, 22–23). It also established collective labor and consolidated mission life. The building of the pipeline coincided with another dimension of Arrernte modernity, the demise of the radical isolation that had been the mission’s lot since its inception. The railway that brought medical help also brought tourism, publicity, and the possibility of commerce. Without the personal engagements that the railway allowed and the improved ability to travel back and forth, it is doubtful that Friedrich Al-

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Figure 6. Road train with pipe fittings at Hermannsburg, 1935. Arthur Latz collection, Strehlow Research Centre, Northern Territory Museum, Alice Springs.

brecht could have realized his plan. From being German outsiders pushed to the periphery, the missionaries also commenced the process of bearing on public opinion and politics with regard to indigenous Central Australia.

The Ritual Politics of Kaporilya Kaporilya presents the prospect of a site desacralized, and yet it was not the first. The array of forces involved in settlement had already undermined much indigenous rite and led Western Arrernte and others to see their tywerrenge through the lens of Western commodity as well as sacred object. As T. G. H. Strehlow underlines, sheer depopulation had a tremendous impact on Arrernte ritual life (1971, xxxv; 1977). The reciprocal staging of performances and site-based portfolios of song maintained by ritual leaders (ingkarte) were undone by the shrinking possibilities for free travel and ritual exchange across the region. There was more than one way in which, as Albrecht had put it, “cattle and natives don’t go together.” Philip Jones (1992) has traced a genealogy of the Arrernte tywerrenge as European collectible, a history that gathered pace with Carl Strehlow’s stern religion and the museum collecting of the 1894 Horn Expedition. Strehlow forbade rainmaking and other major ceremonies around the mission. In his fight against the “cult of the tjurunga,”16 Strehlow also took some from his

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converts and sold them to museums in Germany (Jones 1992, 128). In the course of the Horn Expedition, Edward Stirling and Charles Winnecke were even more direct.17 Being led to one sacred cave, Jones relates, they substituted “steel axes and knives” in recompense for fifteen stone and about thirty wooden tywerrenge (Jones 1992, 118). Later, Baldwin Spencer rued this and other invasions: “It is regrettable that the true nature of the objects thus hidden away in a cave was not known at that time. We learned, later on that the loss of these Churinga was very severely felt and mourned over by the natives, who remained in camp for two weeks, smearing their bodies over with pipeclay. . . . On each occasion also the natives killed the member of the tribe who had shown the spot to the white men” (Spencer cited in Jones 1992, 118). Still, the impact of white power would not be denied. In 1932, T. G. H. Strehlow’s cameleer remarked that “the men everywhere wanted to sell their tjurunga to the whites, and settle down like white men: the only reason for their walkabout was their duty to protect the sacred caves. Now they would sell not newly manufactured tjurunga but the really old treasure . . . so that they could change their old ways of living” (cited in Jones 1992, 124). At Hermannsburg by the 1920s, and subject to the missionaries’ determination to end the tjurunga cult, a similar response occurred. Looking back some sixty years, Seth Pareroultja remarked, “Well, there was not much to eat, that’s why people sell all these things [tjurunga] to the store, so old man Albrecht can send them away or sell them to some tourist people coming in. . . . They were happy to sell it . . . make money for medicine for sick people” (cited in Henson 1992, 51).18 In 1928, at the height of the drought, tywerrenge housed in a cave called Manangananga were produced in public and thereby desacralized. Some accounts of this event propose that the scurvy at Hermannsburg was seen by other nonmission Aborigines as a sign that the place was sung or hexed, perhaps by mission practice and Western Arrernte collusion (see, e.g., Hardy 1992, 143; Jones 1992, 126). This act of desecration was not the cause of the scurvy, though. It followed in the scurvy’s wake and after consultations between Albrecht and some senior custodians. Among them was Titus Renkaraka, who worked as an evangelist for Albrecht and whose descendants are still Ntaria custodians (see Henson 1992, 53; F. Albrecht 1977, 51). From a Christian point of view, the act may have been a “cleansing” of the community. Significantly, the cave held sacred objects for the proximate Ntaria rathepe (twins) site. As people came into the mission, most children born there had rathepe as their conception story and site. Desecration of the site thereby had an unusually broad significance for Aboriginal people at Hermannsburg. Albrecht described the event some years later:

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When we had been at Hermannsburg for some time, people told me of a sacred cave, about 2 miles away from the station, in the hills. I was told that at no time had a woman seen the place, neither a child. Thinking about it for some time, I spoke about it to some elderly Christians suggesting that we as a Christian congregation should do away with it, and as a witness should one Sunday afternoon invite the whole community to come and spend with us a time of song and prayer. For the time being they had no reply but then several arrived saying they were prepared to go out there but were afraid of the pagans in the district who could raid their camp at night and kill them. The next step was to contact as many as we could from outside, inviting them to come out with us. From them we gained the impression that there was little resistance. One Sunday afternoon several hundred men, women and children went out to Manangananga. It was a treat to listen to the speeches of old Moses, August, Abel and others – in praise of God. (F. Albrecht 1976; also cited in Jones 1992,135)

Jones reports that by 1955 the cave was resacralized and certainly during my time at Ntaria, it would not have been appropriate even to ask to see either individual tywerrenge or such a cave. Over two decades and more, land rights had helped revalue objects and sites, although in altered ways. Friedrich Albrecht was eager for opportunities to develop craftwork for commercial purposes at Hermannsburg (Hardy 1992, 144). The adaptation of wood artifacts and tanned skins was a part of this effort, as was the beginning of Albert Namatjira’s career and the Hermannsburg watercolor school. Yet even in the 1930s and in the course of the pipeline project, as Seth Pareroultja attests, tywerrenge were traded. In a handwritten letter from Mount Eliza, Victoria, Una Teague wrote to Albrecht in 1933, “Enclosed please find cheque for Tjurungas which I am very glad to have.” In April 1934, Commissioner A. S. Kenyon of the Victorian State Rivers and Water Supply, who provided technical advice to Albrecht, wrote of one, Mahoney, “delighted with the churingas. I fancy he has spent his year’s allowance already and therefore will not be able to send you your cheque until the end of June.” Concerning himself, Kenyon wrote, “The knives and bones arrived quite safely. I was pleased to learn there would be no charge, so I enclosed 10/- for the Mission Funds.”19 In September 1934, E. J. Horwood, who had surveyed the pipeline route for Albrecht, wrote concerning initiatives he had taken for the sale of Hermannsburg artifacts: “The mulga slabs arrived while I was away, but on Friday I opened them up and took them over to the factory. My foreman, a

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Figure 7. Albert Namatjira’s Kaporilya Boomerang. Image © Legend Press, Sydney, reprinted by permission.

highly skilled worker in wood was very surprised at the workmanship, and finish. . . . Well done, Albert!” Almost certainly these were pieces of mulga shaped like tywerrenge and decorated with pyrographic designs.20 This work was pioneered by Albert Namatjira and, in the first instance, involved traditional designs later to be superseded by European ones drawn “free-hand . . . of local animals, palms” and the like (see figure 7). Albrecht remarked in 1934 that these latter items “appealed and sold well,” not least it seems due to Horword’s distribution (see also Jones 1992, 128). In these ways and over time, the Lutheran mission not only acted to expunge indigenous rite but also sought to bring a new hierarchical order to competing social-moral worlds, or the “two laws,” as Arrernte call them. In the course of fieldwork, a Lutheran pastor remarked to me that the drought and Kaporilya were events in which “our God proved greater than theirs.” This was an acknowledgement of the technological power that had undermined hunter-gatherer life in order to promptly find itself called upon to sustain its victims. The hierarchical relation that the mission proposed was one in which the Christian God would encompass indigenous culture.21 This view is stated clearly in the passage from the Gospels read each year at the Kaporilya site. Taken from the Gospel according to John, chapter 4, it relates a meeting between Jesus and a Samarian woman at Jacob’s well. Jesus has asked the gentile Samarian for water. She replies, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? For the Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is

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that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water. The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; from whence then has thou that living water? Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children and his cattle? Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:1–14, emphasis mine)

From a missionary point of view, the passage is exceptionally apt. The bearer of new knowledge addresses another deemed a pariah. He brings a superior law to that of her fathers and also a healing balm, “springing up into everlasting life.” Water, with its life-giving powers, is the homology that connects these different laws. However, water as symbol here accommodates different meanings: water as physical life’s necessity, and the “living water” of Christian moral order. It also masks what lay behind the rain cloud stories of Kaporilya, a water cult that spoke of ancestral potency, and its own form of masculine power. The Bible passage suggests exchange of the type that the Western Arrernte evoked in their accounts of the missionaries’ arrival. However, this exchange is soon subverted by the fact that the “living water” is presented as incomparably the superior gift. In this parable of the pipeline, drought, and cultural difference, Christian law encompasses the Arrernte.22 This is the message that missionaries intended the Kaporilya ground design to bear, that ultimately the cross transcends the tywerrenge.

Kaporilya and History In Australia, the variety of Aboriginal engagements with settlers is striking. Different regional cultures, natural environments, different periodicities, colonial interests, and variable state ability to address the quotidian of daily life have produced many histories. Therefore I propose to comment on Kaporilya by referencing two other histories, each recorded by an anthropologist. Together they help contextualize Western Arrernte experience. Keen’s (1994) discussion of Yolngu religious life, including Christian practice, emphasizes the use of ambiguity and variation in the control of knowledge. Not only does such an emphasis seem appropriate for his detailed account of clan and regional ritual relations, but in addition, Keen maintains that rendering language “as an open project” provides an appropriate model for social life as such. Both Yolngu ritual and social life are cap-

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tured best by treating them as an ongoing process of “creation, negotiation and imposition of meaning” (Keen 1994, 289). In this treatment, Keen is influenced by Bourdieu (1977) and his stress on the strategies and tempos in social life that inform the phenomenon of structure. Keen treats the advent of a Methodist mission, settlement life, and Christianity as a further variation in Yolngu ways. He prefers this approach to that employed by Jean and John Comaroff in their accounts of Christian missions in Botswana (1991, 1997). The Comaroffs underline the effects of differential power in shaping meaning—an analysis pursued in terms of ideology and hegemony— where Keen dwells on varieties of interaction and the manner in which Yolngu engage and disengage from the European-Christian order. In sum, Keen treats the variations wrought by settlement on the same scale as variations within Yolngu indigenous life. Nonetheless, he notes a trend toward more-universal symbols, both in the 1970s resurgence of Gunapipi and in Christian practice. As knowledge of the world grows, so does the reach of symbol and rite, a point made by Robin Horton (1971, 1975) with reference to Christian and Islamic conversion in Africa. In any colonial situation, the relative power of the forces involved is a matter of fact as much as theory. Keen notes this carefully. He remarks that the “vigorous, if transforming, domain” maintained by Yolngu has been premised on “the failure of the pastoral industry to establish itself in the north . . . , on a long association with a relatively non-interventionist mission and more recently the self-determination policies of the Whitlam Government and subsequent administrations” (Keen 1994, 302). Elsewhere he is even more direct, noting that the Yolngu were protected from the “gross destruction of their population and way of life” by the region’s “unsuitability” for pastoralism and, later, their ability through land rights to regulate mining (Keen 1994, 23). Predictably, a history written in the midst of pastoralism’s impact provides a different view. Cowlishaw’s (1999) account of the Rembarrnga on the southern border of Arnhem land and the effects on them of changing government policy is also, in significant part, about their engagements with pastoralism—both as colonial and “self-determining” subjects. She takes “palimpsest” and “erasure” as her explanatory concepts in preference to notions of hybridity or other concepts that might suggest an equally matched engagement. Cowlishaw writes, A palimpsest is the place where a text has been overwritten or erased to make way for another text. Thus we can imagine Rembarrnga country as a place where the existing text, its images and meanings were covered

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over with other texts, images and meanings. The new design, in this case, was not entirely original but was a copy of what had been created elsewhere, an attempt to replicate forms already in existence and entrenched in those who came and who responded to local conditions only when forced to. The original remains, hidden by new patterns, but still there, and able to re-emerge, perhaps in altered form as the foreign surface fails to congeal or is damaged by the still living original . . . beneath. (Cowlishaw 1999, 14–15)

This fairly optimistic account of continuity is, however, qualified by a subsequent remark: “Those being overwritten find their images and texts, their relationships with their place, begin to merge with the imported ones and can no longer be expressed unchanged” (Cowlishaw 1999, 15). In a word, they experience hegemony. It is the latter account that more nearly captures Western Arrernte experience, and yet there is much in this statement that needs to be teased out if it is to relate to Kaporilya. With her semiotic analogy, Cowlishaw avoids the materiality of power and the structural violence wrought on indigenous Australians. The Arrernte were not merely “written over” but reorganized as social beings. In a very direct material way, the nature of their world was changed by pastoralism and its unintended effects. As T. G. H. Strehlow makes clear in statements based on his 1930s research, the very conditions of living challenged the old ritual life and might have challenged Christianity too but for the lhentere’s technology. The Arrernte became predominantly a sedentary people, adopted new forms of transcendentalism, and sought to master new forms of ritual that might access lhentere power. Yet as Chakrabarty (2000) notes, capital’s route does not require the assimilation of all social life—and especially not in marginal regions such as Central Australia. The very lack of interest in the Arrernte as labor that Friedrich Albrecht decried and the limited disciplining powers of the mission that could not stop intermittent travel sustained identities related to place that now included Hermannsburg station. Indeed, pastoral work and evangelism north and south of the mission brought new inscriptions on an Arrernte landscape (see also chapter 8). Moreover, imagining a way to be in this new environment would entail a search for homologies, not just meanings “shaken together,” as Cowlishaw suggests. The phenomenon of water and its importance in Central Australia allowed its source at Kaporilya to become a symbol mediating different and conflicting worlds. As it seemed to erase a sacred site, Christianity itself became a water cult. As the persona of hunter-gatherers was dismembered by pastoralism, settlement,

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drought, and Christian ideology, a new indigenous subject was already being imagined and celebrated at Kaporilya Days. And what the Arrernte see in Kaporilya—their remembering of its events—is the building of a different world through the laying of track and place: all those constructions and the paths between them that embodied a different world.

Conclusion Kaporilya as mission site is still a “big place” for the Arrernte. Working among the Western Arrernte in 1929, Géza Róheim described another big place also located at the base of the Krichauff Range and on the edge of Missionary Plain. The place he referred to is Ltalaltuma, a major native cat (tyelpe) site. Róheim wrote, When we were staying in Central Australia it was towards the end of a drought period of many years. The natives at the mission were dying of beri-beri,23 and the natives out in the bush were dying of starvation. The carcasses of Mission cattle and horses were lying about the place in every possible phase of disintegration. Water was precious, springs were few and far between. In the beginning I did not quite understand what they meant when talking of a certain place at which the mythical ancestors had arrived. They said, “That is my place! A big place!” (Tmara knarra.) What is a big place? Presumably one in which there are many people—as we say “a big city.” But lo! We arrive at Ltalaltuma, a very big place, a kind of mythological capital; and not a soul is visible. . . . A big place is a place that contains water where a number of people can gather if the season is favourable. (Róheim 1945, 246)

A big place is also a place where people gather for rite, a place that is powerful. Kaporilya sustains that property today. As a consequence of the Arrernte’s and their region’s impact on the Lutherans, the latter were led to emplace their significance and celebrate it in rite. Therefore the site carries multiple forms of value. As a place, it remains a mnemonic of male, traditional power remembered even as it is transgressed. It also bears the inscription of the Finke River Mission and an Arrernte sense of achievement. In the mid-1990s, Kaporilya’s senior custodian, Norman Ratara, died. His links with the mission were both pragmatic and personal. He was himself a cattleman and strong supporter of the outstation movement both as a reinterpretation of sedentary life and as a route for Arrernte Lutherans to avoid the new secular governance. In addition, Gary Stoll and Glen Auricht,

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prominent lay Lutherans at Hermannsburg and both fluent Arrernte speakers, were close associates. The position of the Ratara and Renkaraka families as the sole senior custodians not only for Kaporilya but also for Ntaria had been contested over many years by Gus Ntjalka Williams, the Western Arrernte chair of the Ntaria council (see also chapter 7). In a symbolic act, the council chair designed a personal letterhead consisting of Kaporilya’s two rain clouds (Tnamina and Kantjira). When Norman Ratara died, he was buried at Kaporilya as a further statement of his group’s patrilineal claim. This act also acknowledged Kaporilya as a significant Lutheran site. Christianity had become a part of a Western Arrernte vernacular.

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The Meaning of Pepe

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arrived at Ntaria in 1989, in the year that the Lutheran school closed. That event and others I witnessed in the early years of my research provided me with a sense of Arrernte Christian culture, its historical context, and its salience today. As one young woman put it, “Everybody die and baptize in church.” The beginning and the end of life, if not the interim, are marked by Christian ritual. Moreover, a Lutheran funeral has become the route for a person’s being to return to the country where he or she has lived, often an outstation site (Kenny 2004).1 This view melds both Lutheran and secular ideas to contemporary notions of country. At the same time, the liturgical round and moral censures of the church have little purchase on the young, who see Lutheranism through the lens of a history in which Kaporilya has a central place. Lutheranism and the ambivalences that inform the past are for them historical identity more than compelling rite (see also Brock 1993). This evolving identity of the Arrernte, and Lutheranism, brings fractious argument between the elders and the young. Nonetheless, debate sustains links with the past in the face of further change. To address Ntaria’s Lutheran vernacular—how it has been and how it is remembered—also brings reflections on views of conversion. One such view suggests that embracing a world religion such as Christianity involves a passage away from the local and toward universalism. World religions are juxtaposed with autochthonous religious roots. This position is characteristic of Horton’s intellectualism and other approaches that underline the rationalism of modernities (Horton 1971, 1975; see also Hefner 1993). Another stance, popular in Australian ethnography, defines conversion as surface change and continuity as underlying structure. The fact that in most cases missions have given way to secular orders is taken to show that they had little impact in remote Australia. In effect, conversion is rejected 77

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as an indigenous experience.2 This leaves anthropologists in the awkward position of brashly recording continuity in the face of rapid and extensive change. And yet neither do accounts of an inexorable shift toward a world religion capture Western Arrernte experience. Failure to grasp that many Western Arrernte did become Lutherans leads to simplistic accounts of the role of missionaries in their history. Christian conversion was a central part of the larger ontological shift in which the Arrernte have been involved. Yet this was not a simple transition. Far from realizing a steady progress toward universalism, the nature of Christianity at Hermannsburg imposed a new and specific localism on the Western Arrernte. My argument is that a domestic moral economy at Hermannsburg and the Arrernte’s own social imaginary engendered a specific ritual practice. The Western Arrernte called this “God’s law,” or pepe, a term produced by an Arrernte rendering of the English word paper. This law entailed a strong sense of ritual community located at a particular place. It involved a highly personalized and centralized form of authority. And notwithstanding its paternalism, this order became the taken-for-granted world for many Western Arrernte. The Finke River Mission (FRM) at Hermannsburg was overturned by the Western Arrernte’s growing rights in citizenship and their inclusion in market society, albeit as marginalized participants. Changes dating from the 1950s that included more social services, equal wages, land rights, and secular self-government soon undid the mission. Still, change was met with prevarication by the senior generation who trusted their familiar brokers. Therefore some Western Arrernte and missionaries sought to use the homelands movement, and the federal funding that it brought, to circumvent secular governance at Ntaria. The aim was to decentralize the mission through building outstations on country, establishing a resource center to service them, and devising a new school system to service outstation families. Though government financed, the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC) was managed by Glen Auricht, previously a lay worker at the mission. This interim order was sustained from 1983, when the FRM withdrew as administrator of the settlement, until 1989, when the Lutheran school closed due to insufficient funds and TORC opted for a federally funded Community Development Employment Project (CDEP). It was these changes, rather than mission conversion, that brought the incorporation of Western Arrernte into modern market society and the bureaucratic state. Grasping the meaning of pepe, the mission’s particular local order, is crucial to grasping the double transition through which Western Arrernte have passed—from hunter-gatherer to sedentary life and from mission to

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modernity. It also helps explain why the more recent change has been a testing and violent one involving many more dimensions than simply the receipt of civil rights. The following discussion focuses on pepe and its Arrernte meanings. I begin with two contemporary vignettes that convey pepe’s significance to women in the last of the mission generations. One concerns the closure of the Lutheran school and the other a confrontation between my friend Joyce Robinya Malbunka and various service staff, including lay Lutherans. Then I turn to the past to consider pepe’s colonial context and its remembered iconicity; a Western Arrernte social imaginary of the Christian order. In my conclusion I offer a summation of Western Arrernte conversion and its relation to postmission life.

Two Ntaria Stories, 1989–90 Late in 1989, there was a church service at Ntaria to mark the closure of the Lutheran school, leaving only a Northern Territory government school. A couple of Lutheran teachers had decided to transfer into the secular system, but the closure marked a sad day for many Western Arrernte. The school had functioned in an intimate way. Local groups, or “families,” were assigned a teacher, and teachers devoted themselves to a family. Even people in or close to Ntaria who identified as Lutherans had their children taught in a small kin group by a particular teacher. Those living in proximity to Ntaria were visited daily. For those living on distant land, teachers took two days a week to travel to and from their assigned outstation. On the other three days, they delivered primary education and religious instruction. Initially, and at some sites until the late 1980s, teachers camped out with their host family and taught in the shade of a tree or corrugated iron shed. In time, four outstation schools were built in places that could service regional family clusters. One-room apartments were attached to the schools for the itinerant teachers. This system had evolved out of ferment in the 1960s and 1970s when the Lutherans experimented with elected councils. They came to believe that these local groups, based on country, were the best medium for Arrernte to engage a new, postmission order (see chapter 7). Many Western Arrernte, tasting for the first time autonomy on country, seemed to agree. They hoped that the changes would preserve both Arrernte and God’s law. By 1989, things had moved along. Gus Williams, chair of Ntaria’s secular council, had raised education as an issue. Though the government school in time would have its own outstation teachers, in the 1980s and early 1990s,

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Williams was critical of outstation education. Among other things, he remarked that children were taught only three days a week. His comments came in conjunction with a growing government view that separate Lutheran and state schools involved duplication. Many outstation Arrernte Lutherans saw these views as an attack on their way of life. The matter fed into growing factionalism at Ntaria.3 Nonetheless, starved of resources from both government and its own church, the Lutheran school was forced to close. The Lutherans vacated their government-built school administrative block, which was handed back to the government school. Pastor Paul Albrecht, son of Friedrich Albrecht, delivered the sermon for the service that closed the school. Albrecht had spent his childhood at Hermannsburg and spoke fluent Western Arrernte. Until his retirement in the 1990s, he had remained in Alice Springs as a Bible translator and field superintendent of the Finke River Mission. He was vocal in his opposition to the Central Land Council (CLC) and to the transition from mission to secular government for the Hermannsburg Arrernte. The church service followed a set liturgical form presided over by a Western Arrernte pastor. At its end, this pastor and a number of other Western Arrernte notaries made brief statements to the congregation. The centerpiece of the service, though, was Albrecht’s sermon. Two things about this sermon were significant. The first was the Bible reading for the sermon taken from Genesis 28:10–22. The passage was the same one read by Hermann Kempe when the first Bethlehem church was dedicated at Hermannsburg in 1880 (see Lohe 1977, 15–16).4 The passage refers to Jacob naming Bethel, a place of stones and earth where God spoke to Jacob in a dream. God promised Jacob and the “families of the earth” that Bethel would be their place forever. Among the verses in the passage are the following two. They begin with God speaking: “And, behold I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken of. . . . And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew not.” Women had cited Jacob’s dream to me before. They proposed that Arrernte country had always been God’s place and that the missionaries were simply messengers. The sermon was significant in a second way that concerns Albrecht’s demeanor when he was preaching in Western Arrernte language. He assumed the style of Western Arrernte elders. His gaze was deflected, his body positioned at an angle to the audience, voice modulated as for storytelling, rising and falling for emphasis and supported by deft but economical gestures. Like those older men, he encompassed his audience with his talk-

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ing and thereby projected authority in an oblique way. Albrecht’s message was that all Christians, indigenous and nonindigenous, are one under God wherever they are.5 I assumed that his address was comforting, that his encompassing style was a “looking after” expected of Arrernte elders. I was impressed by Albrecht’s cultural fluency. Therefore, I was surprised when I heard negative comments on the sermon. Women said that Albrecht was wrong to propose that God’s law was everywhere. God had given his country to a particular people and they were the Western Arrernte. They had kept God’s law and taught it to others who did not know it before. Interestingly, these kwertengerle, or evangelists, called themselves by the same term used for “apostles” in Bible translation. In these Arrernte Christians’ eyes, the mission had retrieved this law for the Western Arrernte, and the Arrernte had realized it as pepe. Now the missionaries were leaving with no reciprocation for their hard work. Some of the women criticized one of the Arrernte pastors who often berated the congregation for not keeping God’s law. He argued that this was why the missionaries left. These women observed that the fault was not with their children but rather with the missionaries who no longer looked after relhe (the Arrernte people). I was referred again to Jacob’s dream and the words of God, “I will not leave.” The women objected to the church’s apparent capitulation to a government personified by a Western Arrernte man who seemed unsympathetic to the social order that these Arrernte maintained. Finally, pepe for them was not merely ritual practice but also a materially resourced social order. Notwithstanding their new and empowering citizen’s rights, these women feared a future they could only imagine in local terms. And in those terms they could not see “a way” that would hold their world in place. Joyce, my language teacher, was among these fearful Arrernte women. She was also a grandmother many times over. Like other grandmothers in their fifties and sixties, she had responsibility for numerous small children. The widow of an Arrernte pastor with whom she had evangelized, Joyce often camped with six or eight small kids whom she sought to feed and educate. She preferred to do so on the outstation that had been her husband’s and was headed now by one of her sons. There she had some control of the kids and autonomy from other groups. Sitting on country was “quiet” and removed from Ntaria’s “noise” (see figure 8). She fed the children and welcomed the Lutheran teacher who came each day for the older ones. Outside school hours, she took the kids “walkin’ round,” sometimes cleaned the camp, and had frequent visitors. These days were given a Lutheran inflection by “table grace” sung before breakfast. A devotional that called for sing-

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Figure 8. Joyce Robinya Malbunka with Aaron, Roger, and Faith, 1999. Photograph by author.

ing and prayer was held later in the morning. Singing in the evening could also become devotional. Joyce knew all the hymns, and many of her prayers were extemporary, rounded out by the Lord’s Prayer or a creed. Integral to these days and nights was her practice as a curer, “throwing away badness” as the Arrernte term proposes, using massage and prayer. The same phrase, kurne iweme, is used in the liturgy for the act of forgiving sin—healing biomoral malaise in the biblical way. All these events were a part of life, less ordered when we camped in Ntaria but nonetheless ever a part of the daily round. Over time it was clear to me that this ritual integration of life was also an aesthetic preference for Joyce. Her ritual practice gave contour to the days and held them on a discernible path (see also Austin-Broos 1996b). She felt she was imparting a way, a tyaye, or law, for the children. She often remarked that it was her task to “straighten ’em out” before she became old and died. She also prayed and cured in larger gatherings and attended pepe on Sundays. Finally, from time to time she would wake with a dream that directed us to visit a relative or go to a place where she related to me a past event of significance. This was following God’s will, altyerreke antyapme, spoken to her in dreams—in the way of her forebears and Jacob. These dreams presented an image of a local place with a voice or a messenger from God, a prophet,

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or an angel. Thus I first saw Haasts Bluff, where she and her husband had evangelized, and visited a camp in Alice Springs to find her eldest son with her younger brother, who had broken his leg in an accident. Yet life was not the Lutheran pastorale that this bare description might suggest. Joyce often cared for up to eight kids. She also cared for her deceased husband’s next elder brother and his wife, who were ailing. Her income was a widow’s pension, and she relied on contributions from her children to feed and care for her charges. These donations came sometimes and sometimes not. Times were hard, and most of her children with children were “runnin’ round” and drinking to greater or lesser excess. Alcohol and petrol for Toyotas consumed much of their welfare checks. Sometimes Joyce proposed that they were selfish and observed that they had gone the “wrong way (tyaye kurne).” She reminded them that if they didn’t remember God, he would not remember them. Yet her words seemed most like incantations. Her children did not share her view that prayer was a causal force in the world and bridled when she chided them. When drunk once, a younger son remarked that she was just an old “bush black” who didn’t know anything. He interpreted her adherence to pepe as a traditional way that was now outdated. She was wounded by these remarks, and others stressed that he had not spoken as himself but only in drunkenness. In these arguments between generations, both welfare benefits and federally funded outstation houses made the mission regime seem tawdry in retrospect—a poor and feeble organization that clearly had exploited the relhe involved. This view demeaned Joyce’s generation—as though they had been fools to submit. It also produced confusion in her children. Had their parents been dupes or ruthlessly exploited? Hunger in this local group was a perennial event. Babies were at risk because, in the weekly round, they could fall between carers. Once we had been away in Alice Springs conferring at the CLC on land claim business. On returning to Ntaria, we found that two infants normally cared for by Joyce had been reassigned due to malnutrition. One was a daughter’s daughter and the other the daughter of a young son married to his second cousin. The former had been assigned to a sister-in-law of the relevant daughter, the latter to a patrifilial relative of the son. The sister-in-law was burly and loud. She smoked and drank and was ostensibly non-Christian. She and her brother were part of a large group from the Western Macdonnells that Joyce with her Pertame connections saw almost as strangers. This situation was humiliating to Joyce, for, while the son’s baby had been sent to Alice Springs, the little girl remained at Ntaria. Competition between in-laws saw the little girl primped for church and paraded past her erstwhile carers.

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Joyce and her children did not hold “the Welfare” responsible but rather an Ntaria nurse. Northern Territory welfare officers had visited the babies before, and the nurse had recalled them in Joyce’s absence. The nurse had a long association with the Western Arrernte and had worked for the mission. She was herself a Lutheran. Nonetheless, her lhentere (white person’s) judgment was not the judgment of Joyce and her children. They regarded her acts as betrayal. By removing the babies in the grandmother’s absence on legitimate business, the nurse had cast unjustified aspersions on Joyce. Referring to the nurse, Joyce remarked that her act was “a cruel thing for Christian people [to do].” Her statement was backed by a son, who said, “We are not horse or bullock or dog. They can’t push us anywhere they want like animals.” It was altogether a painful affair. The reassignment was done on a Friday. After church on Sunday, Joyce walked up the main Ntaria road remonstrating with the nurse. Resolute, the nurse walked on, her body communicating nonnegotiability. Joyce returned to the Western Arrernte onlookers and exchanged abuse with her cousin, the mother’s mother of her son’s child. Each one pronounced sons of the other “murderers,” referring to past feuds between groups. The moment was a partly ritualized laying-off of responsibility on one another. For this reason, the exchanges were in English so that everyone would understand. Next day Joyce determined to visit the secular authorities, the male head of Ntaria’s clinic and the staff at TORC. In her unsuccessful appeals to both secular authorities, her main observation was that she held pepe for these children and always looked after them. In other words, according to God’s law, she had been a good carer. She was also saying by implication that the events that threatened the children were not ones that she could address other than through prayer. She could not command sons who were men, even less a son-in-law. The preeminence of husbands over wives was assumed. The responses were not as Joyce had hoped. The clinic head was incredulous, remarking that infants needed more than the prayer of an old (and possibly deluded) Arrernte woman. He queried whether or not Joyce had noticed that the children were thin. She replied that lots of kids are “skinny one.” Like the nurse, the TORC staff responded in a stern way. Notwithstanding Joyce’s appeals, they focused on the children. In the end, she turned to the Ntaria council chair whom she opposed politically. Gus Williams called together the infants’ fathers and berated them for allowing this humiliation of a mother and mother-in-law. It was their acts, he proposed, that had caused a lhentere intervention in relhe affairs. He arranged in the future for the Ntaria school principal to hold money from the parents

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for the children’s food. He spoke with “Welfare” on a conference call, and before too long the babies were returned. Like the women who witnessed the closure of the mission school, Joyce was contending with fraying authority relations. The women of her generation were often bereft of same-generation males due to the effects of diabetes, substance abuse, and premature death. Influenced both by Arrernte and Lutheran culture, they were also disinclined themselves to speak with authority in public. In addition, Joyce’s social drama reflected an institutional impasse caused by a transition from colonial paternalism to the modern individualism of market society and state. The mission regime provided rations for service. In addition, it provisioned the old, the infirm, and nursing mothers and children. Procedures of this type had been in place for almost a century at Ntaria. In the milieu I entered at the end of the 1980s, there was no established means for grandmothers to ensure that they were properly resourced for the responsibilities they bore. Both Arrernte culture and contemporary postcolonial discourse combined to emphasize the rights of youth and young adults to autonomy. Notwithstanding victories for indigenous politics, the impact on elderly carers was disastrous. This context invested Joyce’s situation with a double dilemma. Secular service staff were unable to address the Christian social imaginary of an elderly Arrernte woman. Just as the invaders were unable to “hear” Western Arrernte place-names, these service workers could not grasp Joyce’s postinvasion sense of ritual efficacy—or the kin and gender constraints of her position. At the same time, their alternative institutions could only partly alleviate her concrete circumstance, which lay at the interface of the private and public as defined by the modern state. Joyce’s drama, which came some time after the Lutheran school closed, exemplified the types of issues that concerned the women. Pepe was a familiar milieu, and its way was “straight.”

Pepe as God’s Law The historical features of Central Australian colonialism disciplined the Western Arrernte in numerous ways. Repeated epidemic and drought made worse by pastoralism pushed people away from a hunting-and-gathering life.6 Moreover, the technology of whites not only controlled access to water and pastoral herds but also produced constant sustenance, or so it seemed, within settlements. The latter was a compelling contrast with hunter-gatherer life. At the mission, certain norms were expected, and they became known as tyaye rratye, literally, the path or way (n.) that is

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straight, right, correct (adj.); the right way at Hermannsburg. Tyaye rratye meant learning Bible stories, the liturgy, and the songs and being baptized and, later, confirmed. For the young, this knowledge was acquired through schooling. Where adults were concerned, the right way also involved service or work for rations at the mission or farther afield among the mission’s livestock. Mainly men, occasionally with their wives, worked on other stations in the region. In addition, tyaye rratye involved conforming to the ritual-moral order of Lutheran Christian community—the Lutheran view of marriage, individual sin and confession, and withdrawal from the “tjurunga cult.” Finally, this way involved abstinence from practices associated with cattle and construction camps: gambling, loose sex, and excessive drinking and swearing. The missionaries saw their task as twofold: to convert the Arrernte from a “heathen” religion and to set them on a path within European society that would keep them from the corruption of a fringe-dwelling life. Being clad with hair combed and as clean as possible in a desert environment signified distance from these inferior regimes. That the Western Arrernte in Central Australia described this institutional complex as pepe gave new meaning to Christians as “people of the book.” The centrality of the printed word on paper in the form of the Bible made this particular law different from other “whitefella” law. Western Arrernte deployed the term pepe in a fashion that was similar to the term tywerrenge used for the sacred boards or stones that carry ritual designs (T. Strehlow 1947, 85–86). Just as the latter refers not simply to the boards and stones but to all the paraphernalia and practices involved in Western Arrernte rite, so pepe refers to the Bible but also to the Lutheran liturgy generally—to the various texts, buildings, calls to prayer, and services that are part of Lutheran practice. This similar naming of different laws is indicative of the way in which the Arrernte became Christian by rendering Christianity in an Arrernte way (see Austin-Broos 1997). It also gives sense to the common assertion among older people that Western Arrernte follow two laws, Arrernte law and God’s law. The latter was the order that crystallized at Hermannsburg. Its rites and songs were specific ones that constituted the Christians’ own route to resources. “Out bush” and offstage in camps around the mission, Arrernte law still ordered the social life and lifecycle rituals of many people. However, this institutional complex now jostled with the Hermannsburg law. This law was reflected in a remark made in 1891 by Tjita, father of the notable evangelist Moses Tjalkabota: “Boy, if you continue here [at Hermannsburg], your head will implode and you will dry up” (P. Albrecht 2005, 382). There was now so much to learn. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century, and bracketed by the

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events of Manangananga cave, pepe was inscribed at a particular location— made socially secure at a specific place. Moreover, as the Western Arrernte became increasingly sedentary, pepe also extended its reach. This extension had begun with early indigenous initiatives in evangelism that occurred in the period between late 1922 and 1926 when Hermannsburg lacked a European pastor. Carl Strehlow had departed and died in tragic circumstances.7 Friedrich Albrecht was yet to arrive. In 1923 Moses Tjalkabota and others, including Ntjalka and Phillipus, went to Alice Springs and then to Deep Well station. Shortly after, Tjalkabota traveled south to Henbury. Following Albrecht’s arrival, this evangelism continued to the northwest; to Papunya, the Ehrenberg Range, and ultimately to Mount Leibig in the early 1930s. Among others, Titus Renkaraka was prominent in these initiatives. God’s law as an orthodoxy grew while tywerrenge practice was in retreat. And as the news of pepe spread, the Hermannsburg mission became a “bigger” place. At the same time, Western Arrernte Christians became “the Christian people” of a Lutheran mission settlement. This process involved the Arrernte’s capacity to assimilate the mission to their own social imaginary. However, it also entailed a “plausibility structure,” to use Berger’s term (see Berger 1990); a social and material condition that would shape the Hermannsburg mission as a local, domestic moral economy coordinating daily experience.

Pepe as a Local Order In the first half of the twentieth century, neither pastoralism nor mining flourished in Central Australia. The early promise of settlement in the region waned as periodic drought made the area unattractive for investment. Early investors such as the Parkes brothers at Henbury soon withdrew from the scene and left the pastoral industry to ventures which were often selfmanaged and financed by men who had once worked for absentee owners. They included the Braedon brothers, Bob Buck, and later Bryan Bowman, men who became well known in Central Australia.8 This new class of pastoralist lived intimately with indigenous people, and some of them fathered children with Aboriginal women. They also developed close relations with Aboriginal workers who helped them weather the adverse conditions that beset their leases. Significantly, and even in Carl Strehlow’s time, the mission became a pastoral lease in a similar style. Relhe and lhentere as worker and boss sustained both close and cooperative relations. Stuart, the telegraph station later renamed Alice Springs, was gazetted as a town in 1888 following the development of Arltunga, a goldfield on the Hale River in the

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Eastern Macdonnells. Optimists believed that Stuart would act as a service town for the anticipated mining “rush” (Holmes 1989). Notwithstanding initial high hopes and the fact that close to one hundred Arrernte laborers went to work on the field, it proved as disappointing as early pastoralism had (Pleshet 2004, 5–6). Nor did the improvements in communications brought by the telegraph line in 1873 and the railway from Adelaide in 1929 compensate for this flagging “development.” Hunting and gathering had been largely overturned, but a new rural industrial order remained an illusive dream for the settlers. This situation was clear in the early 1900s and restated with force during the 1920s drought. Finally, World War I (1914–1918) underlined the mission’s isolation in another way. The press and the federal government regarded the Lutherans with suspicion due to their German origins. Fears were expressed that the mission was “Germanising the Natives” and that the “Teuton Mission” could intercept messages from England on the telegraph line. These types of unsubstantiated charges involved a new chapter in a history of hostility between the mission and government agents (see Lohe 1977, 30–35). The upshot was that the mission’s annual federal subsidy of three hundred pounds was suspended between mid-1917 and mid-1923 (see Lohe 1977, 29–32).9 This lack of funding made the mission even more reliant than usual on its own cattle economy and support from Lutheran congregations in South Australia. It seems likely that this circumstance intensified the engagement between at least some staff and Aborigines who made the mission their principal dwelling place. It was an engagement also shaped in significant part by the devotion of its early pastors. Carl Strehlow stayed more than twenty years (1894–1922) and Friedrich Albrecht even longer (1926–62). Today, it is still not uncommon to hear Western Arrernte propose that German and Western Arrernte are similar languages that make it easier for Germans than anyone else (among the nonindigenous) to learn the language.10 Following construction of the Kaporilya pipeline and the opening up of communications that the railhead brought, the mission maintained its involvement in pastoralism and also developed a range of other activities, including the collection of dingo scalps, craftwork, gardening, painting, and tanning. From Kempe to Albrecht, the aim had always been to make the mission a form of industrial village as well as a Christian one. Albrecht embraced and developed this idea with gusto after the 1920s drought. He was one of the very first to discuss the idea of apprenticeships for remote Aborigines (see Hartwig 1965, 459; F. Albrecht 1977, 68–76; P. Albrecht 2002, 23–24). At the same time, conditions in Central Australia meant that the aim was sustainability rather than rapid growth (see Hartwig 1965, 620–26).

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Moreover, the scale of other industries and crafts was sufficiently modest not to overshadow the centrality of Hermannsburg’s ritual identity as a Christian mission settlement. This situation made the mission and pastoral lease doubly a domestic moral economy: one inclined to limit risk and also inclined to allow nonmarket values involved in ritual life to bear on production.11 Maintaining a Christian congregation and promoting Christian practice were as important as the income from pastoralism, which, in turn, was used to sustain these activities. One effect of this interrelationship was an unusual degree of localism that may have led the Arrernte to view the mission as an invasive, powerful, and voracious form, but one with which they could engage. It is not so much that local Western Arrernte culture confined nonlocal Lutheranism. Rather, a checked settler economy and the German minority status of the mission in Australia acted to focus both groups on a Hermannsburg world. The new, settled order confined the labor and social experience of Western Arrernte people. A second effect linked with the first was a ritual use of literacy that channeled its impact on Western Arrernte. Literacy was thoroughly entwined with the practice of pepe and relatively peripheral to the world of paid employment. In the mission domestic economy, the routes to status for men were either as stockman, which required little literacy, or as evangelist and pastor. Craftwork and evangelism brought comparable but lesser status for women, and evangelism once again outranked the other tasks. As a consequence, reading and writing skills were not deployed as secular market attributes, as cultural capital in its usual sense (Bourdieu 1986). Rather, they were identified mainly with right practice of the liturgy and with the writing down of songs on paper (cf. van Toorn 2006; Biddle 1996). This Arrernte inscribing of Christian law on paper also involved the translation task, Bible and liturgy both—a joint project of Western Arrernte and European Lutheran men. Beyond the confines of the liturgy, the major role of literacy, in the hands of the Strehlows (father and son), was to record on paper and audiotape the songs of Western Arrernte ritual life. Matters did change with Friedrich Albrecht’s negotiations regarding Kaporilya and his other industrial projects. In his term as pastor at Hermannsburg, Arrernte Christians and the mission became engaged with a larger world of governance and institutional life. However, the new forms of literate communication involved were confined mainly to mission staff. Finally, Lutheran patriarchy and the lack of a women’s law within Lutheranism gave men a singular ritual preeminence in this very particular literate society. As a consequence, the process of mothers being the bearers of literacy for their

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children, rather than mission staff, was delayed until postmission times. Women who became literate in the 1930s and 1940s used their skills mainly in the practice of the liturgy.12 In sum, God’s law at Hermannsburg was a localized law for a particular place that carried its own mnemonic at Ntaria (site of a falling star and Bethlehem church), on the bed of the Finke River (Jesus’s footprint), and at places such as Kaporilya. It was a ritual order practiced by familiars and anchored by a domestic moral economy comparable in scale, it seemed, to the Arrernte’s own (see also Collmann 1988, 103–10). At its core, this law retained a liturgical use of literacy reflected in the fact that the Western Arrernte called church practice pepe. This personalized and confined social order— a highly institutionalized life—both opened up and closed down windows onto wider worlds for its participants (see Brock 1993). It was in this context that the practice of mission life was assimilated, in some degree, to a Western Arrernte imaginary. I call this assimilation “pepe’s iconography.”

Pepe’s Iconography The generation with whom I could speak about the coming of the missionaries was a generation whose grandparents or great-grandparents had experienced the initial invasion. Nonetheless, contemporary accounts by Western Arrernte women evoked the mission using a set of interconnected representations—various word pictures of the mission. To talk of the mission and Arrernte Christianity was then to talk of characteristic things— remembering in ways that imaginatively valued the past. In the following discussion, I draw on this current comment and on written mission reports to detail six related representations that make up a contemporary vernacular.13 These representations concern the following: 1. The advent of new things, including portable things and the built environment. 2. Working for the missionaries. 3. The discipline of schooling and new naming practices. 4. Locating Christian cosmology through dreams. 5. Representing knowledge in song and “pictures.” 6. Making a settlement with hierarchical relations.

Each of these aspects represents the mission and Christianity in a specific way. Together they present a social order that remade both the environment

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and the subject and was prefigured in Arrernte dreams set down in song and, later, pictures. The whole was maintained by a centralized authority to which the Arrernte adjusted, albeit ambivalently. I discuss each aspect in turn. the advent of new things Frequently, conversations about the past begin with remarks on particular “things.” Commonly flour, tea, blankets, and clothing are used as symbols of difference. All of these items are represented as things that “the Aboriginal people did not know about,” Itne itye kaltye, “They didn’t know.” From the larger range of portable things that the missionaries brought, these particular four seem to have salience due to the fact that they remain perennials of camp life. At the beginning of any day, a large kerosene drum full of water is placed on a fire to boil for thick black morning tea. Its caffeine rouses the brain as it stills raw appetite. Flour is carried for onerous damper making when bread runs out. Clothes and blankets, in conjunction with windbreaks and properly tended fires, make camping on country a comfortable and still desirable practice. Less often people refer to coin, usually when they leap from accounts of the initial invasion to the mission as a colonial order. Buying things at the store with small amounts of cash earned for particular tasks is another thing that people “had not known about” prior to settlement. These comments on portable things often come in conjunction with remarks on the built environment and by implication the viability of sedentary life. The experience of walking into Carl Strehlow’s church was also the experience of walking into the largest expanse of enduring shade that many children had ever seen. Lywentye kngerre, much or large shade, is often related as the initial experience of the mission. That being inside was “a little bit cold,” “like a deep cave,” also evokes traditional images of the sacred—of caves that have housed tywerrenge. Women speak of performing laundering and other domestic work in the small, cell-like utility rooms of the mission. This work was onerous but nonetheless protected both from sun and the desert cold. Therefore the missionaries were notable because they could produce “school, church, mob a house and everything, . . . big mob a shade.” Hermannsburg’s most famous evangelist, Moses Tjalkabota, said that as a boy, “When we came we saw buildings already standing, three of them. I couldn’t imagine how they did this. . . . I felt the buildings with my hands asking, how did they do this?” (Tjalkabota 2002, 244). Not only the listings of commodities but also the statements of indigenous revelation speak to the Arrernte’s own reflection on the power that confronted them.

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working for the missionaries The advent of Hermannsburg did more than increase portable property and remake the environment. Many Arrernte became “good workers” on the mission. Hermannsburg’s Mission Station Chronicle (Hermannsburger Missionblatt), mission reports to the Adelaide Lutheran Herald from the 1920s to the 1940s, and Arthur Latz’s diaries, among other sources, record the Arrernte’s labor on mission projects. Women and men at Ntaria today communicate these efforts by noting modifications in the landscape. They showed me the traces of old stock routes, the pipeline, the minidams that serviced the pastoral herd, and the water holes at Labrapuntja and Kwatjinmarra that had been used for the initial herd of mission sheep. The well with its brick walls sunk at Pmokaputa, or Old Station, an outstation from the Henbury cattle lease later included in the mission lease, was also noted. I was told the story of the tannery as we climbed through its corrugated iron remains. And the small stone and concrete houses built in the early 1960s were seen as the outgrowth of the camps that gradually formed around the church and the missionaries’ houses. Women’s fancywork was retrieved as part of the contemporary women potters’ tradition and located on the verandas of mission houses (see also Isaacs 1999). Just as important, the expression “good worker” plays on the Arrernte term kwertengerle, or “manager,” of the land. Western Arrernte often call the latter “workers” in order to underline that a performance site is only ever realized socially by those who participate in it and, in one way or another, offer service to the owners. The following remark from Friedrich Albrecht, relating his injunctions to Arrernte men to be wage workers, leaves little doubt that their own idea was based on kin relations and entailed this notion of service: Years ago, at Hermannsburg, it so happened that men would come to me and tell me they were going to get some dingo scalps for me. I would correct them by saying: but you are paid cash for your scalps, so you are not working for me. Although accepted, it did not sink in very deeply. After a little more talk [a] man would come in the same way saying: I am going to get some dingo scalps for you. Again I would correct him with the same poor results. Quite obviously my attitude differed widely from his feelings in this matter. (F. Albrecht 1961, 2, emphasis mine)

It therefore seems of significance that it was usual for Arrernte men and women to locate not only the work that they or others had done but the people for whom they had worked: among them “Mr. Schultz,” “Mr. Mattner,” “Mr. Latz,” “Ted Polner,” “old man Albrecht,” and “Mrs. Polner.”

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Others also mentioned the Arrernte men who became “bosses” in the mission order, for example, William Ungwanaka in the post-Kaporilya mission gardens and Manasse Armstrong in the mission tannery. During the 1920s drought, men were paid not only for dingo scalps and kangaroo skins but for skinning dead cattle around the station. With the water supplied by Kaporilya, Albrecht was able to expand tanning. He sent Manasse Armstrong to train at the R. M. Williams factory in Adelaide (see F. Albrecht 1977, 68–70). This story was related many times and underscored the importance of R. M. Williams as much as the diffuse assumption, still prevalent in 1989, that having worked for the mission, it should remain and care for the Arrernte (see also Austin-Broos 2006b). schooling and new naming practices Prior in time to this legion of work came schooling at Hermannsburg. When discussing early contact with the mission, old Western Arrernte people commonly focused on school, to be followed by confirmation. The schoolhouse was often recalled as a trying place because the lessons of pepe were strange. Teachers were described as “hard” or “cruel,” and more than one woman recalled not being “liked” by a teacher. Women also described collective punishment meted out to a class when individuals misbehaved. In 1931, Friedrich Albrecht summed up what Carl Strehlow had no doubt understood in his long term at Hermannsburg— that schooling, food production, and rationing were functionally related: The history of our Mission proves to us, that among the adults there were exceptionally few conversions. It was above all the work among younger people with its definite aim, that brought about the forming of a congregation. The work among the younger people was made possible on the station, by erecting a school. By doing so it was essential that right from the outset the children and partly also the adults had to be provided for. . . . One feels doubtful, whether, whilst having to search for their food they could be influenced sufficiently to attain our goal with them. (F. Albrecht 1931c, 263)

Even by 1913, the mission slaughtered two or three beasts a week and imported “20 tons of flour, 4 tons of sugar and 400 pounds of tea” per year. These provisions were required to sustain 170 Arrernte and 12 neighboring Luritja (see Lohe 1977, 31; C. Strehlow [1913] 1991, i–ii). As people increasingly relied on rations, children went to school as a central component of pepe. Moreover, learning to read was learning to decipher the missionaries’ inscription on paper of Western Arrernte language.

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Figure 9. Title page of Carl Strehlow’s Western Arrernte primer. Reprinted by permission of the Finke River Mission Board, Adelaide.

A children’s Arrernte reader composed by Carl Strehlow (see figure 9) was published posthumously in 1928 and provides an insight into the experience of the Arrernte “scholars.”14 The primer begins with morphemic exercises governed by a European rendering of vowels and consonants. It then provides a range of individual words, gradually introducing issues of grammar through lists of increasingly complex forms of noun and verb suffixes. These exercises are followed by others that involve small vocabulary lists of animals, birds, snakes, fish, and types of bush tucker. A section of single sentences is next, the final one proposing that God cares for the Arrernte (Altjirala rella mara kankamanga). Then come short stories locating the Arrernte in Australia as opposed to other continents, telling of the first missionaries’ journey, the omnipresence of God and Jesus, of heaven and angels. A selection of translated hymns follows and finally two short prayers, one of which begins, “God, we have come here to learn the right way, to observe your will” (Altjirai, nuna naka pitjikala, tjaia mara galtjeritjika, ankatja

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unkwangana wutjika).15 Teaching relied extensively on chorused repetition and rote learning with oral testing of individuals. By the late 1930s, scholars were also encouraged to draw. For those Western Arrernte men and women who became evangelists, this Western Arrernte literacy that allowed use of a Western Arrernte Bible was a mark of distinction. This was especially so when Hermannsburg indigenous evangelists and pastors traveled to preach to cattle station mobs who admired these achievements. Conversion was marked in a more brutal way. Whenever I sought to trace kin relations across generations, the women I worked with protested vigorously. They pointed out that this information must be available already in both mission and land council records. It had been provided many times before. In the course of our banter, they had little interest in my own endeavor to collect spontaneous kin listings that might indicate their taken-for-granted kin worlds today. Although I was frustrated in this task, their reluctant and partial compliance revealed one thing: that women in their fifties who spoke of a grandparental generation adopted a standard form for naming relatives: “heathen name H________, baptismal name B________.” This form was used during the early mission days to mark the breach between cultures, between Christianity and the “tjurunga cult.” As my previous mention of “Moses Tjalkabota” and “Titus Renkaraka” shows, this breach was opened and closed again as the names of antecedents came to designate modern Arrernte “families” identified in terms of patronymics.16 Although this distinction between the heathen and Christian has softened with time, it was still evident among women elders with whom I worked. On one occasion, we met in the borrowed apartment of an Ntaria service worker. The women insisted on sitting with their backs to a very fine Warlpiri acrylic dot painting, which they described as a “heathen picture.” Although these women were happy to tell Dreaming stories in the form of short narratives as a claim to country, their sensibilities had been shaped for a lifetime by the Christian word and its iconography. dreaming a christian cosmology And yet they sought continuity. I had arrived at Ntaria in turbulent times as factionalism raged between the outstation mob still aligned with the FRM and the Ntaria council chair with his supporters. In this context, women of a Lutheran persuasion commonly related dreams that indicated the way ahead. A debate over who should control the old mission buildings, known as the “Historic Precinct,” produced a number of dreams. One involved a tree falling across the site and blocking the way of town councilors. Another woman was warned by Jesus of the scorpions in her shoes as she woke on the day of a meeting. Both these

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dreams were sent by God to show a person the “right way”; in this case, blocking and turning back the councilors. Aboriginal use of dreams to validate ritual innovations—or in this case to contest them—has been reported extensively in ethnographic literature for Balgo, Belyuen, Wadeye, and Yuendumu. New songs and ceremony are told to exponents in dreams and then voiced and danced into life as renderings of the known. Both Yolngu and Murrinh-Patha have used similar types of dream to interpret Christian practice.17 More evident perhaps in times of stress, these cases nonetheless reflect the relation between having or “seeing” dreams and the Dreaming. Both refer to phenomena that are “hidden” or latent but can be made evident although they are not of the everyday (see Róheim 1945; Stanner 1956; Myers 1986). Their hiding connects with the way that antecedents after death remain as forms of presence in or underneath a place. In the telling of the dream and in its singing, the hidden or else the forgotten is brought to mind. It is therefore not surprising that both men and women related that “the Christian people” who had not been to school learned their Christian practice through dreaming or “seeing” the Bible story (tnengkarre areme). A common formulation was that people did not know or could not “hear” or understand the missionary and grew tired trying. However, in their sleep they dreamed about Jesus and his footprint (or design). These comments contextualize a report from Carl Strehlow in 1922 relating the way in which at least some Western Arrernte sought to make pepe manifest in the world. Strehlow wrote: About 3 months ago some of our christian blacks had dreams and visions in which they saw angels and heard heavenly music, which they taught the others; on some evenings they sang for hours and hours and closed these exercises with prayers. One man called Ndamindana or Jim, who is attending the baptismal instruction brought me a hymn of 21 verses describing the last judgment which shows that he has closely followed the religious instructions on Sundays and he told me in the evening that he was very joyful, because he had seen angels and heard heavenly music. . . . Some days later Rebecka, an old christian woman, . . . came and told me that she had seen the angel Gabriel; she wanted a sheet of paper as she intended to write down her experience and the song she had heard.18

Strehlow recorded the long conversation Rebecka had had with Gabriel regarding her own deceased children and one of Abel’s.19 Gabriel had told Rebecca that Abel’s child had died because “God liked it.” Prior to her death, the little girl had had no apparent illness. Strehlow was unimpressed with

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Rebecka’s dream and song, noting yet other cases of songs dreamed and written down. He remarked that the priority in Christian matters should be to “obey . . . God” and “fulfill one’s calling.” Strehlow wrote, “The blacks concede this, but they say, that these visions had the purpose to rouse them up and convert them . . . to a better life” (C. Strehlow 1922, 104). knowledge represented in song and “pictures” Western Arrernte used these dreams to reveal and interpret new law. The Lutherans, who taught a sacramental religion and were influenced by pietism, discouraged this dreaming. Yet they did not discourage the practice of literacy and, in particular, the practice of writing, singing, and translating hymns. Carl Strehlow remarks that Rebecka asked for a piece of paper to record her song. This was the way in which the Arrernte sought to grasp the design of God’s law and inscribe it on pepe. As time passed at Hermannsburg, notable evangelists aspired to have their own hymns in the Arrernte Lutheran hymnal, which now includes a number authored by Western Arrernte Lutherans. The women of the Hermannsburg Lutheran Choir maintain this love of song. At various outstation schools in particular, “pictures” with songs have been a popular way of teaching the young. Pictures of Jesus spreading his message to listening crowds, pictures of angels addressing Mary at the Enunciation, and reproductions of Oscar Namatjira’s painting of the Crucifixion located in Central Australia are popular with the old and very young.20 In 1925, the teacher Adolf Heinrich reported that evangelist Tjalkabota21 was much impressed by “the Pictures of the Bible.” He continued to use them in his work even after he lost his sight in his late twenties. Twice in his autobiography Tjalkabota (see figure 10) mentions the importance of songs and pictures. In both cases he contrasts them with tywerrenge. In the course of his own initiation (possibly in the late 1880s), and in the absence of their elders, he and other initiates talked about pictures and Christian songs. Tjalkabota remarked that “I held onto God’s word and the christian songs more than onto the tjurrunga [tywerrenge].”22 Some twenty years later, returning from his evangelical trip to Deep Well in the company of another Christian, August, he camped with relatives on his mother’s side. Tjalkabota related their discussion concerning Christian conversion: “In the evening I admonished them greatly . . . Then they said, ‘How is it that you two have come with so much paper?’ [By this time, Moses was blind.] I said, ‘To show you these picture. God in heaven is alive. We have brought this to show you.’ With amazement they see Jesus dying on the cross, Jesus suffering. . . . We two also sang in front of them, ‘Jesu nukai, Ingkata knarai.’ . . . They were really happy because this was a really good song.”

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Figure 10. Moses and Sofia Tjalkabota (left) with another couple, Maisie and Eugene. Reprinted by permission of the Lutheran Church Archive, Adelaide.

An old man referred to his many tywerrenge, and Moses responded to him, “Don’t put your faith in those tjurrunga [tywerrenge]. Those tjurrunga continue to cause you to die. They do not make you alive, they do not come to your help, they do not protect you, they don’t care for you” (Tjalkabota 2002, 286–87). Recalling the pleasure he felt as a boy when mission staff came to retrieve him from his father’s camp after he had missed Christmas at Hermannsburg, Tjalkabota said, “I longed for the important songs.” One might read too much into this remark. Nonetheless, with others it evokes a circumstance in which the constitution of the Western Arrernte world changed and made God’s law significant. This law was pepe. It left traces in the country and reshaped the Arrernte subject through new forms of service and through literacy. It was manifest in dreams that were sung and written down. Its design was present in pictures and realized in the hard work of Christian ritual. a settlement with hierarchical relations In the course of my fieldwork, there were five discernable camps around the central service area of Ntaria. This circumstance remained quite stable for most of the 1990s. Subsequently further building and demolition have produced new sites and modified old ones. This dynamic is a reminder that initially the missionaries came to a site close to Ntaria water hole, a place of only minor impor-

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tance on the edge of a dry plain between two ranges. By the 1930s, Aboriginal people at Hermannsburg resided in one of two major camps, mpepele or alturle. Mpepele means “middle,” “center,” or “the in-between.” Alturle means “west.” The camp names reference the origins of a number of people in each camp, the former coming up from the south and southeast, from Uruna, or the Waterhouse Range, and the latter coming from west and northwest of Hermannsburg, some out of the Western Macdonnells. The stories of invasion say that Pertame and Uruna people were the missionaries’ initial guides. Women showed me both the location of the original mpepele camps, close to the old church and the eating house, and the sites for camping by the Finke River that became a new camp known as “Middleeast.” Mpepele names the original location of people from the southeast, living in and around the mission. They were the “first ones” and lived at the center of a new, unfolding world. Descendants of these various families have been prominent in the mission’s history and still maintain close alliances today. In the course of the 1920s drought, the “people from the west” trickled in slowly and then, following the Coniston Massacre, more rapidly. The massacre, which occurred in 1928 on Warlpiri country to the north, rekindled fears of whites first fueled by Constable Willshire at Boggy Hole.23 As more people came to the mission, the straw and thatched huts of the Christian people were steadily located outside the mission compound to the west and also to the east. The latter remained mpepele, though. Previously, a permanent gathering of more than two hundred people would not have been feasible in this terrain (see Thorley 2001). As this new “big place” for “Christian people” revealed its law, a new transcendentalism manifest as “God” also anchored a new form of centralized authority. Women noted that mission staff could be “cruel”: they punished kids in school, exploited women as menial domestics, and beat men for playing cards, sometimes humiliating them. An authority ignoring specific boundaries defined by emplaced and kin-based identity could not but be met with ambivalence. This is conveyed today by stories of transgression and defiance—skipping school, escaping work on the pipeline, playing cards still, and for the Pareroultjas, leaving the mission. Slyly humorous remarks about the sexual and other transgressions of mission staff also express this ambivalence. Nonetheless, “the first ones” and others among the Christian people were drawn into this authoritarian order. In 1936 Arthur Latz wrote, “As card playing had started again, all those who played had to go to Missioner Albrecht. . . . Abel and Manasse dealt out thrashings, 15 strokes to 12 card players.”24 Abel Ratara would become the mission’s head evangelist, and Manasse

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Armstrong would be not only a skilled tanner but also Western Arrernte foreman of works. Rataras and descendants of the previously mentioned Titus Renkaraka remain today senior custodians of Ntaria. The Arrernte were subject to the piety and the authoritarianism of the Lutherans (see Rowse 1992; 1998b, 85) but also to their own experience with displacement, violence, and drought. Possibly, their response to invasion involved not only copying the missionaries but also drawing on the fact that indigenous desert law is “hard.” Writing of the Pintupi, Myers notes the ability of senior men to “deny sorrow” in the punishment of people who are invariably relatives. The Pintupi told Myers that in this case they act “as agents of a higher authority and not of their own will.” How else within their law, Myers asks (1986, 119), to explain the suspension of kin relatedness and the use of severe physical punishment? How else to explain entirely the manner in which Western Arrernte people took up the teaching of the Lutherans and, subject to the deprivations of invasion, came to practice God’s law? In the 1990s, remembering this process revealed a Lutheran vernacular which I have sought to describe in terms of a Christianity assimilated to an Arrernte imaginary. And finally, pepe, God’s law, became a transcendental order; a center, mpepele, that involved both indigenous and nonindigenous Lutherans.

Conclusion Hermannsburg’s local material world as much as pepe’s iconography made a specific Christianity—an ontology and cosmology shaped by a local moral economy and an indigenous imaginary. For this reason, neither of the views on conversion canvassed at the outset entirely captures the Arrernte’s experience. Christianity could not be simply an overlay maintained by external authority and shucked off as soon as the mission ceased to be the state’s administrative agent. For the Arrernte, becoming sedentary and thereby participants in a European settlement was a fundamental change that would in turn change ideas about the world. The forced reconfiguring of resources that pastoral settlement brought made Hermannsburg a particular place that gave plausibility to new rite and a new transcendentalism. The change was not superficial, and yet it touched the Western Arrernte unevenly. In the context of Central Australia’s limited development as a colonial economy, neither pastoralism nor Lutheranism could redefine instantly or comprehensively the orientations of indigenous people. This was especially the case with ideas of sociality linked to place. As a consequence, Arrernte no-

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tions of a law, or the “way” for a place, mediated Christian conversion. In turn this association of God’s law with Arrernte law—two laws for different types of emplaced being—became the Western Arrernte’s master homology. The Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg sought to sustain continuity by providing Lutheranism with the status of a law. If a view of change as simply ephemeral does not suit the Arrernte people’s experience, Horton’s intellectualism fits better. A new form of transcendentalism was introduced that mirrored a stratified society and centralized authority and power. This new cosmology sought to replace the “tjurunga cult,” the multiplicity of Dreaming heroes and sites that reflected the Arrernte’s previous hunting-and-gathering society (see T. Strehlow 1947, 1997; Rumsey 2001). Yet Horton’s unidirectional view of conversion obscures Western Arrernte experience in a central respect. At the time of the outstation movement and later, many Western Arrernte hoped that it would bring a multiplication of small domestic economies—emplaced, autonomous, and comparable to the mission. Although they rejected the mission’s paternalism, these ideas of an intimate order endured. This was the Western Arrernte’s twentieth-century localism, produced through the intersection of their own “rhizomic” system25 and the historical course of the Finke River Mission. In comparison with the new forms of government, this was a known and personalized world, hence the consternation that women felt in 1989. For the FRM to leave God’s place in the cause of a universal and unlocated God was to demean the work that the Western Arrernte had done. To leave the law was to leave the local and thereby also undermine the domestic economy on which the Arrernte had been reliant for at least four generations. The challenge of the second transition into a full cash economy and market society is reflected in the dilemmas that Joyce, and others like her, faced. With political and personal autonomy came new individualisms that undermined authority and intergenerational relations. The Western Arrernte in fact exchanged the paternalism of the mission for the impersonality of market society and the state, an impersonality that would underscore their economically marginal position. The social milieu of this transition, including its everyday violence, is related in part 2.

Postscript The parents of the children in Joyce’s story have lived to raise their children. Each is now a nondrinker and employed in the community.

G pa r t t wo

Life as a Standing Fight

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the impact of post–World War II change engulfed Western Arrernte people. Life became a standing fight for social coherence and individual identity. In this context, social suffering became a common experience. Land rights and the return to country that outstations brought also magnified everyday demands. Both the bureaucratic state and market society disordered intimate lives as people confronted new legal procedures, impersonality, and cash and commodities. Failing local authority was cause and consequence of widespread substance abuse, especially among men. This part of the book provides a focus on the everyday of Arrernte life; on central dimensions of the subject, relatedness, and identity. The account begins in chapter 4 with a common Ntaria dilemma—the circumstance of an individual whose family came in to the mission from a proximate region generations ago. Distanced now from their father’s place and retaining only subsidiary rights in country around Ntaria, some Arrernte people struggle to maintain an emplaced identity. Chapter 5 offers a portrait of Arrernte relatedness, the nature and practice of kin in a marginalized society. Changes in the tropes employed to talk about relatedness reflect the transition from a place-based system to one in which commodities and cash are used to express relatedness. The third and final analysis, presented in chapter 6, explores the implications of everyday violence for the Arrernte subject. As pressure on the etiquette of relatedness grows, violence both reflects and exacerbates the struggle for a sense of self. This final analysis takes as its analogue an observation on honey ants.

G chapter 4

Home and Away The Dislocation of Identity

I

n the course of preparations for the Western Arrernte Palm Valley land claim,1 Joyce Robinya Malbunka drew attention to the fact that her father had connections with Jikala, a site outside the area of the claim but within the Ntaria land trust that adjoined the claim site (see map 4).2 Traditional owners for Ntaria were also counted as some of the owners for Palm Valley land. When Joyce made her remarks, people took her to be saying that Jikala and Ntaria were her father’s country—and at times she seemed to say just that. Yet common opinion was that her father’s country was south of Ntaria by the Finke River and north of the Henbury pastoral station, around a place called Lalkara, also called Lalkara Yard. Her younger brother and senior spokesman for the Robinya group confirmed that this was his father’s place. Like his sister, he had strong associations south and retained some knowledge of Southern Arrernte (Pertame), a language spoken little at Ntaria. In public meetings leading up to the claim, the son of a cousin (MoBrDa) to Joyce identified her as one of the few Pertame still around Ntaria.3 She did not contest this identification, and in fact her day-to-day associations clearly showed her regional engagement with this group, manifest in mutual demands, in camping together, and in shared emotions. Notwithstanding Joyce’s reputation as an outstanding Western Arrernte speaker, her southern orientation and identity were clear. Yet she maintained that during his later life her father was “boss” for Jikala, and her brother confirmed as well that he had received major knowledge for the site.4 Her brother explained to me the link between Jikala and his father’s place farther south. At least one Dreaming track, rrekere, a type of duck, came out from Lalkara, traveled north beyond the sources of the Finke, and then returned, following the Finke’s path from just north of Jikala back to Lalkara. Managers (kwertengerle) for the brother, one deceased before the claim 105

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Map 4. Western Arrernte land trusts. Adapted from J. Morton 1997a.

and the other a respected man peripheral to it, both confirmed that the siblings’ father and father’s father had had rights along the Finke at various sites. Some of these were places on tracks coming from or through their country. Knowledge for other sites came through “mother’s side,” farther up the Finke. Jikala was quite close to a place that Joyce’s brother’s wife had come from. Joyce’s father’s father had also obtained a wife from the same locale. These women were malyenweke, relatives from a group with which Robinyas married.5 When the claim was finally settled, the land commissioner registered the Robinya interest as a particular but peripheral one. The Robinyas, he proposed, should be consulted on decisions relating to Jikala and other sites along the Finke in which they had specific “out of estate” interests.6 Yet it is fair to say that such interests have limited legal purchase and not much influence today. Whether such claims are conceded in local life depends on political and social factors. One factor is whether men of influence can push an “out of estate” interest. Joyce’s brother was often away, and she had no other “powerful” males residing at Ntaria. The matter was pursued with passion nonetheless. There were material and pragmatic reasons to do so. Among them was the fact that only traditional owners, or those of stature endorsed by them, could obtain outstation houses on Western Arrernte land. Housing was scarce. Staying mainly at her children’s place, Joyce was dependent. Sometimes she yearned for a “quiet”

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place away from the “noise” of Ntaria. She wanted a place to camp with her grandkids and her own relatives. To emphasize the difference between her children and her own patrifilial kin, sometimes Joyce observed (in English) that she and the children were “different family.” This comment betrayed the regional, gender, and generational issues she faced. At the same time, we often discussed the Ntaria politics that led her on behalf of her children to push for additional ritual affiliations. In the clamor of Ntaria life, diversified interests in country seemed the preferable path. Still, my sense was that something else bothered Joyce. One might call it “identity.” She seemed to care that her antecedents had walked up and down the Finke. While Joyce was conceived at Ntaria, her “borning place” was Bob Buck’s station, Middleton Pond. Just west of Henbury, her father had worked there with Pertame one-countrymen.7 Her mother, Elfrieda, also worked on these pastoral stations (see figure 11). Joyce first remembered traveling with her father from this vicinity to Ntaria when she was three years old. Some sixty years later, our most common weekend jaunts were south from Ntaria, past Alitera and toward Irbmankara or Illamurta. In Beckett’s (1965) terms, this was Joyce’s “beat,” or run, “the set of frequented places joined by a track that each [indigenous person] consolidates and then comes to regard as an individual stamping ground” (quoted in Sansom 1982,

Figure 11. Joyce’s mother, Elfrieda (far left), at Henbury, circa 1925. Photograph by Otto Tschirn, reprinted by permission of the Strehlow Research Centre, Northern Territory Museum, Alice Springs.

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125; also Birdsall 1988). In earlier times, this same beat was probably part of the “range” on which her antecedents hunted and foraged (Stanner 1965a). Joyce also underlined that her father’s mob was called lhere pirnte, “people of the Finke,” rather than Pertame. The latter term is also used to designate the region of the Southern Arrernte, an area that overlaps with the lower Finke but also covers many other places that were strange to Joyce. Moreover, Pertame as dialect was not her only one. Although Western Arrernte was her first language, she also spoke some Pertame and knew that antecedents had been bilingual. In addition, Joyce had learned Kukatja-Luritja, Kaytetye, and English. She understood other Arrernte dialects and some Pitjantjatjara. Lhere pirnte, as topography and traveled region, was the way she summed herself—in contrast to tyurretye, those who came in from the Western Macdonnells. This mode of identity, based on region and movement within it, sat uneasily in the land claim, a fact that Joyce acknowledged. Yet she pursued her cause with alacrity and made a tentative attempt to insert it in the claim. Perhaps it was all she had. Joyce’s desire to be close to the Christian community and resources at Hermannsburg had left her estranged from Lalkara. Once she described it as “a proper lonely place”: lonely for people, value, and significance, and lonely perhaps for her as well. Others had the major claim down there, and in any case, that country had no services. Practicalities masked the fact that Lalkara was within the Henbury station lease and therefore not available for claims under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976). In addition, other Pertame had remained on Henbury as workers and knew the area well. For the future, if there were a purchase or excision, their claim would be the stronger one. Others acknowledged this. All these factors kept Joyce at Ntaria and among the bulk of her relatives. Still, she had no jural standing there as a preeminent owner of land and, as a consequence, lacked her own resources. With the mission gone and her husband passed away, her influence was faltering along with her sense of self. Hence she made the claim that her father was “boss” for Jikala. In the following discussion, I propose to use Joyce’s case to highlight aspects of a hunter-gatherer life that made it literally “home and away”; ranged between various forms of visiting that sustained diverse links and also, where possible, the maintenance of a father’s place, generally called “my country (pmere nweke)” by Western Arrernte.8 Traditionally, country entailed some exclusionary relations, commonly in the form of a descent group of custodians and their helpers with various ceremonial rights. This tendency toward consolidation was balanced by factors that promoted diversity in social, economic, and ritual relations, and among these factors were

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conception beliefs. As I will describe in the next section of this chapter, the latter provided attachments to place in addition to those inherited through patrifilial and matrifilial links. Both conception totemism and visiting for various ends were integral to a lived dynamic in which the balance between diverse relations and consolidation shifted over time. People might leave their country for a month, or years, and occasionally relocate due to feud, drought, or marriage arrangements. My argument is that, following the initial disruption of invasion, settlement and the state’s jural order brought practices that focused attention on bounded patrilineal estates. The balance provided by diversification was tipped toward consolidation. It was a process of exogenous and endogenous change. However, where the latter moved quite slowly, the former was fairly abrupt and irrevocable. In sum, the enduring effect of settlement and the rationalizations involved in land rights legislation have been related parts of the state’s transforming effects. By legally protecting settlers and, at a later date, formulating indigenous tenure in accord with its legal tenets, the state has perforce changed indigenous knowledge systems once used to manage land and social relatedness. The outcome is that elements of the original system, associated both with conception and with visiting in a region, lack salience in modern life and certainly in land claims. Joyce’s dilemma was in part a product of this circumstance: estranged from country, it now seemed difficult to relocate effectively.

A History of Visiting and Conception Sites Jikala was Joyce’s father’s and her brother’s conception site. T. G. H. (Ted) Strehlow’s genealogies, which build on his father Carl’s, provide conception sites for many of her antecedents. Together these data add time depth to Joyce’s beat because they provide a sense of range, the area where her group walked around at their place and beyond it. In his genealogies, Ted Strehlow included the subsection, the conception site, and the “personal totem” of most people he recorded.9 He provided this rationale: “In Central Australia every individual has (1) a class (or subsection name), (2) a personal totem, [and] (3) a conception site. Since the social status of every individual in the pre-white days depended on these three things, all his friends and acquaintances took pains to memorise these details. This information was consequently available for as long as the individual’s name was remembered” (T. Strehlow 1955). Elsewhere Strehlow argued that a person’s conception place and its story amounted to a form of individuation among patrifilial relatives. It was a major form of personal identity (T. Strehlow 1947, 139).

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His data for the Robinyas came from interviews that he conducted with Tjalkabota and Utnadata in the 1950s and from his father. The elder Strehlow recorded Lutintja as Robinya’s senior antecedent, Lutintja “coming out of [conceived at]” Rama on the Finke, just north of Jikala. This is a connection that reaches back to the early nineteenth century at least. Alkia, a son of Lutintja, married Anupa, who “came from [was conceived at]” Pmoierka on the Palmer River. Alkia’s conception place is recorded as Lalkara; in Ted Strehlow’s notes, “downstream from Irbmangkara [Running Waters].” His son, Robinya was conceived at Jikala, and Robinya’s son, Tjitjinana, is recorded as being conceived at Tapitjinama, also “downstream” from Irbmankara. In 1888, Tjitjinana was baptized at the mission and took the name Phillipus. He was about ten years old at the time. As a young adult, he went on evangelical journeys south with Tjalkabota and also with Ntjalka. Later, he and his wife resided at Ntaria. His son Lucas, who was Joyce’s father, was conceived at Jikala. Most of the other children of Phillipus were conceived at Ntaria. Joyce was also conceived at Ntaria and had Middleton Pond as her borning place. Her brother, however, was conceived at Jikala. These data suggest that the movement I have noted for Joyce—up and down the Finke’s middle reaches—may have existed for a century before her time (see map 5).10 They also document the long association that patrilineal male antecedents had with Jikala. T. G. H. Strehlow notes a discrepancy between the material collected by his father and the information given to him by Tjalkabota. In Carl Strehlow’s records, Robinya’s parents are Alkia, his father (Fa), and Anupa, his mother (Mo). Alkia is recorded as Lutinja’s son, and the latter’s genealogy has a northern orientation. This genealogy also includes many other Western Arrernte people who were located in and around tyurretye. Tjalkabota’s account, however, provides different names for Robinya’s parents— Alakurka (Fa) and Lakutniaka (Mo). Alakurka is included on Lakutniaka’s genealogy only as an affine with no recorded father. Moreover, Lakutniaka’s other relatives and affines all have a uniformly southern orientation. Both Carl Strehlow’s Alkia and Ted Strehlow’s Alakurka are recorded with the same subsection, kemarre. T. G. H. Strehlow notes that his father sometimes cataloged people as “same father” on the basis that they shared a conception site and belonged to the same subsection. That is, they seemed to come from one place, shared a story, and also seemed to have similar marriage options. This might explain the presence of Alkia (or Alakurka) among Lutintja’s children and his son Robinya’s descendants among people with whom they normally are not closely linked.11 The significance of this

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Map 5. Places in the Robinya range.

confusion is that it revolves around the practice in question: namely, movement back and forth along the Finke that may have provided a person with an “out of estate” conception site. This was movement to visit relatives, forage, and attend to ceremony. The confusion also possibly implies that conception as an identity was once more important than it is today. In sum, the various conception sites of Joyce’s antecedents suggest the same passage up and down the Finke River that defined Joyce’s beat, the one that was related by her brother’s kwertengerle and was invested in his rrekere story. Whether Joyce’s antecedents were always in the south, identified with people north through Carl Strehlow’s confusion, or came at an early date from the north to reside in the south12 is less important here than the pattern of their movement through space and time. It was a movement up and down the rivers and mainly north-south on regular routes that were part of Joyce’s childhood and her later life. It was this dynamic of “walkin’ round” that gave her a regional identity more diffuse than Lalkara but consistent with it. In addition, the data suggest that Robinya men had a long association with Jikala as a conception site.

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Conception and a Regional Dynamic In land claim discussions among Western Arrernte today, the issue of conception site, the place where a mother first felt the foetus turn in the womb, has little significance. In fact, some Western Arrernte now identify conception with a story and body mark but not with a particular place. They will point to a birthmark or another unusual physical feature—wild skin, head shape, or a mole—in order to indicate that their embodied being was shaped by a spirit that entered their mother’s womb. However, this event is no longer seen to create an attachment to place. Rather, it influences personality that may be represented by one or another physical feature. The initial ontology of conception seems to have almost gone, and this shift contrasts not only with an Arrernte past but also with practice and belief in areas of the Western Desert and northern Australia. (see Myers 1986; Povinelli 1993a). One reason for this difference could be that many Western Arrernte no longer embrace a view of the world that supports the experience and belief that surrounds conception. The Western Arrernte world has changed. T. G. H. Strehlow records that Arrernte beliefs about conception held that the initial movement of a foetus was in fact the entry of an ancestral seed or spirit child, active in that particular place, into the mother’s womb to shape the being of the person (T. Strehlow 1947, 86–91). Strehlow always has denied that this theory entailed ignorance of physical paternity (T. Strehlow 1947, 133; see also Merlan 1986). Rather, these conception beliefs were a way of men assimilating gestation to their ritual concerns. Strehlow remarks more than once that in creation myths, it is men who are “gestators.” Just as initiation is making men out of boys, or “man-making” (artwe-lheme), gestation was the vitality in country lodged there by male Dreaming heroes. Conception came out of a place where the mother walked around, where she was subject to this male-invested vitality of country (J. Morton 1987a, 1987b; see also Hiatt 1975). At Ntaria today, the teachings of the local clinic and Christianity both contest this view of the world. Where the latter is concerned, it is telling that a Western Arrernte term once used for “conception site,” ngampekele, now has the meaning in Christian prayer of “eternally” or “everlasting” as in “ngampekele [for ever and ever], Amen.” A term that once described emplaced being is purely temporal now in the Arrernte Lutheran liturgy. Many Arrernte women I asked were unaware of or unwilling to state the term’s former meaning. With the impact of pastoralism, both meaning and experience shifted because social practice did. As Arrernte people moved into settlements and adopted a sedentary life, the role of conception in defining personal identity

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changed. Increasingly, all the children of one generation born to different groups with different regional connections shared the same or just a few conception sites, songs, and “totems” (or ancestral designs). For instance, a story about twins terminates at Ntaria, and in the past few generations, most Western Arrernte have had Ntaria as their conception site and rathepe, or “twins,” as their conception totem. Perusing Ted Strehlow’s genealogies, it is evident that settlement around Henbury pastoral station to the south had a similar impact. Many people’s conception site became Tuna (or Henbury) and their personal totem tyunpe (perentie, or monitor lizard). At least for conception, personal and regional specificity collapsed under the impact of a sedentary life and the estrangement from foraging practice (but see T. Strehlow 1997, 32). Finally, and decisive perhaps, the ritual system of which conception was a part changed. To my knowledge, the main rites that endure among Western Arrernte men are rites of initiation that bring men together with initiates from a number of regions. Over time, the practice has evolved of staging a standard song cycle performance notwithstanding the fact that each initiate receives the design of patrifilial relatives. Less common, if extant at all among Western Arrernte, are the particular site-based rites of specific regions known as “increase” rites in the ethnographic literature (see also Peterson 2000). Nor does an active system of regional ritual exchange endure except for a few senior men and women. In the past, it could be asserted generally that people traveled as guests to the festivals of others and invited those others in turn to their own regional festivals (see Kimber and Smith 1987). This particular dynamic of aggregation and dispersal is realized now in contemporary sports and music festivals, while male initiation alone remains as the shared and objectified “tradition” integrating a region. Women such as Joyce rarely attend ceremonial, which occurs mainly among Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara women to the north and south of Ntaria. On these occasions, Western Arrernte women are often observers. These types of changes in ritual life, consistent with sedentarism and mission surveillance of women, work to erase both practical and ritual knowledge. The range of familiar species and therefore the range of minor nontraveling stories and totems known in a region must diminish. As a consequence, the role of conception as an elaborated idiom of differentiation is reduced. Things were not always so. Strehlow reports that for a full performance at a major ritual center, the highest-ranking participants were those of the local descent group who shared the ancestor’s song and the same nyenhenge, or subsection identity. The example he takes is a honey ant center. At that center, men who both

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“inherited” a particular totem at their father’s place A, and were also its “reincarnations” through conception, had the highest status (see also Pink 1936, 287, 305). Their “clan” and “personal” conception totems coincided. Next came men with the same dual status from other places on that honey ant Dreaming track within the immediate locale. A third rank was men from the local descent group who inherited a subsection and songs from their fathers, though their conception sites and songs were different ones. Below these three ranks came men from a neighboring site B on the same Dreaming track that terminated at A. Possibly they resided in an adjacent country. A fifth rank included men who came from farther sites C, linked through tracks to B, though not with A directly. The latter could participate in the performance only as ritual assistants and, in order to see the rite, had to present gifts of meat to the higher-ranked performers (T. Strehlow 1978, 42–43). Nonetheless, these various groups would have been involved in regional ritual exchange. They were all honey ant men and involved in ceremonies for honey ants. Elsewhere Strehlow stipulates that the men who made a ground-painting for an ancestral rite using their own blood included only men “reincarnated” by conception from an ancestor or men “physically descended” through other men from the ancestor (T. Strehlow 1997, 16). Here conception and patrilineal totemism were assimilated—though the actual coincidence of these forms conferred the highest status of all. A ritual descent group did not always contain someone who could claim the highest status. People seemed often to have conception sites in proximity to a pmere kwertethe—their main inherited site—but only occasionally did the two coincide. Merlan has remarked on the “fortuitous” nature of conception and, like Strehlow, notes its capacity to act as a form of differentiation among individuals (Merlan 1986, 488). On the other hand, Strehlow also remarks that, “the inevitable disruptive effect exercised upon a native community by the doctrine of the conception site is deliberately counterbalanced by the strong emphasis laid upon the unifying ties represented by the allegiance claims of [a main patrilineal site] and by membership obligations to the local [nyenhenge section]” (T. Strehlow 1947, 139). For this reason, conception sites, though fortuitous, also cluster to some degree around a place identified as father’s (see also T. Strehlow 1978, 41).13 Notwithstanding these ways in which conception and inherited site worked in concert to consolidate a country (estate), other data from Ted Strehlow’s corpus show the way in which conception promoted regional relations. Specifically, conception was a central way in which someone could diversify knowledge. One example that Strehlow gives is the historical figure Nathaneal Rauwiraka, an Ellery Creek man whose patrilineal totem

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was honey ant and whose nyenhenge, or subsection identity, was penangke/ pengarte.14 Rauwiraka’s conception site was Pmutjuka in Anmatyerre territory north. Pmutjuka was a carpet snake site, in the territory of a penangke/ pengarte group. After his first initiation rites, performed by Luritja in the south, Rauwiraka traveled north and spent quite a long time learning the performances and songs of his conception ancestor. Later in life he followed the track of this conception ancestor to another major penangke/pengarte site in Central Arrernte territory. Rauwiraka developed over time a large portfolio of knowledge from these places in conjunction with knowledge from his own patrilineal honey ant site at Thata and the nearby great honey ant site of Roulbmaulbma, both on the Ellery Creek. Able to act as a ritual assistant for others, knowledge bred knowledge in his remarkable career (T. Strehlow 1997). Strehlow makes clear that at a major site such as Roulbmaulbma, ritual assistants were often drawn from other groups along the same Dreaming track that also had the same subsection identity, that is, penangke/pengarte honey ant men. Moreover, were one such group to die out, a member or members of another one had a very strong claim to take over responsibility for the place and possibly to shift residence (T. Strehlow 1947, 149; J. Morton 1997a, 120). Notwithstanding this preference for ritual engagement with others who shared both a subsection identity and a totem, be it a conception or patrifilial one, men also used conception to extend their knowledge in other ways. T. G. H. Strehlow instances Makarinja, a peltharre man whose patrilineal totems included native cat and euro, or wallaroo. He was conceived, however, at the honey ant penangke/pengarte place, Ljaba, and assiduously pursued knowledge of this place. In later life, other penangke/pengarte men resented the knowledge held by this peltharre man. Strehlow relates an angry debate about who should inherit it (T. Strehlow 1947, 127–29). The tywerrenge, or sacred boards, of conception totems were the only ones that might become the personal property of a man, in principle with full rights of disposal. In fact, however, men seldom took possession of them unless their own subsection identity was the same as the conception totem’s; they resided in the same locale; or they were merely minding the tywerrenge while waiting for an appropriate heir to mature in the resident line (see also Barker 1976, 233, 235). There was a presumption here that a ritual leader’s subsection should be consistent with that of the ancestor and the site over which he was assuming authority. These examples demonstrate the tension between diversification and consolidation that conception entailed. The coincidence of a conception site with a main patrilineally inherited site brought high status. Moreover,

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conception as individuation within the ritual group brought balance to the estate. Those involved shared a ritual focus and also had their own personal identity. On the other hand, fortuitous but also often strategic conception in another place provided a route to diversification, to building a portfolio within a larger region. This was an activity in which both Rauwirika and Makarinja were involved. It allowed an opportunity for some men to become ritual cognoscenti (ingkarte). It was possible to be the latter—a cognoscente—and as such act as a kwertengerle (manager) for a pmerekwerteye (custodian) at a place that was not one’s own.15 Makarinja was equipped to do so and thereby also equipped, if the right moment came, to claim custodianship of that site. These were, however, political moments and contained within them other tools of consolidation. One was the privileging of knowledgeable men beyond a descent group who nonetheless shared that group’s subsection identity. The allocation of subsections to ancestral heroes and their sites put the brakes on fortuitous conception. Men were somewhat discouraged from pursuing extensive knowledge linked to a subsection different from their own. As Makarinja’s case shows, it was not impossible to gain custodianship but nonetheless a difficult task. Why? Subsection identities inherited through fathers and also assigned to ancestral heroes and their sites encouraged the idea that paternity and sibling status should coincide with emplaced gestation, that is, that a man and his patrilineal descendants were also linked directly with an ancestor and his place. Assigning subsections to ancestral heroes and sites that were also inherited through the patrifiliations of a (sometime) resident group allowed ideas of human-to-human inheritance to redefine the generative powers of the land and make them more predictable. The implication was that someone who was not a “father,” “brother,” or “son” of a resident descent group could not really embody the ancestral figure of that site. In the event, the proposal would be that the ancestor’s section had changed, but such a proposal was a rare occurrence (see T. Strehlow 1947, 92–93). These issues surrounding subsections encouraged the consolidation of descent groups focused on major sites, and myth in fact assisted this. Traveling ancestors could use one of two means to maintain some consistency between their subsection identity and that of a series of sites. Coming to the limit of a country invested with his own subsection identity, an ancestor could travel underground, surfacing again only when he reached the country of another group with the same identity (see T. Strehlow 1947, 149). According to Arrernte with whom I spoke, ancestral birds achieved the same effect by flying and alighting but only in appropriate places. This

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practice gave men the option of pursuing knowledge in quite distant places but preferably in ones with which they shared a subsection identity. Alternatively, some ancestors, and especially the native cat (tyelpe), traveled in hordes that contained a variety of subsection pairs. People in different countries took up aspects of the story in their locale that involved those heroes with the same subsection identity. Yet again, interlinking stories of different heroes that engaged each other at a certain point—a caterpillar (yeperenye) encountering a wild dog (irtnwere), for instance—could provide events at sites that involved two or more subsection pairs. In this case, men from any one subsection identity might tell the story and also aspire to custodianship of the site (T. Strehlow 1947, 151–53). Men accumulated portfolios of knowledge through fortuitous connections and became ingkarte, respected cognoscenti, ritual bosses. Such knowledge was a route to status and power. In times of regional stress such as drought or the disruption brought by invasion, this diversification also had another role. A ritual leader and other men of more modest attainment could act as a bridge for the relocation of a group. They could either facilitate integration into the ritual life of a clan elsewhere or take over the rite of a place that had been deserted. One major route was through mother’sside knowledge that could ultimately see a country change its subsection identity (see also Dussart 2000; Povinelli 1993a). Another way was through “following up” a track, which might involve a man advancing his knowledge along a track from a site within his estate to one beyond it at which he was conceived. Rather than relocating as such, the latter case often entailed extending country, a common phenomenon among Western Arrernte in the wake of invasion (see also J. Morton 1997a). Diversification in these cases led to new consolidations. While these options remained, it is fair to observe that in Carl Strehlow’s time, at least modest endogenous change was probably occurring. The subsection system, brought from the northeast, had secured itself among the Western Arrernte and possibly was moving south among Pertame with their four-section system (McConvell 1985; Dousset 2005). With its interlinked identities for ancestors, sites, and human agents, this system helped consolidation. As T. G. H. Strehlow might have put it, the forces of inheritance were gaining over reincarnation, and with it, an emphasis on the social inheritance of sites was perhaps gaining over conception. It was in this context of modest endogenous change that pastoralism came to Central Australia. Before I address this historical juncture, I propose to discuss two other texts. They address, first, conception and inheritance, and second, the dynamic relations between diverse links to country and consolidation.

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Two Other Relevant Texts In a discussion of Western Desert societies, Annette Hamilton offers an account of male Aboriginal rite as the work involved in the reproduction of species (see also J. Morton 1987a). Indigenous culture proposed that ritual performance was more important than the foraging of women for maintaining sustenance. It was men’s ritual, after all, that reproduced the species. Among Western Arrernte, and others whom Hamilton cites, the term used for “work” today—urrkapeme—was used once mainly to describe ritual preparation. Hamilton uses this cultural fact to query taken-for-granted distinctions between religion and economics. Was it really the case in indigenous society that women did “most of the work” while men controlled important ceremony? Was that how life was experienced? Hamilton’s argument bears on Stanner’s (1965a) distinction between bounded ritual estates and (relatively) unbounded ranges for foraging. In traditional society, did Aboriginal people classify man-land relations that way, as either ritual or economic? She also compares the work of Berndt (1966) and Tindale (1972) on Western Desert societies. She uses their material to question whether dialect variation defined territorial units. Might this variation have reflected shifting relations between groups that were not in fact confined to one univocal area (Hamilton 1998, 100)?16 The Pitjantjatjara whom Hamilton discusses have borning rather than conception beliefs. “A person gains his/her totemic affiliation by being born at a particular place, near a particular waterhole.” Ceremonial rights come through this form of emplacement rather than through father. Nonetheless, Hamilton proposes that, “symbolically, this is a sort of patrilineal descent.” “The ‘father’ is not the real father, but instead the totemic species whose essence is reincarnated in the individual born along his track.” Hamilton argues that the carrying capacity of Pitjantjatjara country could not support the type of patrilineal inheritance that the Arrernte seemed to have. Among Pitjantjatjara, fathers may have wished to return home when a birth was imminent, but this was an “ideal” that could not have been fulfilled “in the majority of cases” (Hamilton 1998, 101, 103). Rather, fathers sought continuity in ritual inheritance by sons having their borning places along the same track. If a wife and mother had received her own totemic affiliation from somewhere else along that track, this would also consolidate identity. A son could engage the knowledge of his father either through fathers or through mothers’ brothers. If it were feasible for a group to reside mainly around father’s place as well, doing so would guarantee father-to-son inheritance.

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Hamilton’s discussion is geared to interrogate Stanner’s view of manland relations. For people in arid zones, such as Pitjantjatjara, who lack marked patriliny and a subsection system, Stanner’s range and estate seem to collapse into one or else estates become mainly egocentric.17 Again, track rather than territory is the main source of identity, and language or dialect acts mainly to section tracks which do not define expanses of territory as such. Hamilton (1998) writes of Pitjantjatjara social organization in ways that resemble accounts of the Pintupi written by Myers (1986, 1998). Moreover, her comparative touchstone is the Western Arrernte as described by T. G.H. Strehlow (1965). In pursuit of this comparison, Hamilton constructs two ideal types, a “place-based” and a “father-based” system. She also arranges them in a temporal sequence shaped, perhaps, by ecology (see also T. Strehlow 1965, 1999). At one time, she suggests, marriages were organized mainly along Dreaming tracks between local groups who were geographically distant. They thereby maintained “totem-group endogamy” and “local [residential] group exogamy.” Regional identity “along the same track” was realized “at the level of dialect.” This is a place-based system, but one that “strains” toward patriliny (Hamilton 1998, 104). With this remark she suggests, like Myers, that influential men in placed-based systems would have found it “congenial” nonetheless to “pass knowledge” on to their sons (Myers 1998, 41–42). Hamilton continues the story: At a later date, “men . . . claim to ‘own’ these countries whereas men born elsewhere on the track do not.” Rites in cult activity are defined through descent. Patriliny has overcome borning or conception place as the preeminent entry into rite. Ritual inheritance differentiates people and countries, rather than dialect difference that has now lost its previous function. There is (indirect) exchange of women, but because the inheritance of rite is patrifilial, the totemic affiliation of wives has less importance for the descent group. Hamilton states, “The likelihood is that a section or subsection system will be well integrated” (Hamilton 1998, 105). With these remarks she points to the dynamics fostering consolidation implied in Strehlow’s ethnography. Using data drawn from various sources, Tim Ingold (1986) presents another view on the manner in which this consolidation—we might call it male corporatism—emerged. While some of his assumptions are problematic, he has an important point to make.18 Ingold puts his argument in terms of “territory” and “tenure.” He proposes that, among hunter-gatherers, territorial behavior should be seen as “communication” while tenure should be seen as “appropriation” (Ingold 1986, 133). Territory, in Ingold’s terms, involves cooperation in the management of resources across a larger terrain

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of which the territories are parts. Tenure, on the other hand, is concerned with authority and identity among subjects. It involves alienation and also inheritance. “Tenure is about the ways in which a resource locale is worked or bound into the biography of the subject, or into the developmental trajectory of . . . groups” (Ingold 1986, 137; see also Peterson 1969). This appropriation of a place in order to bound and define a subject through time is different from the maintenance of territory. Ingold notes that in foraging practice, the bounding of territory is fairly weak. Provided appropriate etiquettes of approach are followed and appropriate relations established that define in any particular case hosts and guests, travel across boundaries is quite common and unproblematic. Why then is a sense of boundary maintained? Territoriality, Ingold notes, is used to develop, in a cooperative way, knowledge of “dispersed flora and fauna” across a terrain. No local group can sustain a uniform depth of knowledge for the total area on which they need to rely for sustenance. Territoriality addresses this issue and also is a means of predicting where others are in that larger region. It allows a group to find out efficiently to what degree resources in a less-familiar place have been exploited (Ingold 1986, 143). And as foraging required cooperation among women, much of this communication was between them (see Hamilton 1987). Ingold argues that the very existence of territorial boundaries “is predicated on the possibility of movement across them.” The boundaries of tenure, however, “demarcate zones of exclusion” (Ingold 1986, 156). For Ingold, though, these zones of exclusion were sites or sections of track rather than land area (Ingold 1986, 147–50). People lay claim to a length of track or to “clusters” of sites or to “a given constellation of sites.” He notes that even T. G. H. Strehlow’s account of the Arrernte refers to knowledge of “handover points” along this or that track rather than to land area boundaries as such (Ingold 1986, 149). Robert Layton, writing of the Pitjantjatjara, and Olive Pink, of the Arrernte, both remark that a sense of particular country radiated out from sites rather than being defined by a boundary (Layton 1982, 19; Pink 1936). Layton also refers to these sites as “linked to other sites by corridors along which people moved” (Layton 1982, 19). Gidjingali, Lester Hiatt observes, confirm they are in a different estate only on approaching particular sites (Hiatt 1965, 16). Therefore Ingold proposes that in fact when Australians speak of “country X” and “country Y,” what they are speaking of is “the world as seen from” place X or Y, appropriated through inheritance of knowledge and defining a subject. All such tenure involves “exclusivity of access devolving upon specific persons or groups, the casting of the object in a temporal continuum, the imputation to it of creative

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potency and, as a corollary, its position as the focus of regenerative ritual” (Ingold 1986, 157). For the purposes of this discussion, Ingold’s most important point concerns the relation between tenure and territory in Aboriginal society. Ingold points out that territory is the “instrument” of the appropriation involved in tenure (Ingold 1986, 141). In order for Aboriginal people to sustain identity through tracks and sites, they must also live within their environment. For effective foraging, they must find diverse and self-sustaining ways of reproducing cooperative knowledge. As T. G. H. Strehlow has argued in addition, song knowledge in the Arrernte environment was mythical knowledge but also had embedded in it knowledge of the environment (1970). In short, tenure and territory are not the same but actually entail one another. Ingold’s findings amplify Hamilton’s account. Even a place-based system was one in which fathers, and mothers too, sought to ensure identity with their children through seeking a viable form of tenure in which inheritance through father may have been an ideal but in which there was emphasis on conception along a Dreaming track. The system, as Hamilton writes, was “straining” toward patriliny and toward the correlative realization of territory and tenure (Hamilton 1998, 104). A system of tenure is strengthened by a more settled life on better resourced land, a more prominent notion of inheritance, and subsection identity among ancestors, country, and a ritual descent group. Nonetheless, if the society remains a hunter-gatherer one, this strengthened tenure still requires territoriality; “patterns of associative interaction” and especially women’s foraging that maintains regular sustenance and, at least occasionally, fortuitous conception. Strehlow’s data provide another reason why even systems located on relatively well-watered land, such as the Western Arrernte’s, might have sustained a creative tension between diversification and consolidation; among hunter-gatherers, a reason why Dreaming knowledge did not become simply local and contained within estates. Strehlow points to the knowledge-carrying capacity of groups, an analogue to the carrying capacity of land. He proposes a maximum population of three thousand Arrernte at the time of settlement. He excludes all those who were unable to “carry” the tywerrenge of major sites, such as women, young men, and novices. He proposes a remaining number of about four hundred, possibly only half of whom were true ingkarte. He also remarks on the harshness of terrain, even for the Arrernte, and the periodic impact of drought (T. Strehlow 1997, 1–2). How was the impressive corpus of knowledge recorded in part by the Strehlows, father and son, actually reproduced? Son Ted Strehlow answers this question in his account of Rauwiraka’s diversified portfolio of knowledge

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that clearly overlapped with others. Strehlow focuses on three routes to diversification: engagement with the group that controls knowledge of a conception site, engagement with one’s own ritual descent group, and finally, engagement with mother’s patrilineal group, the MoBr having important roles in a man’s initiation. Strehlow remarks, “the mother usually came from an area twenty or fifty miles away, sometimes even further” (T. Strehlow 1997, 3). In Aranda Traditions he also indicates special circumstances in which a man might seek to inherit the personal, conception tywerrenge of a mother or father, especially if the man had ingkarte status (Strehlow 1947, 133–39). This was pursuit of knowledge at the highest level. A further important feature of this system was the hierarchy of knowledge involved in the maintenance of major sites. In part this hierarchy came through the arcane language used for especially secret couplets of song, in part through obfuscation in the imparting of knowledge to those of modest rank (see T. Strehlow 1965, 70–71, 312–13, 197–98; 1947, 146–47). It was this hierarchy that made knowledge something that could be kept and given away. Knowledge was alienated but also shared, and this sharing, like territorial cooperation, was insurance against natural disasters or those wrought by human beings (see also H. Morphy 1991, 69).

The Impact of Settlement This discussion places the importance of conception and visiting in a larger context of man-land relations among Western Arrernte. These factors fostered diversification but led to consolidation as well. It is also clear that there was one factor in addition to environment that promoted consolidation: the way in which ancestral heroes, sites, and ritual estates came to share a subsection identity. This factor strengthened a shift toward the exclusionary inheritance of rights that might define a ritual descent group. My contention is that European invasion and the advent of pastoralism further weakened the dynamic of diversification. These historical factors undermined both ritual exchange and long-distance regional cooperation in foraging. They also weakened conception beliefs. Concurrently, pastoral settlement and its support in the state’s legal system strengthened consolidation. These changes produced a similar tendency among both indigenous and nonindigenous observers: a more static view of ritual descent groups (that became a European patrilineal model) and countries (which became more sharply bounded ritual estates)—the neatly sectioned patchwork quilt that T. G. H. Strehlow produced in his 1965 map (see map 6).

Map 6. Western Arrernte estates, circa 1949. Adapted from T. Strehlow 1965.

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I have noted already that the tendency of the Arrernte to congregate around European settlements—be they the mission or pastoral stations— undermined conception’s significance. This impact of new resource sources and restricted travel also affected visiting and patterns of reliance on relatives. Visiting was less often for the purpose of foraging and more often for sharing rations and possibly cash. Sources of food and goods became more centralized, and relatives would come to live in closer proximity. Over time, these changed social patterns reduced knowledge of the land, which became “emptied out.” European procedures had other impacts. The manner in which the mission became a refuge from the likes of Constable Willshire and disgruntled pastoralists also taught the Arrernte about European boundaries and what it was to be on one person’s “block” or another’s (see T. Strehlow 1977). T. G. H. Strehlow describes one case graphically: Born about 1867, [Talku] organised raids upon cattle belonging to Tempe Downs Station at the beginning of the century. A police party surprised these raiders one day south of Ltalaltuma, and fired upon them when they sought to evade capture. Talku was hit by a bullet from a police tracker’s rifle which passed through his body and emerged again without apparently injuring any vital organs. His upper thigh bone was, however, shattered. He was carried to Hermannsburg, a distance of some twenty-five miles. His tough constitution and unconquerable courage carried him through this ordeal. After being nursed back to health at Hermannsburg, he showed his gratitude to my father by providing him with detailed information on Loritja [Luritja] totemic rites, sacred songs and social organisation. (T. Strehlow 1971, xxi)

Not only the Lutheran lease around Hermannsburg but also the Finke River Mission’s base in Alice Springs has been referred to as the “mission block”; the latter, a place where Arrernte could camp with impunity while visiting hospitalized relatives. This was at a time when only “half-castes” could normally gain camping rights within the town precinct (see also Rowse 1998b, 95). It may be that through such practices the term “block” as legally bounded space lodged in Arrernte and other forms of Aboriginal English. McGrath points out that in northern Australia, around Wave Hill, successful claimants under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act “decided to prove . . . legal ownership by building fences around land granted.” One observed, “We got to go and build a fence around our place . . . that’s gotta be a block there, belong to Mudbura” (McGrath 1987,

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163). This is not to say that prior to settlement the Arrernte and others like them had no sense of boundaries. Ritual restrictions defined areas of spatial exclusion surrounding sites (see Munn 2003). For the uninitiated, women, children, and strangers of either sex to enter these excluded zones could mean death. Nonetheless, this type of spatial exclusion was not necessarily identical with a mundane piece of land in which, perhaps, the magicality is invested in the boundary rather than a site. Today, Western Arrernte quite commonly refer to estates as “blocks,” a different block from the one meaning obstruction or “barrier” on a track, arrkngerte, that once marked the handover point for song and ceremony (T. Strehlow 1965, 138). This creeping hegemony of English has had apparently harmless complements; for example, boss, worker, manager, and mob, each with a usage linked to pastoralism. Spell is another term, used to refer to a break from work. Local historian Bryan Bowman writes of Central Australians that they might work for “three to six months or even longer” and then “go bush” for “a spell” (Bowman n.d., 17). A Western Arrernte man of the generation fully employed in pastoralism gave me a Dreaming story of a traveling ancestor who periodically “spelled” or “took a spell” along his track at various places that became sacred sites. The use of English metaphor to establish homology this time renders the ancient past in terms that engage a postsettlement present. Ancestors “spelled” as they travelled across “blocks” of country. Other material and social aspects of pastoralism may have influenced ideas about country. It is likely that the centralized layout of a homestead on a block as represented on a map of pastoral leases, the lease being a piece of pepe, all worked to assimilate Arrernte understandings of pmere (country/camp), pmere kwethete (a country’s big place/site), and tywerrenge (sacra) as things acquired through a father’s line rather than in more mediated and differentiated ways as part of a complex system. A sense of preeminent patriliny would have been reinforced by the missionaries’ penchant for genealogy taking. It was not only Carl and Ted Strehlow who recorded extensive genealogies generally referenced to apical ancestors who were male. Record keepers of births, deaths, and marriages at Hermannsburg also collected material. Ultimately, this information was put together in a “birthday book” of thirty-eight “families” of the Western Arrernte, listed according to patrilineal descent. The forerunner of this book was the type of listing of families that Friedrich Albrecht produced in 1931 in his report to the chief protector on mortality in the 1920s drought (F. Albrecht 1931b). “Father’s” or “FaFa’s country” seems to be a common phenomenon throughout Australia where man-land relations are concerned. Hamilton

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captures it well with her account of systems that “strained” toward patriliny (see also Sutton 1995). At the same time, I have proposed that European culture also had an impact, which amounted to something more than Radcliffe-Brown’s intellectual influence on T. G. H. Strehlow and other anthropologists (Radcliffe-Brown 1930; cf. T. Strehlow 1965).19 Radcliffe-Brown, Strehlow, and others were influenced by taken-for-granted notions of private property, genealogy, corporate group, and inheritance rights when they produced their anthropological models. Moreover, Strehlow’s account was also influenced by something else: the manner in which pastoralism and its practice of property rights had in part and implicitly redefined Western Arrernte understandings of themselves. The historical experience of settlement simplified and also interpreted a previous dynamic system. This European hegemony continued to ramify into the 1990s when officers of the Central Land Council (CLC) sought records of countries mapped by Lutherans and sallied forth, once again, to take genealogies.

Back to the Present All these factors bore on Joyce’s case. The identity she claimed as a lhere pirnte person still had salience, but not within a land claim. This identity, summed in Joyce’s beat, relied on the diversity of visiting and, as I will show, on a diversity of male portfolio knowledge supported by conception. Both these dimensions of a classical system, dimensions that allowed flexibility in times of stress, have been sidelined through that system’s rerendering in the context of sedentary life. Where European practice is concerned, its nature is best described in terms of a corporatism that entails categories concerning land and private-property rights and genealogical inheritance with a male bias. These are jural matters in indigenous life also backed by the state and central to the land rights act. Even the clause that deals with issues of traditional use is not intended as such to capture the issue of range or beat. Yet it is important to note that among all those who came in to Hermannsburg, some families “shifted” successfully and others did not. In successful shifts, either people have taken over custodianship of sites or settled, properly resourced, as guests on the country of hosts. The continuity here is that, as in the past, shifting is a political act and depends on alliances, often involving male knowledge. In Joyce’s case, neither her affines nor her children addressed her needs as she had hoped. This may have been due in part to widowhood and to the absence of patrifilially related men around Ntaria. Joyce’s claim was based on the standing of her father and her brother—

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on their conception site and in particular on their status as ingkarte for Jikala. In a remarkable incident, Joyce proposed that her father fulfilled the criterion for “ownership” of the site. Pressing her for a reason why Jikala was her father’s place, Joyce observed that in her father’s generation people asked his permission to go there—even including those who now own the country (block, estate) on which Jikala is located. He was the one to “ask.” Just as Myers relates of the Pintupi farther west, Joyce proposed here that the true test of custodianship was the right to be asked for access to a place or its defining songs and ceremony. Myers observes, “Ownership consists primarily in control over the stories, objects and ritual associated with the . . . ancestors . . . at a particular place. . . . Since knowledge and control of country are already in the hands of ‘owners,’ converting claims to an interest in a named place requires convincing the owners to include one in knowledge and activity” (Myers 1988, 41). Joyce’s father passed this knowledge on to his son. Having acquired a tywerrenge for the site, the CLC acknowledged this when they offered the tywerrenge back to him. All things considered, and to the consternation of others, Joyce’s brother declined the offer. He was not prepared to defend a broader claim to country on the basis of his undisputed knowledge for this “out-of-estate” site. Other factors also influenced him. He no longer resided around Ntaria, living mainly in Alice Springs or with his second wife farther south. He had left Ntaria in early life due to a ritual transgression and then the death of his first wife in a car accident. Though not the driver of the car, his survival made him responsible. In addition to these issues, there were two more general ones: Among Western Arrernte, conception even accompanied by knowledge now has an ambiguous status as a basis for attachment to place. Related to this issue, the status of ingkarte—ritual cognoscente for a place—has become obscure both in law and in practice. Another term, pmerekwerteye, or “country owner,” is the preferred one. With the attenuation of Arrernte ceremonial, presence around a place (“looking after it”) and social inheritance now play a central role in defining rights, as does public consensus. Much of Arrernte history is reflected in the simple fact that ingkarte, the term for a ritual cognoscente, is used most often now for Lutheran pastors. Joyce’s brother said, “I cannot let go of my father’s country.” The country he referred to was Lalkara. He requested only to have his interest in Jikala “recognised,” and that the land commissioner did. And yet in the family chats around this issue, there was a lingering echo from the past and the roles that conception once played. Joyce and her brother’s subsection (“skin”) was kemarre from the generational pair pwerrele/kemarre. The country around Lalkara from which the rrekere

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(duck) flew up the Finke River is also pwerrele/kemarre. A factor in various disputes around Ntaria is T. G. H. Strehlow’s record that country around and north of Ntaria, including Jikala, in his time was pwerrele/kemarre. Today this area is subsumed within other estates that are ngale/mpetyane and peltharre/kngwarreye, respectively (see maps 4 and 6). However, the rrekere from Lalkara seemed to recognize a former pwerrele/kemarre identity for this part of the Finke. As Joyce’s brother told me, these pwerrerle/ kemarre birds alighted on the northern side of Jikala and, after they had rested, marched on down the Finke some way past Ntaria where they took off again, flying south. In short, they alighted at a place that shared its skin with Lalkara, the place where they came out and to which they returned.

Conclusion One point of this discussion, and perhaps the most important one, is to underline the complex knowledge system whereby Western Arrernte invested value in place, gave each other identity, and maintained a regional sociality over time in a harsh environment. Their human sociocultural achievement was considerable. Australian histories of first contact and colonialism, and even forms of frontier violence—about which there is much debate among the historians—remain incomplete and even misleading without due reference to these ethnographic issues. The creeping destruction of this knowledge system and its various social concomitants has been the greatest violence to Western Arrernte life. A second major point concerns land rights and land claim procedures. My argument might be taken to suggest the “cunning of recognition” on the part of the liberal state that Povinelli (2002) writes about: Land rights are granted as a political gesture to cultural difference, but the state, through its governance, acknowledges difference only in order to assimilate it.20 This view has an element of truth and yet it lacks appropriate context. It is clear and sad but predictable perhaps that the legal system of a nation-state that has usurped an indigenous people would not and could not duplicate in its jural forms their system of man-land relations. This is part of the structural violence that European invasion and marginalization brought. But is the matter simply one of “incommensurability” and a dominant state? Is history as simple as that, or as easily judged? Between the time of invasion and the late twentieth century, people like the Western and Southern Arrernte and the Luritja have changed. There could be no better evidence for this change than Christianity’s impact and the diminishing significance of conception. Christianity’s own creationism

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contested the Western Arrernte’s. Arrernte notions of conception, though, were also contested by sedentary life and the attenuation of practical and ritual knowledge it brought. Again, it is fair to say that younger generations adept in the “talk” of land claims no longer have a precise sense of “what the system really was” three or four generations back.21 Using homology and metaphor, constructed continuities elide real difference in Western Arrernte experience. “Country,” or pmere, is an example in itself. Today the Western Arrernte word is used for “camp” and “known place” (see also Myers 1986, 55), but also for a house and an outstation block. As Cowlishaw puts it, “relationships with . . . place . . . can no longer be expressed unchanged” (1999, 15). In fact, my own use of recorded genealogies to suggest a continuity in practice prior to 1888, when Joyce’s grandfather Tjitjinana (Phillipus) was born, is itself a cultural non sequitur. At this point, Joyce’s own memory failed, and for the purpose of debate I interposed the written record. But Western Arrernte do the same. Who prevails partly or wholly in this circumstance, and who does not, is a matter for ethnographic analysis at that point where local history intersects with the state and its legal procedures. At least two issues bear on this. On the one hand, through land rights Western Arrernte have sought to take control of their history. Land rights do acknowledge difference, and few Western Arrernte would regret that fact. On the other hand, both this control and acknowledgment are mediated by the superior power of the state. The Western Arrernte are subject to “the law of the land,” and that is the state’s law now. As a consequence, man-land relations under the land rights act are rationalized in Weber’s sense. The issue of land rights becomes a modern state institution that grants rights and also brings intense local politics. This is the context for Joyce’s experience. Notwithstanding the benefits of land rights legislation, this modern form cannot reinstate the system that invasion undermined. As a consequence, Joyce and others were dislocated, their identity obscured. The significant redefinition of man-land relations and, integral to them, the value of place is not the only change among Western Arrernte brought by invasion and entrenched by modernity. Kin relations in a cash and commodity world have brought other changes in idiom and practice. Chapter 5 describes these relations.

G chapter 5

Living with Kin

I

asked my friend Joyce how lhentere (“whitefellas,” or white people) are different from relhe (Western Arrernte). She said that whitefellas don’t “look after” relhe. “They only look after theirself. They’re goin’ fast all the time. They’re always leavin’.” She made a definite link between being locality-based and “lookin’ after,” a euphemism for kin relations. Joyce implied that all sociality assumes the form of kin relations and that to come to a place, stay for a while, and then leave permanently precludes this sociality. “Lookin’ after” or “caring for” requires both being emplaced and the passage of time. Women look after kids and expect that they will “work for” them, nwerneke urrkapeme. To say of someone that “he only looks after ’imself” is to say that he or she is a poor relative. In the case of a grandmother, though, it means that her grandchildren have grown up, that she is too old to care for kids, and that no one cares for her. As a result, she only looks after herself, a state described as kunye, poignant or pitiful; one in which she keeps “walkin’ round” to visit relatives and might be said to have “only her dogs as friends.” When women consider kinship and age, they use this representation. It reflects one circumstance among others of being at the margins of kin and at the margins of sociality itself. This imagery was employed by Joyce to characterize lhentere. It is a common remark among Western Arrernte that although they worked for the Lutherans, in not paying wages and ultimately leaving Ntaria, the Lutherans did not look after them. Rather than succumbing to dependency, this observation reveals an Arrernte precept. When they came, the Lutherans made Ntaria their place. They became its powerful presence, and as a consequence, they should have looked after the Arrernte in just the way that the Western Arrernte looked after them in the early years of settlement. In Joyce’s view, not only missionaries but whitefellas generally 130

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live beyond these forms of reciprocal service. This is a pitiful life but also a confronting one for the Western Arrernte. It makes lhentere seem like beings who don’t know how to be. A remark in another domain raises comparable issues among men. As recorded in the minutes of a meeting at the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC), a Western Arrernte man, also an outstation leader, “said that outstation people should not have to work on building jobs at their outstations—that was white man’s work.”1 The remark was made in the context of task allocations for the Western Arrernte’s Community Development Employment Project (CDEP; see Sanders 1993). Since 1989, the scheme had been maintained as a central part of outstation economy. The statement was taken as an index of race relations in the area, repeated in various camps by people on both sides.2 Some white employees treated it as evidence of the fact that “blackfellas don’t want to work” and that the Western Arrernte are “spoilt.” They contended, “The mission did too much for them.” Among Western Arrernte, the remark was remembered as pertaining to a particular lhentere who insulted men unwittingly. He rode roughshod over the ideas of older men, unable to “hear” or understand what they were saying. He did not reflect on orders of authority within or beyond the resource center. He did not understand that service should be reciprocated. He thereby made both senior and junior men feel awkward—or ashamed for him. Ultimately the lhentere’s behavior led to a clash with Arrernte employees at TORC. Unable to comprehend the anger he caused, this white employee left. The remark was made by an Arrernte man who within his own kin group stood in a subordinate position to a neighboring outstation leader. The latter man was older than the former and also the son of an elder brother to the former’s father. Reputedly, this neighbor had more extensive ritual knowledge and, with the help of his wife, had been successful in gaining resources for his place. Proximity to the senior man placed the speaker under pressure. He saw his role as “looking after” or being “boss” for his close kin (see Anderson 1998). He had worked hard to acquire a small cattle herd and repair the yards on his place. Especially on his own estate, he did not identify as a welfare recipient, as someone who could be ordered about by a lhentere. Fearing humiliation, he sought to confer humiliation back. For Joyce, the practice of relatedness remained a fundamental given of life, a crucial coordinate of every person and of her identity. For the outstation leader, relatedness additionally was a central value of leadership. Given a conflict between pleasing the state through its employment programs and presenting himself as an authoritative relative, he chose the latter course. He would not demean his status by becoming the navvy of a man with no

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Map 7. Ntaria Township, circa 1998. By 2006, Middle East and West camps had been razed. New building is proceeding.

respect in Arrernte life. Even while emplaced identity in the Western Arrernte region has been rearranged by European settlement, the role of kin relatedness in defining subjects, social context, and the strategies of daily life has remained crucial. Relatedness in itself becomes a homology. As the mission population expanded, the orientation of camps echoed the directions from which people came in to the mission. This has meant that over time, the same forms of kin link between Ntaria camps (see map 7), which were once links between different countries, have been established and acted out. People walk around the settlement where once they walked around a region. Similarly, the values and use accorded to portable things, the cash and commodities of modernity, are reinterpreted by Western Arrernte largely as media of relatedness (see Myers 1988). Relatedness interprets both media of value, portable things as well as place. At the same time, the contexts in which relatedness is practiced have changed. As a consequence, the way Western Arrernte think and talk about kin is also evolving over time. I have sought to trace this process through the metaphors that people employ to speak of kin relations. In this regard, my account suggests a shift from a focus on emplacement to a greater en-

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gagement with a world of cash and commodities. It is a slow transition, and an uneven one. Yet as this change unfolds, it is significant enough to precipitate conflict and a violence of the everyday. To begin with, and as I will elaborate, now more relatives live in close proximity than was ever the case before—even in mission times. The demands of kin relatedness, of relatives on each other, therefore have proliferated as a lived experience. Again, as the things that can be demanded grow, relations between relatives, and between generations, become more prone to ramifying conflicts that cannot be resolved. A multiplicity of things circulating in settlements that are more populous than ever before intensifies the practice of relatedness. This situation was in part the making of the malnutrition described in chapter 3 and also of fights between lhentere and relhe over service delivery. Moreover, in the context of an economy supported mainly by government transfers and centralized at two major points—Ntaria and TORC—the resource politics between family groups has been heightened. As Ntaria becomes again the main resource hub, this issue will persist (see chapters 7 and 8). Modern conditions of resource management more than past traditional propensities bring conflict into relatedness. In the discussion that follows, I propose to sketch an interpretation of the various dimensions of relatedness that inform Western Arrernte life. I discuss fields of kin and the issue of descent. Then I address local groups and ego-centered networks of kin. Along the way, I note changing idioms of relatedness. Finally, I provide two examples of ways in which a modern economy with its cash, commodities, and resource competition affects kin relatedness. One example concerns the impact of circulating “things” on the relations between individual relatives. The other concerns the fashion in which resource politics unfolds, as an intra- and interfamily affair, in the outstation milieu. Many of these topics in the area of “kinship” mark a hotly contested terrain of anthropological debate (see Austin-Broos 2003). Rather than privilege that debate here, I focus on another important theme: the manner in which relatedness remains embedded in contemporary Western Arrernte life even as this condition brings conflict and violence. Integral to this issue is the fact that relatedness is used now not simply as the medium for social life but also as a buffer against a larger and alien society.

Fields of Kin and the Issue of Descent The term that Western Arrernte often use to describe their kin is rame rame, which they generally translate as “descendants” or the offspring of a person. Additionally, the term is offered as a Western Arrernte equivalent to

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Figure 12. An example of multiple kinship identities.

“relative” or “family,” often in the usage ramerame wurle or family group.3 Rame rame, rendered as “descendants,” is also defined as “those who have not been before.” It is commonly used as a term for “children,” but its reference can also extend to include relatives of the same and proximate generations who share an identity through filiation.4 This latter rendering of rame rame reflects a stress on “strings” of relatedness rather than mere lateral relations (see also Keen 1995, 516–17). Rame rame is used to refer to living kin a person knows of or would acknowledge as relatives if appropriately reminded. Many of these kin would be involved in that person’s network. It is quite explicit that rame rame can be traced in a nonunilineal fashion through both mothers and fathers. Rame rame are cognatic kin not traced to a sole antecedent. Rather, rame rame refers to relatives who are known or believed to share identity by virtue of a common antecedent; for example, same father’s father, same mother, or same mother’s mother’s father (also see J. Morton 1992b, 68). Generally, this is described as having, for instance, meye nyente, or “one mother.” In this form, a person can assume different contextual identities: for example (see figure 12), one mother with Z; one father’s mother with X and Y; or one father’s father with W, X, and Y. In Arrernte English, people say, “Rame rame is a string that we know.” This comment intends a contrast between tracing filiations from a shared antecedent and merely conferring a subsection identity, or “skin,” in order to assimilate someone into a group (see Dousset 2005). “Skin,” a woman said, “is just leading like a little string,” meaning that such a link is not always grounded in known relations of shared filiation. Subsections sort kin into one of eight classes organized in generational pairs and into intermarrying moieties. The subsection one inherits from one’s father designates

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preferred marriage partners and provides an automatic identity. In addition, subsections allow an “as if” designation for an outsider. Providing an outsider with a skin or subsection name establishes a relevant form of relatedness/identity between people who were previously strangers. Then they can respond to each other as relatives and exchange services. Irrketye is the Arrernte term for a string made from human hair, and interestingly, between women, it is a popular present on a departure. Henderson and Dobson report for the Central Arrernte that the umbilical cord, or ayepe, of a baby was “placed in a pouch attached to a . . . hair string necklace so that the child would not mourn separation from its mother” (1994, 343). Yet when Arrernte themselves talk about kinship, irrketye is not a common term. The English term string is a general description provided for non-Arrernte speakers. It refers to the various forms of relatedness that together constitute a field of kin or filial relations. These relations can be marked by the dyadic suffix -nhenge. Two such examples are the filiations nyenhenge and menhenge. They refer to the relations between individuals in adjacent generations, to father-child and mother-child pairs, respectively. If the relation spoken of is between a plurality of children and a father, or a plurality of children and their mother, the relational suffix becomes -nhengenhenge (see also Green 1998).5 The doubled suffix is also used to designate a group that shares a father’s father (FaFa) and his country. Today these terms are described by young Western Arrernte as “old time,” or ritually relevant terms not used a lot today. It is common for people to use the Arrernte English terms father’s side and mother’s side instead. Father’s side refers back at least to a FaFa, while mother’s side can refer to a “string” of women that has interlinked moieties through marriage. These English terms are also used to identify the first link in a nonunilineal “string.” For example, a person claiming a shared identity through mother’s father will describe the other person as a “mother’s side” relative. This talk about identity in terms of strings and shared antecedents describes who relatives are. It is also the way in which landholding groups are defined. Among Western Arrernte these groups have a patrilineal bias, a manifest tendency over time that is stated in the form of a rule (Bourdieu 1977, 29).6 The jural core of this notion lies in the fact that ideally ancestral design should be passed through a FaFa’s line in order to define preeminent right to country. And where, for instance, a landholding group has derived its position through a matrifilial link, there is nonetheless a tendency to try to render that group as patrilineal in subsequent generations, through residence and inherited knowledge. Fathers, as Myers notes, “are keen to

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favour sons,” and the sentiment is reinforced when a father has inherited from his father (1998, 102). Still, there are many exceptions to patriliny in Western Arrernte society today and to primogeniture in inheritance. Groups well organized in one generation fall into disarray in the next, and forceful individuals, both men and women, seek to activate other forms of filiation in their claims to an interest in country. A steadily decreasing number of Western Arrernte knowledgeable men has also increased this trend toward cognatic groups. More relatives with diverse forms of filiation must be included in fewer groups. Though in the past drought and other factors may have produced these conditions, the scale of change in the twentieth century has probably been unique (see also Yengoyan 1972). Addressing similar issues, Morton describes Western Arrernte descent as “partially cognatic,” though with a strong patrilineal bias reflected in “the ‘most equal’ men” who usually speak for a group (J. Morton 1997b,120; 1992b, 82–84). This produces what I am inclined to call patronymic families: groups identified with a father-son string and also bearing a family name that derives from a male antecedent.7 These families emerge from networks of relations in the context of land claims and large-scale resource politics. In these and like institutional contexts, they take the form of bounded groups. Their scale and current political nature make them eminently modern forms, linked with but different from the ritual descent groups of presettlement times.8 In this context, patriliny, such as it is, is best construed as a value or cultural fact important in its own right as a causal factor in events without being the numerical norm on all occasions of inheritance. As cultural fact it is sometimes expressed through a metaphor of tree trunk, seeds, or leaves. I recorded as a field note the following comment from a man concerning “out of estate” sites in which someone might have an interest beyond his or her estate: “Country, he said, is like a tree [pointing to one in an Alice Springs park]. It has a thick trunk and branches anchored in one place. It might be covered in leaves with seedpods as well. Wind can come and blow the tree. Seedpods can be blown from the tree to country somewhere else. The pods can strike a root and grow there, another little tree. But this one is not the same as the first tree. That’s the one, the first one.” This remark suggests the manner in which Arrernte kinship comes from an indigenous past and also looks to European institutions that now pervade Western Arrernte life. The remark represents patriliny in a way familiar to Europeans, as a “family tree” or “genealogy.” It also grounds this patrifiliation in country by identifying it with a track or story line. The tree with its seeds is filiation, but it is also a story track that generates “out of estate” sites.9

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This grounding of patriliny in country and story line is also reflected in the way that women draw lines in the sand to show the location of various groups across a region (see also Munn 1986, 68–79). This practice of drawing descendants on country is described as tyarrekngeme, meaning “to drag,” especially to drag a stick along the ground as a child might as a form of play. Such drawings, often done in the course of debates among women about owners and past migrations, are intended to inscribe descendants on country. They demonstrate that people are coming from a place, signaled by the adoption of a personal name that consists of the suffix -renye attached to a place-name: for example, Ltalaltuma (place) and Ltalaltumarenye (the name of a person coming from Ltalaltuma). People are also described as “dragging” antecedents, and these are patrilineal antecedents. The term is used in this type of construction: Ralph, Mildred, Wally, katye ingkerreke, tyarrekngeme Hezekial nthurrenge, or “Ralph, Mildred, Wally, all the children, are definitely dragging [or coming from] Hezekial.” Hezekial was these grown children’s father’s father. Two generations further back they were coming out of Ltalaltuma, or “dragging” Ltalaltumarenye. Coming from a place and dragging antecedents over country seems to ground filiations and also mark them as patrilineal. In a fashion similar to the tree and seedpods, “dragging” seems to enfold patriline and story line into one emplaced identity. Whereas the groups described as landholding groups are generally identified with patronymics and designs, places and subsection identities that in concert point toward a patronymic family, rame rame refers to a field of kin, some of whom may live together in a local group or associate through networks. Among the Western Arrernte, nyenhengenhenge and rame rame are complementary notions of different orders: the former is the identifying core of a descent group while the latter is a set of living descendants who practice relatedness. Just as family and patriliny draw on images of place and ritual estate, local groups and networks also bring characteristic metaphors.

Local Groups and Networks Western Arrernte offer rame rame or ramerame wurle to describe people camping together in a group; a set of kin “who have not been before” (see, e.g., the family group pictured in figure 13). It is just as usual, though, for people to be described in terms of a particular individual’s camp, or pmere, for example, Joyceke pmere, or Joyce’s camp.10 Camps or local groups are clusters of association shaped by overlapping networks of kin. To emphasize

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Figure 13. A Malbunka ramerame wurle (family group). Back row includes, from left, Bryan Malbunka; his father, Ralph; and Ralph’s brother-in-law Carl Inkamala. In front of Carl is his wife, Mildred Malbunka, with members of two descending generations in this Malbunka family. Photograph by author.

identity within such a group, people might say Nwerne nyente kwete, literally, “We are keeping on as one,” or figuratively, “We are all one family.” These groups can fluctuate from four or five to more than twenty people. The source of this fluctuation is most commonly the movements of young people or visits from siblings of the head or head’s spouse. Elderly parents or parents-in-law often augment a camp and can be passed between siblings. An example would be the camps of a sibling set mostly in their forties or fifties: Ralph, Mildred, Elfrieda, Rodney, and Wally, “all same father and mother.” They have four deceased brothers, one of whom died in infancy and another who died as a young man. The other two are survived by five adult children. Joyce, their mother, was still alive during the time that I camped with them. Their father had died some years previously. Ralph maintained his camp most of the time at his outstation on FaFa’s country about forty kilometers (roughly twenty-five miles) from Ntaria.11 His own particular country, outstation, and sites were part of a larger estate

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he shared with other descendants of his father’s brothers and sister.12 Ralph’s father was the youngest in a “same mother” sibling set. Ralph was therefore especially close to the sons of his father’s next elder brother and a son of their FaFa’s second, younger wife. A foster son of this second wife also resided with Ralph. Ralph and his group associated less with the children of his father’s more-senior siblings. Although he would describe these relatives as “close,” he was often in dispute with them and would say sometimes that he didn’t “know” them. On one occasion Ralph stopped his younger children attending a school at the outstation of his father’s senior brother’s son. As a result, the school lost its teacher. In addition to the relatives on his estate with whom he engaged, Ralph also interacted frequently with his two sisters, Mildred and Elfrieda, and his younger brother Wally. These three groups all resided in Ntaria. Mildred and Elfrieda, like their spouses, were service workers in the settlement. Wally resided with his wife’s mother, who was also the father’s sister’s daughter (FaSiDa) of his own mother. Avoidance made their spatial arrangements complex.13 Mildred often, Elfrieda less frequently, and Wally seldom visited their brother’s outstation. Ralph, however, visited them often with his wife and children and also looked after the sons of his other brother, Rodney, who was often in Alice Springs with his wife. The interaction among these groups was especially dense in Ntaria, though Mildred had ambitions to build a house at the outstation. In the 1990s, it had two houses, for Ralph and Rodney, though Rodney stayed only occasionally. Others visited more frequently. Ralph sometimes accommodated his affines, sometimes his mother’s brother and other patrifilial relatives. Occasionally his sisters brought grandchildren to the camp, and in the summer months, many relatives took up residence. Then the outstation’s population could expand to forty. On a weekly basis, Ralph’s network involved about seventy people.14 It had a significant patrifilial bias although it was not a network simply of patrifilial relatives. Because his brothers-in-law had their estates elsewhere, and Ralph had access to resource center support, he was expected to show consideration. In various everyday ways, he was expected to look after them. Joyce, Ralph’s mother, camped with one or another of these siblings who are all her children. She said that they were her close relatives because they were her children whereas she did not count most of their other patrifilial relatives as close. Neither did she associate with them. She looked after her late husband’s next elder brother and his wife when they were old and ailing, but with other in-laws she had little contact. In a society that favors

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father’s side, Joyce’s father had no brothers with issue, and her father’s father’s brothers (FaFaBrs) either left Central Australia or died in epidemics in the early twentieth century. Her own brother left Ntaria, having been involved in a ritual transgression and after the death of his wife. His children now align with their “mother’s [father’s] side.” Joyce’s mother’s father (MoFa) was white or part-white, and she took her reference point from her mother’s mother (MoMo) and that woman’s grandchildren—siblings and cousins to Joyce. Her network therefore involved many of the same camps as her son but also other camps in Ntaria and at various outstations where some of her southern relatives resided. Also included were relatives north at Larumba, an erstwhile cattle camp, and at Tempe Downs in the south, close by the Palmer River that joins the Finke. Beat and network coincided, though Joyce’s network was particularly dense around Ntaria. Where Joyce counted all these relatives as close and also visited them, Ralph regarded a number as being only “a little bit close.” They would be included, however, in the network of relatives that Ralph would engage in the course of a year; to be considered at regional gatherings including sports and land council meetings, summoned to funerals, and responded to in ritual matters for the sake of his sons. Moreover, travels south to Angas Downs and Illamurta as well as northwest almost doubled the kin whom Ralph engaged in the course of a year. The terms for “close” and “distant” relatives, itenye and irlenge, respectively, are also common spatial terms. Not surprisingly, “close” relatives are thought of as one-countrymen, often members of a marriage moiety who once resided in the same region. The importance of association is marked by another term that can be translated either as “relative” or “friend,” an intriguing juxtaposition of meanings I render as “an intimate.” Tyene, people say, “is someone that we know”; “someone you give money to”; “someone you can ask for something.” The term is especially applicable to same-sex associations. Men who have “bin through” (been initiated) together refer to each other as “friends.” Women who make pottery together are also tyene. And people who are part of an active network are not just rame rame but ramerame tyene nweke, “my [very] own relatives.” They are tyene itenye, “proper close relatives.” Other people can be tyene ware, “relative a little bit” or “friend,” but thought of as a relative only through association and not coming from one mother, father, or the like. “Someone, he might come and work for you for a long time and stay with you and then you call ’im tyene nweke [my friend]. You can give ’im a skin if he doesn’t have one.” The man who is a foster brother to Ralph is tyene ware, someone who has been included in Ralph’s network. Where people say “one father” or “all

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same mother and father” when they describe filiation, tyene is often defined as being ”one food” (merne nyente). “I would ask ’im for something and give ’im food”; “I trust that one”; “I feel safe to ask ’im for something [food]”; “He won’t tell story if I ask ’im.” Both Carl Strehlow ([1910] 1991, ix–xiv, 81, 90) and Spencer and Gillen (1899, 447) refer to the use of tyene to describe associations between totemic species. They also translate this relationship as “friends.” Strehlow’s list reveals that the most typical among these associations were those between animals and birds and between birds and bush foods, especially berries. In different ways both birds and berries are ubiquitous, suggesting an endless variation of contexts in which associations are realized. Among Western Arrernte women today, I have collected just a few examples of totemic “friends,” including the one between mythical women of the Dreaming (alkngerintye) and crested rock pigeons. People tell me that spinifex grass and the little people who damp it are also “friends” (see Kenny 2004). So are cattle and the sparrows that eat ticks standing on the cattle’s backs. Tyene is evocative for understanding Western Arrernte ideas about kin. On the one hand, kin are seen as positioned in strings of filiation. By virtue of ritual practice, past and present, ritual descent grows out of filiation. The significance of descent in turn has been transformed by jural forms of the state—not least those involved in land claims—and by resource politics. Patronymic families now dominate corporate life, relatives on a larger scale grouped together in resource claims. On the other hand, kin are the consociates found in local groups and ego-centered networks. In this context, tyene stands for a relatedness that is ubiquitous and variable, and concerned with association. Moreover, that both humans and other species, and relatives as well as strangers, can be friends, intimates who share food, suggests that tyene grounds sociality in a region of country where people have foraged together and lived together with species. Joyce’s tyene were, like her, people of the Finke River, lhere pirnte people. In sum, relatives are people with a shared filiation but also people with whom one does and should associate. Coming or growing out of a place, dragging or tracking across country, positioned in association with species, and sharing food and locatedness are common images of the old when discussing kin. These metaphors demonstrate how Arrernte notions of sociality have been grounded in kin and country. They also show how sociocentric groups are emergent in a milieu that vests superior power in men. Yet all strings and shared identities coming from a place should be nurtured. This practice shapes identities manifest in beats, and beats in turn interpret a region in a way that crosscuts ritual estates or countries. Not to visit kin, and be visited in turn, denies one’s

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relatedness. Such a person will become “one alone,” bereft of identity. It is interesting that Arrernte often describe lhentere as people who choose to live beyond or without kin. They see this as a difficult life. It also involves being “out of place,” as lhentere seem to be when they come to Ntaria. Such a person remains unformed until he or she is included in relatedness.

Ngkwaltye and “Powerful Men”: The Context of Kin Today It is just because these tropes and values are central to the Arrernte, and finely balanced and diffuse, that the impacts of sedentary life and of cash and commodities have been so great. Both conditions of settlement and motorized transport have transformed the networks of a foraging life. Today there is a plethora of portable things to pass between relatives when they meet. Relatives ask one another for cash, things, and purchased food rather than for foraging rights.15 Moreover, the asking comes at any moment in the day, both in camps and at the clinic or the supermarket, or on the road or at TORC. This makes relatedness “hard work” (see Dussart 2000, 129–30).16 Forms of engagement and request that were once occasional or rare are now everyday affairs. This is both a cause for celebration and a source of considerable strain. “Worry” or stress in turn brings travel between localities. People “take a spell” from one set of relatives and visit another. Weekly, Arrernte can travel now long distances to visit kin (Young and Doohan 1989). As a result, both social and geographic space has expanded. Furthermore, the time required to service relatives has increased. To these changes can be added the impact of the Arrernte’s recent form of marginalization. Tied to Ntaria by the felt value of place and relatedness, and yet dependent on cash and goods, Western Arrernte endure the opprobrium of being welfare recipients. Often, people are less literate now than their mission antecedents and know what it is to be “poor.” Wariness, resentment, and anger are common attitudes among the young who often find an outlet in personal fights and conflict between family groups. Diabetes, STDs, alcohol abuse, and “sniffing” petrol are common. Finally, this intersection of cultural difference, marginalization, and denigration racializes identities. At Ntaria, the mainly white service population maintains a life outside working hours almost entirely separate from that of indigenous people. Western Arrernte in turn conceptualize lhentere as largely external to their life. The majority of rural Aboriginal people engage with only a few establishments when they go to Alice Springs. They sustain a mainly Aboriginal beat that sequesters them among their own. The networks involved in living with kin thereby involve a certain involution. Not only do they

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provide the substance of social engagements. Networks now are also a buffer and a refuge from market society. These conditions of modernity bear on both the practice and the idiom of kin. Cash and commodities, and their use in Western Arrernte life, are central in this context. As others have remarked, a “grammar” of service exchange sustained between kin transforms the significance of money and things (Sansom 1988a; Myers 1988). They are not used simply as media of exchange or even to define the self but rather as means to confirm relatedness. Western Arrernte test the status of a kin relation by asking someone for something—some food or help in a task, or a bit of cash. The response can be immediate or deferred and constant or variable over time and in accord with available goods. This “demand sharing,” as Peterson calls it, admits the relatives whom one knows and by whom one is known (Peterson 1993, 870; 1997). It interprets them as close, very close, or perhaps a little bit distant. It becomes the major way in which women, especially, elaborate networks. They extend their associations and activate relatedness across numerous local groups. As portable things (cash and commodities) proliferate and aggregation and dispersal quicken with transport and settlement growth, the testing of relatedness grows—and also the conflict and tension it brings. Macdonald uses “allocative power” to refer to the relative capacity of any person to respond to these kin demands (Macdonald 2000, 96–99). In conjunction with this general use, it is also useful to deploy the term in a more specific way—to describe the attribute of outstation leaders who vie successfully for goods. Among Western Arrernte, the status of “looking after” is evidenced by the power to allocate resources, encompassing rather than being encompassed by other kin and associates. It also implies preeminence at least in relation to some other groups. This quality of Western Arrernte leaders, normally but not always men, defines them in Anderson’s (1998) terms as “bosses” or, in Arrernte English, as “powerful men.” This designation is reserved for men who command cash and commodities, whereas someone versed in ritual knowledge will be described as a man who “knows.” Among Western Arrernte, the relation between ritual knowledge and resource preeminence has become a tenuous one. Acknowledged traditional owners have their status through inheritance, and their levels of ritual knowledge can vary. Ritual knowledge per se does not bring material power. This hiatus between regimes also ensures a different dynamics in resource politics. Access to traditional knowledge was dispersed across the filigreed system of sites that gave value to place in an Arrernte world. Authority and also power was concentrated but also dispersed. Unlike knowledge,

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the resources that Western Arrernte bid for today are highly centralized. TORC and the Ntaria council have been focal points for government grants and various projects brought to the area. Whoever dominates these centers tends to control material power within the community. Gaining access to these sites therefore has entailed a blunter politics than past competitions over ritual knowledge, and different types of violence as well. Demand sharing and bosses with allocative power mark kinship practice in market society and the bureaucratic state. Networks tend to expand in order to increase the field available for individual demands. At the same time, resource competition places limits on the kin to whom a boss can respond, or fail to respond diplomatically. Heightened conflict therefore ensues both between kin and within organizations as demanding and sharing become harder to realize. In the following discussion, I attend in turn to the indicative experience of women and men. For Joyce and her daughters, Mildred and Elfrieda, making a camp involved sweeping a locale, cooking, and finding kids. Someone might be sent to find a knife to cut salt beef or a “wire” to construct a grill over an open fire. To make a camp also was to create a hearth, a site for provisioning “all the hungry people”—children, their fathers, and those relatives who through their demands marked themselves as intimates. This was the milieu of demand sharing and the circulation of things, the most important of them being money or ngkwaltye. The term for money is actually perte. Ngkwaltye connotes a small piece of something, “a part, bit, crumb or scrap,” and it is in this capacity that money, cigarettes, grog, and secondhand clothes proceed according to a similar logic (see Henderson and Dobson 1994, 495). They are all instances of crumbs or scraps that acknowledge relations between kin where payday binges or a loss at cards can create instant scarcity. During the 1990s, the Community Development Employment Project was the main source of income. Windfalls through gambling and royalty payments generally were spent quickly on cars, refrigerators, or washing machines. Sometimes women saved for a “trip” to the coast organized by the church or another women’s group. Someone like Ralph saved for car repairs. Yet dedication of saved money to an object or a person was relatively rare. The CDEP had automatic deductions for house rent and other maintenance charges. After deductions, flat CDEP pay could range from 260 to 340 dollars a fortnight. Those who had “top up” earnings or permanent parttime or full-time employment, including outstation heads who received a CDEP supervisor’s loading, had larger incomes. Nonetheless, most Arrernte experienced money mainly as ngkwaltye, as “something” for generalized

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exchange used to purchase food, secondhand clothes, tobacco, grog, and petrol. Both sexes began to receive their “pay” at age sixteen. Young people who ran short turned to their siblings and cousins or to their grandparents. Wives asked husbands only as a last resort, and in general people asked and gave less to affines than they did to close kin. Money was used mainly for food, and while women seldom asked a spouse for money, husbands expected food from a wife who also fed children who were young adults. The amount that a husband provided to his wife’s hearth could vary considerably and depended both on the age of his children and his parents and on his sense of self as an Arrernte boss. Men who were resource rich looked after kin to increase their influence and expand their networks. Commonly, men who were less successful cared less about their status and consequently gave less to wives and other relatives. In her tasks, generally a wife was assisted most by her sisters and mother. Grandmothers in their forties and fifties tended to receive many requests for both food and scraps of cash. Often requests would come from three and even four generations, for as women became more experienced in maintaining equanimity in both giving and denial, they also drew requests to them. “I can ask ’im. He won’t complain” describes an accomplished woman. Ngkwaltye, the demand sharing of bits and crumbs, involved Western Arrernte men but consumed women. Transactions were most dense on pension “paydays” when women collected their cash and went directly to the supermarkets but then sought to ask for contributions to their hearth, retrieving debts and avoiding their retrieval by others. Sometimes women sustained the advantage of major initial expenditures on food by having locks fitted to refrigerators. They could realize the value of their pay before the period of requests set in. A locked refrigerator left them free to try their hand at cards or watch for a windfall to a relative on whom they could make a demand. Older women often watched these games in order to learn what they might expect from children and grandchildren in subsequent days. Lean times occurred for some directly after card games and after the binges that were common on paydays. Lean times for all occurred on the days leading up to the next payday. That was when approaches would be made to grandmothers with a widow’s pension. For a woman such as Joyce, approaches would be numerous from her mother’s brother’s son’s son (MoBrSoSo), from children and grandchildren, one of her brother’s sons, and a sister from Alice Springs: “You got money?” “Heh, kemarre, I’m your little sister,” “I’m your big brother’s son,” “MumMum [Granny], you got anything?” “A little money?” “Give me something!” Such a woman would also make her own requests for amounts

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ranging from five to fifty dollars from relatives, those she had not pressed recently, especially relatives she had fed. Such a request could take the form of a quiet comment as she walked past someone on the street, “Hey, Robinya, you got anything?”—literally, “Anything lying about you?”—or as relatives met each other at the supermarket, “You got somethin’ for me?” The reply “I got nothin’ ” was considered acceptable provided it was not used too frequently. Yet need was not the only condition in which demand realized relatedness. One day in Alice Springs, sitting with Joyce in a car outside a “cashand-carry,” two men about forty years old strolled by. I did not know them, and my friend appeared not to notice until she called out at their backs, “Hey, Namatjira! You got somethin’ for me?” One turned and hurried to the car followed by the other. He shook Joyce’s hand vigorously and they exchanged observations on each other’s health. Namatjira, apologizing, gave my friend five dollars. As they strolled away she told me that she “grew ’im up.” He was related to Joyce through her father’s mother and therefore he should work for her “a little bit.” Fingering the five dollars, she remarked that all these men “drinkin’ too much,” hence the small amount. Nonetheless, she was happy to have tested relatedness. This testing of relatedness, often in the absence of need, transforms the significance of money and things. A good example is the “power tickets” used at Ntaria to feed the electric meters attached to every house. Power tickets could be bought at a value of five, ten, or twenty dollars from one of the two Ntaria stores. Women almost automatically asked a relative, male or female, for power ticket money when their electricity ran out. It was a tangible mode in which to ask for “something” and crib a little extra money for food. Commonly, however, these requests also had a very wide span, for power tickets were a form of play. “You got power money for me?” was like the teasing “Give me something!” These remarks, and the practice of demanding, embody the open-endedness that Povinelli describes in women’s foraging (see Povinelli, 1993b). Just as a feature in the natural environment “might be something,” there “might be something” in a kin relation. This logic of relatedness is placed in sharp relief by a situation in which a person, though sustained bodily, is deprived of network associations. Joyce visited an affine at an old people’s home in Alice Springs. A nurse drew her attention to another resident, a cousin (mother’s brother’s daughter, MoBrDa) to Joyce. Rendered paraplegic in an accident, she had been in the home for many years. Somewhat embarrassed, Joyce exclaimed, “We thought you were dead!” as a hasty explanation for not visiting. While the cousins talked, the nurse complained to me that when the woman’s grand-

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children came, they took everything she had. The nurse spoke proudly of a new pink dress the staff had bought their patient. Naturally, the nurse was dismayed when Joyce left with the pink dress. She would have been even more dismayed at the cache revealed later in the car: a necklace, a roll-on deodorant, a slip, some sweets, and a number of coins. Her cousin was fighting hard not to be socially dead and Joyce, now grinning sheepishly, could not deny her. Accepting things was allowing that in the future her cousin might demand a visit. In this particular case, the cousin was crafting a demand through unsolicited giving. Because it is women rather than men who are hearth keepers, their practice of demand sharing seemed more relentless, more audacious, more artful and desperate, and in a smaller currency than the demand sharing of men. Their balancing of the relation between “looking after” and “working for” was more precarious and apparent. It involved gender-specific subterfuge, as when a group of women and children, or even simply women, headed for the bush to have a “picnic” and eat some meat that otherwise would be taken by their brothers, children, and husbands. It had a brutal aspect as women grew old and were less able to manage the stress involved in being central to a local group. Progressively, their networks shrank and they became dependent on a younger generation. Often they were bullied by descendants into giving money with little in return (see also Dussart 2000, 104; Merlan 1991, 287–88). Thus, they would lose control of a hearth and then keep “walkin’ round” asking for and giving ngkwaltye as they fought for relatedness. When grandmothers had the care of kids, especially infants, other effects were evident. Sometimes beleaguered women, however conscientious, could not prevent malnourishment in kids, due to insufficient cash. This circumstance was exacerbated by failures at the levels of relatedness, community, and the state. Relatives were often irresponsible, especially with gambling and alcohol consumption. The individuating power of cash has made reciprocal relations more variable and tenuous. At the level of community, the mission’s form of governance specifically provided for the old, the infirm, and the young. They received priority in rationing. With the mission’s departure, no particular provisions were made for those at risk. Finally, federal policies that encouraged a return to tradition without due regard to economy have deepened the Western Arrernte’s marginalization. This anomalous and poorly wrought transition to modernity has meant that ineffectual demanders are at constant risk. Arrernte relatedness and a cashand-commodity world provide an imperfect fit. The pattern for outstation leaders was blunter but revealed a similar logic. Through land rights, many outstation heads received modest royal-

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ties. A natural gas pipeline crosses Western Arrernte land, and royalties are distributed among the patronymic families. Bosses demonstrated “looking after” by the thoroughness and fairness with which they oversaw these payments, the value of which was in the distribution made more than in the money received. These distributions took place just a few times a year, while resource bids through the CDEP and government grants were a continuous and turbulent affair. In the Western Arrernte system, the leaders of local groups resident on outstations were designated as “supervisors” for the CDEP. People registered as recipients on a particular outstation and under the supervision of a local group head. Each week that local head signed the time sheets for his relatives who were defined as workers on outstation projects under the head’s supervision. In turn, on a fortnightly basis, when CDEP benefits were received, money was drawn from these workers’ pay for rent, power, and maintenance, and for emergencies including “tucker money” in the form of food vouchers for those totally bereft of cash. It was common for a supervisor to control the use of this money. This practice encouraged some heads to expand their camps aggressively and therefore the numbers on their CDEP “list.” Much of this money was spent on petrol and four-wheel-drive vehicles that bosses often placed at the disposal of their kin. Quite a lot of money could be spent on grog or gambling, including casino gambling in Alice Springs. While some heads became powerful bosses, others simply exploited their kin. What made a person “powerful” or a boss was looking after his or her list. Over time the list would grow as the number of relatives acknowledged as “close,” and residing at least sometimes on the outstation, increased (see also Anderson 1998, 205–6) through an expansion of allocative power, aided by government grants and organizational positioning. In addition to cash and four-wheel drives, people vied for a range of services: houses, telecommunications, upgraded bores and rainwater tanks, solar electricity rather than the more unreliable generators, sporting facilities for youth, and, if the outstation was the preeminent one in a family, a small elementary school. Outstations could also be involved in one or more forms of enterprise including craft activity, land maintenance, feral animal mustering, and small-scale pastoralism (Austin-Broos 2001a). These too brought supporting grants for tools and craft materials, fencing equipment, additional service support, horse saddles, and motorbikes for mustering. Occasionally a boss might seek an additional vehicle or a replacement cattle herd. Beyond bare minima, these resources were not treated as a right, and tenacity in gaining grants with the aid of service staff was an arbiter of a boss’s success.

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Consequently, if a boss or close relative of a boss could command an organizational position, access to allocative power would increase. During the 1990s and early 2000s, TORC employed mainly white managers, mechanics, and accounting staff. However, a number of other positions and a management committee, representing more than thirty outstations, were the province of Western Arrernte. Most powerful among these positions was chair of the management committee, and whoever was chair of that committee opened the way for relatives to take up some of the lesser positions. White staff, albeit often unawares, thereby were always dealing with a particular configuration of relatives at the resource center. At least initially, staff would often identify it as the group of most active and dedicated people and thereby see no anomaly in this configuration commanding a good proportion of grants and favored access to center facilities. Sooner or later, though, conflicts would emerge, first manifest as grumbling and then apparent at the meetings where government grants were discussed. These meetings were often fraught affairs between outstation leaders. These men and, occasionally, women would attend meetings accompanied by a few kin while numerous others remained outside, waiting sometimes for hours. Some would be from the leader’s local outstation group and some from his network. As the politics unfolded, possibly over a series of meetings, this congregation would begin to jell as a patronymic family—as the descent group resident or not on the boss’s land who might reasonably hope to benefit from a resource grant. While relatives sat outside, murmuring in the shade, their boss would be inside negotiating for resources. Pressure would be on the boss to augment his allocative power. Generally the conditions for this task had been built before. Through their networks, bosses built coalitions in order to pursue resource goals. And coalitions through their demands would limit the aspirations of other groups. Those under challenge might not appear at the meeting at all, thereby conceding the bid. Just as often, though, there was overt and stressful conflict including charge and countercharge concerning resource center management. In this process, arguments between Arrernte families could engulf white staff, and when forms of talent, resource, and regional power changed, augmenting some at the cost of others, white service workers could be tossed aside in the flow of Arrernte politics, which in turn could mean an opening up of organizational positions with a new range of alliances to be formed. Groups could be eclipsed for a number of years but then return to influence with the rise of a new boss. Through all this wrangling, relatives supported their leader. In return, a powerful man provided money, regular transport, housing, and plenty of

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Figure 14. Relatives attend an Australian rules football festival in Alice Springs. Photograph by author.

meat. He staged complex events such as horse races, kangaroo hunts, mustering camps, and barbecues. He thereby sought to anchor “family,” and especially father’s-side relatives, on his country. At the same time, he serviced other relatives through transport and accommodation, and he traveled with kin to Australian rules football festivals (see figure 14), sporting carnivals, and land council regional meetings where there would be provisioning, royalty distributions, card games, and, invariably, the opportunity to test and confirm relatedness. Bosses and their allocative power were heavily dependent on government grants. Remoteness and scarce commercial openings impede economic development in Central Australia. This situation also restricted the human capital that bosses themselves could command. Resource aspirations were therefore focused mainly on the few centralized outlets. This focus tended to rigidify relatedness, foregrounding “family” seen as a corporate group and foreclosing on extended networks, which in turn transformed relatedness into enduring factionalism. While a dynamic like this may have always been a part of Arrernte life, there seems little doubt that centralized cash resources in the form of government transfers have exacerbated community conflict. In turn, the consequent intensity of kin relations has forced Western Arrernte toward more-univocal patronymic families. The artful and sen-

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sitive practice of ubiquitous relations in networks inevitably is blunted— even as resource politics has heightened the importance of kin. This trend toward concentrations of power was modified in some degree by the way in which welfare dependence magnified individualism across generations. CDEP and other forms of welfare brought low-level autonomy to all Western Arrernte from their late teenage years onward. Constant discussion among the old of “young kid runnin’ round” reflected this phenomenon. For many youth traveling back and forth to Alice Springs, the power politics of TORC and Ntaria was of little interest. This lack of interest leavened an Ntaria milieu that often was infused with conflict. However, individuation of this type also brought its own discordances. Individual lowlevel autonomy undermined the authority of elders that was substantially based on commodities and cash. A CDEP supervisor who struck his relative off the list for “runnin’ round” would still receive from that same relative a demand for ngkwaltye. To desist from either act contravened a value, though the values resided in different types of regime. Bosses honored the values of kin by breaching the rules of CDEP. Often they would pay their relatives without requiring set work tasks. Authority in all forms therefore tended to weaken. Parents who were also CDEP supervisors were compelled to look after youth who would not “work for” them, either as a service or as employees. The anomie and the frustration created by this circumstance made CDEP an uneasy affair—quite different from its imagined role in the world of policy formulation.

Conclusion The context in which Arrernte live with kin has changed dramatically over the course of a century. This change is reflected most immediately in the metaphors used to describe relatedness. Talk of place and “dragging” antecedents make way for ngkwaltye and “powerful men”; tyene and associations with species-in-place make way for large-scale “families” acting as factional groups in resource competition. This movement of imaginaries that informs practice announces the arrival of market society and, central to it, commodities and cash. Yet it is important to note that one set of metaphors “making way” for another does not reflect in fact a clean ontological shift. Rather, Western Arrernte people today live with both these idioms, both across and within generations. Together they convey something of the complex nuance and the tangled unmanageability involved in Arrernte modernity.

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The Western Arrernte remain kin-based in a market society with its concomitant government bureaucracies. A state-sponsored return to country has encouraged this circumstance while also further entrenching the Arrernte’s economic marginalization. This juxtaposition of different social orders is reflected in the fact that proliferating goods and cash have acted to expand demanding and sharing among kin relations. The Arrernte thus become masters of circulation but with a limited involvement in long-term productive work. Concurrently, the individuation that comes with welfare payments fractures the value of widespread relatedness. Hence the suffering of those who fall in the interstices of kin—including the elderly and hungry kids. In addition, the distributions of power and knowledge inherent in an emplaced ritual life have been changed by a sedentary life, which has brought resource concentration in settlements. This outcome has been intensified further by economies that rely on government transfers, promoting the importance of Ntaria and TORC. Rather than simply a legacy of tradition unleashed by the mission’s demise, the conflict that occupies the Arrernte’s powerful men has unfolded in this context of marginalization. Australian ethnography has its own particular tradition of Schneider’s critique of the genealogical method (see Schneider 1984). His point was that early anthropologists took for granted Europe’s metaphors for kin relatedness—especially “blood” as a metaphor for biogenetic substance and notions like “family tree” to describe the relations of “descent” between those who shared this type of substance. Schneider might have added, as other anthropologists have, that the method also presumed specific forms of property and its inheritance. Private, movable property is passed down family trees mainly between blood relatives. In his account of kin in terms of identities and relatedness, Myers (1986) sought to depart from these types of assumption. He gave an account of identities and relatedness as the Pintupi experienced them. Keen argued further that the tropes of Yolngu relatedness bound people into country and bore no evidence of notions of descent, and thereby of clan—at least in our sense of them as corporate groups (see Keen 1995, 1997, 2000). Povinelli (2002) has offered a related critique by questioning whether accounts of indigenous relations to the land can be interpreted adequately in a framework that privileges heterosexuality and its “descent.” In this discussion, I have not sought to resolve these issues. I have found a use for both “kin” and “relatedness” and for notions of descent, local groups, and networks. Moreover, I am inclined to think that the influence of Europe on the Arrernte probably makes the issues raised by these debates difficult to resolve, at least in their original terms. Which systems are we comparing in this circumstance? Rather, I have sought to underline another

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issue—kinship in context. As the Arrernte’s economy has changed, along with other socialities, so too has the way in which relatedness is and can be practiced. The system of families, local groups, and networks that informs Western Arrernte life today is mightily shaped by their marginal position. Moreover, this economic marginality has encouraged Western Arrernte to remain kin-based, yet simultaneously required that they jettison this way of life if they are to become more successful market individuals. The distress that this conflict brings makes Arrernte life turbulent and sometimes violent. It also encourages derogatory ideas among whites that link being “black” to “pathology.” In turn, this hostility encourages the Arrernte to practice relatedness as both a buffer and a respite from the larger society (see Trigger 1986). This circumstance bears on relatedness but also on the forms of value, expectation, and practice that define the Western Arrernte subject. The next chapter looks more closely at the Arrernte subject and at the impact of everyday violence.

G chapter 6

Honey Ants and Relatedness

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n my first yerrampe (honey ant) hunt, I had an experience that stayed with me. I had walked long and hard with a group of women through a red sandy plain dotted with mulga.1 We were in the vicinity of Ellery Creek, an ancestral honey ant track. Old hands preceded me, their digging sticks held behind their backs in crooked elbows. Eyes were peeled, and toes probed the surface debris for evidence of honey ants. At sites that looked promising, we stopped and I was called to start the dig with some initial shoveling. As the hole began to grow, the experts took over, digging with sticks and hands and carefully feeling their way until they came upon a rwerre, or shelf in the underground tunnels (see figure 15). Sometimes there were honey ants. A digger dipped probing fingers into the unearthed shelf, carefully scooping out the ants. Then, raising a cupped hand, gently she would tip the ants with their golden abdomens onto the soil around the hole. She or another digger would divide the ants between us. The women were grandmothers and some great-grandmothers, collecting ants for their smallest kids. With only a transient son, I received just a small amount, but even so, my collection grew as the hunt proceeded. We each carried a pannikin to save our share of ants, and like the other women, I dropped ants into mine as we moved along. After a while I noticed, to my dismay, that the ants at the bottom of my pannikin had become a murky mess of punctured abdomens and seeping honey. Heads and legs were ripped off. Discreetly, or so I thought, I cast my eyes across to the pannikin of the Arrernte woman sitting next to me. Her honey ants seemed to be intact, and the abdomens rolled around glistening. She noticed my cautious glance, looked into my pannikin, and then looked away again, struggling to control a grin. Without a word, she picked up an ant from the soil and, while she held the honey ant between forefinger and thumb, showed 154

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Figure 15. Vivienne Meneri and old Della Malbunka digging for honey ants. Photograph by author.

me how she detached the head and legs from the swollen abdomen with the deft flick of a finger. Then she remarked that unless you did that, the honey ants would “fight” each other. The image that has stayed with me is the comparison between the messy contents of my pannikin and the woman’s orderly ants, “together but separate.” I have heard the phrase many times. It stands for a Western Arrernte etiquette of relatedness; the ways in which one manages the relatives who actually define one’s sense of being. Today, however, the violence of life at Ntaria makes this etiquette hard to sustain and brings disorder and great distress. Intergenerational relations are especially fraught with tension and lead me to liken this sociality to my pannikin of honey ants. There came a time in field research when I could no longer say that there must be order in each dimension of the everyday. Moreover, although the past also involved bloody and often gendered violence (Sutton 2001), today’s disorder is magnified by marginalization and competing regimes of value—a kin-based society half in and half out of a very different order. In this chapter I deal not simply with Arrernte kin relatedness but also with what it means to be an Arrernte subject. What type of selfhood is built from relatedness? And what does violence between kin do to that subject? The violence I have in mind involves verbal and physical abuse and the failure

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to reciprocate service to kin. It also involves the frequent death of relatives. In order to address these issues, I give an account of kinship etiquette and of inherent and relational being. My proposal is that relational being is uniquely vulnerable to the current forms of violence that pervade Ntaria. Challenged in their very being, the Arrernte engage with large regional gatherings at which they work to renew relatedness. Ironically, the all-too-frequent funerals that often mark a violent end to life are also major sites of renewal.

“Together but Separate”: An Etiquette I first became aware of “together but separate” in the course of discussing Western Arrernte marriage. A woman was describing for me how succeeding generations of women interlinked moieties by passing through generational pairs (nyenhenge) of the subsection system “like a clock.” She remarked that following the marriage rule and thereby marrying into an appropriate class kept people “proper separate” so that they could be together. As I worked on genealogies collected by the father and son Carl and T. G. H. (Ted) Strehlow and began to get a sense of connections between different people and regions spawned by marriages and ensuing filiation, I saw how this image of remaining together by being properly separate was also inscribed on the land. A system of emplaced and interconnected regional sociality unfolded before me. Watching relatives together in a camp with sons-in-law and motherin-law sitting “proper separate,” I saw a common embodiment of this principle (see also Hiatt 1965, 114–17). I noted the naturalness with which two people could remain separate and not speak, even when they were the only ones in camp. Catherine and Ronald Berndt (1988), not to mention A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1965), have suggested that avoidance practice points to social relations in which there are “mixed demands” and potential “strain” (Berndt and Berndt 1988, 82). If this is so, then avoidance relations merely magnify the differentiations of kinship. In a camp, people position their bodies and modulate their voices to realize discretion in relation to others. Most notably, staring or even looking directly at another is regarded as definitely crass. One should not invade others’ space with loud remarks and those not engaged with you should incline their bodies away from your conversation. That way, as Fred Myers (1986) would remark, the practice of relatedness also ensures autonomy. Camping at an outstation day after day with between three and five adults and six to twelve kids, I didn’t feel invaded and lacking in privacy. Avoidance magnifies this discretion and concentrates it in social space.

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Being properly separate also involves bounding engagements. When two people meet and discuss something in a supermarket or over the telephone, conversation will be terminated with a word that seems abrupt to the untutored ear. Having exchanged pleasantries or passed on information, each will terminate the conversation with the term kele, or “finish.” If the conversation involves some decision making, to kele is added marre, or “good.” Something that is “finished well” is something agreed upon, kele marre. Compare the Australian English idiomatic “See you!” as a way of ending an engagement. It stresses continuing connection and seems to deny termination even as it affirms it. The Western Arrernte kele is much more confident in its finishing because there is a keener sense that this is one specific engagement within a continuous and multivalent field. Any engagement invokes an identity between relatives. There are always other identities. The phenomenon is demonstrated in interaction when a person, about to finish an engagement, employs hand signals—the sign “What’s up?”— to hail and stay another person until the current exchange is done. While speech engages one person, hand signs engage the other. This ordered management of sociality allows a subject and her interlocutors to realize the potential of their sociality in diffuse embodied terms. Physically, they seem to spread their relatedness through space exploring its potentials. Managing multiple engagements as one steps from a shop or cooks some meat are typical. Again, the practice of demanding—that tries out a relation at a particular time and place—tests whether or not another subject will, there and then, embrace you. As night falls around a camp, this testing, which generally involves demands for food, occurs at rapid-fire pace—“Nweke nthaye!” (Give me!) “Ma!” (Take it!)—accompanied by shouts, a grumble, and fleeting leaps in and out of the fire’s light. The busyness ensures against embarrassment. Containing and bounding engagement in a field so that relations will not fight (twerreme) each other is integral to daily interaction. It is also apparent in the management of knowledge. Western Arrernte people attend both to the explicit nature of a question, its request for information, and to the manner in which they can respond. I once talked in a casual way with a powerful woman about country. She outlined her particular claims pursued now mainly in the cause of her sons and of her daughter’s children, whose father is white. Not only did she do this but also verbally “fought” with three other families identified with her region. One had moved up too far. Another had shifted northwest taking advantage of the Hermannsburg mission. Another had entirely relocated and now would not be recognized as holding country in either the new or the old place. She was entirely silent

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about another group to the south of the place that she claimed through her mother’s mother. She would not argue with that group’s connection that came through “father’s side.” In her own calculations, that position was given. It was tasteless, even foolish to query it. But then I asked her a question about a relative and a claimed connection farther west. Abruptly she said, “I can’t speak for west. They wouldn’t like it.” This conversation impressed me for its mixture of freedom and restraint. In her remarks she sustained an identity as Pertame, or Southern Arrernte, even though she and her parents had lived long among the Ntaria Western Arrernte. With this identity, however, she felt confident in women’s conversation to encompass the business of others with whom she shared a regional identity. At the same time, her conversation was strictly contained with regard, first, to more distant Pertame (both in regional and kin terms) and, second, to non-Pertame. Similar types of encompassing and bounding occur in references to stories where people will direct the questioner elsewhere— “You will have to ask X; I can’t speak for that”—or, starting from a particular place, a person will say that he or she can only talk up to another place. In a secular milieu, this order was maintained in stories about the homelands movement. Stories were told within particular limits set by the outstation in question. People named the place of particular camps and often identified who planted which trees or built a particular fence. There was little if any comment on outstations overall. There was no general history of “the Western Arrernte homelands movement,” only particular histories of families and locations. One general remark was made, and made by almost everyone, that people “shifted” from Hermannsburg because with the demise of the mission, there was too much fighting, drinking, and “wrong way” marriage. The Hermannsburg that became Ntaria is characterized still as a place of “noise” and “fighting” whereas outstations are “quiet”—and properly separate. But Hermannsburg then was the place in which everyone was mixed together, like my honey ants. Improperly, and therefore properly, it was part of everybody’s story. Not surprisingly, this style is also embedded in language. In her account of kin terms in Arrerntic languages, Jennifer Green devotes a section to dyadic constructions including the -nhenge of Western Arrernte usage (see Green 1998, 45–54).2 The suffix attached to a kin term is used to indicate a pair of people related in a specific way. The term may be used as a form of address or reference. Sometimes the term will be a reciprocal one between the speaker and person spoken to, such as arrengenhenge for the relation between grandfather and his son’s child. The kin term for both is arrenge. Sometimes it will be nonreciprocal, as when a younger sister talks to or of

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her senior sister employing a dyadic term kwayenhenge, with the kin term for elder sister, kwaye, as the root. Green proposes that the choice of the root in nonreciprocal constructions is governed by the person whom the speaker is addressing. When the terms are used in a referential way, usually the root will be the kin term for the senior person in the relationship. More generally she observes, “The choice of dyadic terms emphasises the significance of a relationship between a pair of referents and de-emphasises their relationships with anyone else and so highlights ‘the kin relationship which is most relevant in the discourse context’ ” (Green 1998, 49, citing McGregor). Once again, the ternary terms that realize avoidance, allowing a mother to talk with her daughter about the latter’s husband, for instance, show the manner in which relatedness is ordered in practice. These terminologies realize in language the bounding of engagement that the term kele represents in practice (see Green 1998, 41–45, 52–53). Given the density of modern settlements and the heightened rates of engagement allowed by cars and the exchange of things, social life is a movable feast. As various relations draw into focus and out again, one serially affirms identities (see also Green 1998, 49, citing Simpson). I conclude this section with the proposal that all this bounding and containing is more than a pragmatics of “close-up” relatedness. It is more than the management of sociality. It is also the way in which the Western Arrernte experience themselves. One expands and luxuriates in interaction, becoming big from a core potential being. This realization becomes the making of a powerful self when it is married with large-scale resource management. Correlatively, age or the accidents of life can undermine this experience and render life as a standing fight. Beset by illness and substance abuse, the violence of the everyday, people fight to sustain their selves through forms of relational being kept properly separate. Such an autonomy is given at birth but realized in the course of life. Becoming and remaining salient depends on relational practice. When relations between relatives, and especially generations, are tangled or violent affairs, inevitably the subject is diminished. To approach this topic, first of all I make some remarks on the nature of inherent and relational being.

Inherent and Relational Being The focus so far on relational being and on its role in Arrernte life should not obscure the fact that from early days each Western Arrernte is accorded an inherent being. Once babies are sitting up and smiling, relatives go to them and seek to elicit acknowledgment, smiles, or a movement of the hands or

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head. Often this is done by women or young boys and girls placing their faces close to the infant’s and vocalizing and repeating abbreviated kin terms: “de-de!” “ya-ya!” “ka-ka!” “mum-mum!” Relatives struggle in mock competition to attract the baby’s attention. As the infant grows, such efforts can involve pinching (“crueling”) the baby on an arm or cheek. The baby will be encouraged to respond with a directed strike. Some months later, the infant may be driven around in a car and held at a window while relatives stand in front of their Ntaria camps, waving or jumping up and down, and calling out the baby’s name, their own kin status, or a skin. “Here! Look! Your big sister!” “Come here, little brother!” “Pengarte araye!” Someone who is unsuccessful in these jousts will often say in a good-humored way, “Oh, he doesn’t like me.” In this context, the comment has particular connotations. It is regarded as natural that infants will “like” some relatives more than others. This is a part of their inherent being. Not to be liked is no shame, for a person will be liked by others in turn. Similarly, children can be more or less inclined to naughtiness. “Cheeky one” can be an enduring state as much as a specific intent. When a child is seen over time to be naughty in particular company, then the expectation is that the relative involved will accept and manage this behavior. A person might say, “He’s cheeky one for me,” “He doesn’t like me” or perhaps, “That werre [boy] is bad for me, send ’im to Mildred.” Myers writes that “Pintupi accept that people retain, at the core, an incomprehensible individuality . . . [but] this selfhood is to be mediated through . . . relatedness, something that increases through one’s life” (1986, 124). Remarks by Hamilton on child rearing among the Anbarra in Arnhem Land draw out some further dimensions of this contention. Hamilton writes that “the Aboriginal model is one in which the role of the caretaker is to pay attention to the overt demands of the infant. Here, the infant is active and the caretaker passive. The infant cries, the caretaker feeds. When it is old enough it grabs the breast or the food for itself. If it does not grab for it, it does not want it. In each case the assumption is that whatever the child wants is what it needs” (1981, 128) Even more important, Hamilton relates, “I asked people why they always gave the child what it wanted, and they said, ‘Because otherwise the child will cry.’ ” I enquired if crying was not natural to children. They told me that if the child starts to cry then it will go on crying, and the children who cry are always the ones who die. Crying is, afterall, a distress signal, and its cure is surely the removal of distress” (1981, 129) This account of the experience of an infant other, as demand that must be responded to, links with the attempts of relatives to be noticed by a baby. Engagement is initiated as demand and ought to be responded

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to—otherwise the person dies. Provoking an infant encourages demand and thereby builds relatedness. Yet mysteriously and inevitably, infants have preferences among their relatives. Each person has an inherent capacity to order his or her identity and realize a uniqueness of being. On a mustering trip to capture brumbies, Joyce remarked on two of her grandsons, “He’s good. He’s bad but [pele] smart one.” She referred to the personalities of these lads, one a gentle and joyous figure, the other truculent and difficult, as givens she considered when addressing them. She offered no explanation, social or moral, for their characteristics. Her view was unqualified, dry description of the way they were. Applied to strangers, this approach makes Arrernte tolerant to a wide range of personalities. A person is observed, summed up, and responded to accordingly. Applied to their own youth, this view can make Arrernte relatives reluctant to intervene with drinkers or with petrol sniffers: “That’s his business.” This diffidence is in part a fear of physical violence. It is also the acknowledgement of an inherent autonomy; the right of any subject to specify a self. There is something quite mysterious in this but also patently obvious to every Western Arrernte. This notion of inherent being links with aspects of gender relations and also with the transcendental. The subject and the world, mediated by gender rules, provide the Western Arrernte with an ontic sense that there are, in fact, some engagements that are unimaginable. Among Western Arrernte today, my experience of this perspective comes in the manner that male song knowledge is cordoned off from women and the young. Women who know an “outside” version of a story linked with their father’s side generally tell it diffidently and after conferring with a man. “Men’s business” is a precluded area, and inappropriate inquiries will be met with mute containment.3 So keen is this sense of bounded men’s space that the entire building that houses the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs, including its offices, souvenir shop, and the Northern Territory Museum exhibition, are all regarded as off-limits by most Arrernte women. Because it is known that Arrernte tywerrenge (sacred boards) pertaining to men’s ceremonies are somewhere in the building, in fact locked in a vaultlike room, women fear to enter. One man remarked that the center had become a “big cave” for the Western Arrernte. His reference was to the caves on country that women once were killed for approaching. The caves harbored the sacra of a transcendental world. In sum, the inherent being of infancy, gender, and the transcendental reveal an Arrernte ontology that involves unchanging and mysterious dimensions. These ideas in turn have acted as an anchor in the ebb and flow of relatedness. Relational being is each individual’s lived interpretation of this inherent

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being. For small children, life is camp life—not just one camp, but numerous ones between which the child travels on foot or by vehicle. As Hamilton relates, children are passed among female siblings of their mother, grandmothers, and “aunties” on their father’s side. Always the child is living in a multigenerational environment, juxtaposed with a peer play group of siblings and cousins. At Ntaria, this dense sociality of the child is made evident when, at around the age of twelve, a child is confirmed in the Lutheran church. This is an occasion for large gatherings of relatives who come armed with cameras to “snap” the confirmation group. Each child can have ten or more relatives in action, photographing the group outside the church. Suddenly this most Christian and European rite becomes something else—an Arrernte performance of relatedness. The dense kin-based sociality of small children is also reflected in classroom conflict. Aggression between groups of kids from different families, sometimes in a state of feud, can make school life turbulent. The tasks teachers must perform and the knowledge they require suddenly diverge from the norm for nonindigenous teachers. Those who stay at Ntaria become familiar with families, their recent histories, and regional relations. Not long after Lutheran communion, Western Arrernte youths have their initiation. As a woman anthropologist, my observations are from the outside: of roads closed, men away, visitors brought in, mothers with tied heads, and the constant checking to see whether this year’s group is on the move and which tracks are shut down. Among some Arrernte, it is still usual at the end of proceedings for a father’s mother to lead her young relatives back into Ntaria and their own camp. I have watched this event with head bowed and eyes sideways, as young men, tyene now, resume mundane social life. Initiation consolidates the peer group of male kin with whom a youth will begin his “runnin’ round,” exercising his autonomy. Although there have been a number of attempts to reinstigate female initiation at Ntaria, to my knowledge these attempts have not been successful. First childbirth for a teenage girl has become a counterpart. It throws a focus on the young woman’s relational being. Mother and mother-in-law of the new mother, who are often relatives themselves, generally greet each other formally at a hospital bedside or else back in camp. Past quarrels regarding the conduct of their children will be put aside in order to praise and poke the new arrival. Other women relatives come, as do children, to engage with the infant. The mother’s mother and other women relatives will care for this child as much as the mother will. However, in those first few days, or more usually nights, the crowds that gather around the newborn provide the mother with a sense of being located among her kin—on the cusp of

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maturity but not quite there. Childbearing is the pragmatic sign for older relatives to refer to a couple as “married.” If they break up later, the term is dropped. As time passes, young men become involved in outstation life or drift to Alice Springs and town life. Women, if they find a stable partner, gradually move toward the maintenance of their own hearth. These routes reflect the ways in which the young become autonomous adults. Building autonomy and individual identity involve the cultivation of relatedness as an exploration of one’s inherent being. They also require the etiquette of being “together but separate.” Bounding and containing one’s various identities involves managing diverse and competing transactions. To do so is to grow strong (ikerlte), to become an accomplished relative. To fail is to suffer diminishment and to confer that diminishment on others (Myers 1986, 108, 113). Often subterfuge and the comic are used to mask an inability to give. Hiding, “forgetting,” or running away can be ways to protect relatedness (see Myers 1988).4 I have seen a woman throw meat wrapped in cloth onto a veranda roof as the speck of her son-in-law’s car approached an outstation. He was known widely at Ntaria as a ferocious eater of meat. However unfair his demands, refusal would have diminished them both. The importance of managing relatedness, of containing and bounding it, becomes apparent when a person is refused. If demands are not met, a person might for a while decide not to ask another for “something” by saying, aggressively this time, “He doesn’t like me.” A more violent style can provide a reason not to be liked: “Fuckin’ bitch, cunt. Yu proper heathen!” accompanied by a theatrical stalking off, or revving or wheeling in a “mota-car.” The person thereby contains or sections off diminishment using anger. Getting drunk so that an outburst can be treated as “not ’imself” is an attempt to express hurt but cauterize the act by avoiding a rupture in relatedness. This type of response diminishes both the demander and the giver who, in that moment, lose their imputed identity. Part of the rationale of ngkwaltye (small change or morsels) is to distribute resources thinly but widely, a form of containment in itself, so that the number of these awkward moments can be reduced. Yet these efforts are not always sustained. Someone who cannot give, and loses confidence in asking, experiences rapid diminishment of self—a common event among the old. It also seems to apply in the case of incarcerated men who commit suicide. Losing the context for relatedness, they also start to lose their self. For this reason, youngsters who become withdrawn or depressed in the Alice Springs jail elicit concern from other inmates, who then spread the word when relatives come and sometimes request that an inmate be relocated with other imprisoned kin. Protecting the self from diminishment can elicit violent reproof. It can

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also make for silence. This silence has a particular phenomenal character and is used to signal that a request or a question is out of place. In my field notes, I call it “hitting the dead spot.” Quickly and without comment, a gulf opens up between subjects. The course of interaction must change, for that identity has been refused (see also Lorimer 2001, 132, 157–58). This silence blankets the self and protects against unwanted intrusions. It has a different and more subtle use in the context of a death. Being sorry with a bereaved person often brings a mute response. Bodies engage in grief to enact the loss of identity.

The Subject and Relatedness The eitquette of being separate in order to be together harmonizes relatedness. Notions of inherent being stabilize and ground the Arrernte subject. In order to state why this subject is unusually vulnerable to violence, I propose to call briefly on some other anthropology; research on the subject in other societies where kinship or intimate exchange is also foundational. Remarks made by Wagner (1991), Marriott (1976), and Strathern (1985, 1988) seem to refract the Arrernte subject—“refract” because Marriott describes prestation in India, and Wagner and Strathern, a Melanesian world of gifts. Both these socialities are like indigenous Australia to the extent that subjects are built from an extensive range of intimate relations. On the other hand, they are also different. In one case, a particular theory of substance (India) and, in the other, a particular use of things to stand for the subject (Melanesia) make them different socialities and forms of experience. Nonetheless, this work in other cultures carries an insight for this account: namely, that the self is found in relatedness and not counterpoised to it. In Western Arrernte terms, the subject can grow “big” or “small” but cannot be nyente ware, isolated or “one alone.” In his discussion of “big men” and “great men,” Wagner notes that the person in these socialities “is never a unit standing in relation to an aggregate, or an aggregate standing in relation to a unit, but always an entity with relationship integrally implied.” He elaborates this idea by proposing that genealogy is itself a form of “enchainment” where one person comes out of another, and social groups as well as subjects are “sectionings or identifications of this enchainment, different projections of . . . fractality” (Wagner 1991, 163, emphasis mine). A comparable range of projections allows Western Arrernte to talk of “strings”—the filiations that define identities brought to mind in acts of relatedness.5 Through practice, each person becomes an aggregate of filiations, each one subsumed in another and all

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informing a social field as they inform the subject. The subject and a social field are objectified simultaneously. Dual forms of practice shape this sense of the subject: One involves the way in which a subject draws on a relational field to realize relatedness. The other involves the range of potential values that a subject brings to a social field. The two dynamics operate like a positive feedback. More specifically, subjects promote the experience of “divisible” being wherein a person “absorbs” the “heterogeneous” influence of others (Marriott 1976, 111). The “growing big” that I have mentioned involves the absorption into the self of the experience and memory of diverse relatedness. One reaches out or demands a range of acknowledgements that constitute identity. Yet this is only part of the practice. Growing big also involves partibility; having “different values to dispense in different directions” (Strathern 1985, 203). By absorbing the value of others into oneself and dispensing different values in turn, a person expands in value through practicing relatedness. Divisible and partible being in fact involve a process of maintaining a relational field through both introjection and projection. Things demanded and given on request are the material media of this process. As Wagner observes, this subject is “an entity with relationship integrally implied.” It is neither a unit juxtaposed to an aggregate nor one defined by a univalent border. Rather, this subject is a nexus of identities, and each of these nexes is unique (see also Sansom 1982; Myers 1986, 124–25).6 To this subject, it is crucial that most of life involves a continuous field of relatedness in time and space. In this world, subject-being is the “concrete logic” of these identities. Relationships in place constitute the person. This is not to say that Western Arrernte people cannot permanently leave their kin, or that elements of this subject-being are not shared by other, less intimate cultures. It is to say, however, that becoming “one alone” is challenging to contemplate. At the same time, remaining in the midst of fraught relations can rapidly undermine a finely wrought etiquette and start to expunge the very self. Moreover, the vulnerability of the subject in the Ntaria milieu has been heightened by historical events. As I have recorded in part 1, the near destruction of the ritual order, and God’s law in turn, has weakened notions of the transcendental and of stable, inherent being as an anchor for relatedness. In addition, settlement and then marginalization have brought a much greater density to the Arrernte’s social relations. The proliferation of everyday demands tests and then undermines the usual practice of relational being. In this context, willfulness becomes the way. Generations don’t connect, etiquettes collapse, and frustration breeds violent outbursts. As imagination fails, instances of substance abuse increase. The pro-

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cess is uneven because others struggle mightily to maintain relatedness and a sense of self. Extracts from my field notes tell the story.

Violence, Death, and Festivals On a night with Joyce looking after kids: Drove back to Hermannsburg and deposited Ray’s two boys with Leanne and left them a fair amount of meat and bread for her kids, Marie’s kids, and the two boys. We saw that Ray’s car wasn’t back. After we had eaten, Joyce and I went to take a look. It was pretty wet, so we drove. No-one on the verandah outside. Inside there were about six small kids sitting on beds watching TV with a bar heater propped up next to their heads. Ray’s two-year-old boy was there in a nappy [diaper] and a rug on the bed. The second front room was closed. Joyce went in to look for some clothes—she found one dress but not her large bag. The kitchen and the fourth room were in darkness. The floor was wet (turned out to be flooded by a leak in the roof). A substantial piece of rancid beef— about the size of a large leg of lamb—was lying on the bed. One little boy said “That’s our meat,” but there was no way this bunch of kids was ever going to cook it. Joyce told me to pick up the baby. “He can’t stay ’ere with this ketyeye [kid’s] mob. He’s hungry. We’ll take him to Ella’s place.” We did that. When we arrived, only three of the older girls were there, two with babies and one youth with one of the girls. I sat the baby down. Joyce said to the girls, “He’s gotta have somethin!” The youth gave the baby an orange, unpeeled. Then they all started watching TV again. The kitchen of the brand new house was looking worse for wear. Something had boiled over on top of the stove and ended up black and caked all over the bench. A billy [pot] was on the stove so I scooped out some water in a bowl, made some milk with powder and squashed a Weetabix into it. The baby refused at first and then began to take the cereal, gripping the spoon so tightly that I would not have been able to release it.7

Later, the same night: The baby was given to Marie who just took him without comment. Joyce tried to persuade Ray’s little girl to come with us instead of “sleepin’ with all the boys. You’re a girl. You can’t sleep with all that boy.” No success. The girl began to scream and scream. Her elder brother tried

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to persuade her by pulling her and calling her name. Telling her to come with us. (Maybe she thought I was Welfare.) She wouldn’t. Eventually she ran to the side of the house and scaled the fence and sat with the people next door. I don’t know them. As I looked up from this small-kid debacle—the boys went back to sleep at Ray’s place—I saw old Johann just sitting there, watching. He had grown his beard long, like an ingkarte. Two of the older boys . . . were standing in the gloom, blankets over their heads, sniffing petrol. At that moment, Middle East [camp] with its mean little houses, naked rubbished yards, and tins and wrecked cars piled up everywhere looked like some sort of moonscape. The two ghostly figures stood there watching us with their sawn-off soft drink bottles half full of petrol. . . . Joyce was trying to address the small fleet of kids. She had nothing left for the sniffers at all. (“Them sniffers finished. Had it, that mob” she once said). I decided to bring the car up. The rain was really pelting down. Then I began to freak out. “You—didn’t—leave—your—keys—in—the— car—did—you?” I thought. I jumped in and, in a panic, turned the headlights straight on the sniffers. I dimmed them. Scared, I guess . . .

Parents absconding to a card game in Papunya had created this desperate night that involved four generations. Afterward Joyce came down with pleural pneumonia. Daytime desperation often involves serial events that ripple through a network over time. The following field notes condense the passage of weeks: One day Joyce was collecting some pension money for one of her grandsons, a lad of around fifteen years with three older sisters. She had raised them from an early age after their mother passed away. More recently, their father had died. The grandson had been “runnin’ round”, sniffing and drinking. He became involved in a fight with male relatives and was “cut up” on the back. Part of his shoulder bone was visible through the wound. His late father’s sister had remarked that she could not get the police because the aggressors were family. Joyce wanted to give the lad some money so that he could go to another settlement. In the interim, he had taken refuge at an outstation owned by mother’s side relatives. Owing to past disputes over the death of her daughter-in-law, Joyce would not go there. She was looking for someone to take the money to him. Of the lad’s own sisters she remarked that the eldest “did not like” those relatives and that the two younger sisters would take the money for themselves.

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She approached a classificatory sister of the siblings (FaBrDa). Would she take the money? The young woman refused. She said that the lad had smashed the window of her car when he was sniffing. As Joyce sought to terminate this awkward encounter with silence and head dropped down, her granddaughter hauled back her attention, rasping out her views. This guttural talking makes the recipient cringe and works to enslave the person. The young woman made clear that not only would she not take the money to her brother. She also demanded money from Joyce for the repair of her windscreen. Joyce dipped into the purse around her neck and brought out $20 with the comment Ma! [Take it!] As we walked away, she remarked that the money was hers, not her grandson’s. A little later, the lad’s two younger sisters accosted us. They were hoping to get the money. The elder of the two was a bit drunk and vocal. She said that Joyce was an “old heathen bitch” who carried her money around her neck. The grandmother grew angry, rasping in turn that the young woman “just run round” and did not look after her kid, raised by an “auntie.” Neither had this girl and her elder sister looked after the child of their third, younger sister. As a consequence, that kid had been sent away, long way, to the daughter of one of Joyce’s sisters. Everyone was “sorry for that kid now” who didn’t know his own mother. Joyce would not give them the money. Later she said of the two girls, “He’s jus’ lookin’ for a man, goin’ back to Alice Springs with that Johnny mob,” a reference to a group related by marriage to one of her brother’s sons. Later, one of Joyce’s own daughters took the money to the injured lad. A week or so passed. Joyce and one of her sons were preparing to leave Ntaria and return to his outstation. Affines of Joyce’s son were coming from a distance to visit and some of her other children and their children were also going along. For winter, the weather was warm and kids were excited. We had been loading up a truck with blankets and groceries and then drove over to West camp to speak with the granddaughters Joyce had quarreled with. In the interim, there had been another awkward encounter. The youngest had her child back from Larumba for a visit. We had met the two briefly but when Joyce asked to hold the child her granddaughter refused her. “She doesn’t like me,” Joyce said later. She was hurt by this refusal. Yet the tenor of the subsequent encounter was quite different. The granddaughters and grandmother used my presence to reminisce about early outstation days when they were ketyeye kwerrke [little kids]. There was recollection of camping, of my awkwardness with language and my revulsion when they swept up a dead puppy and threw

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it in a rubbish bin. They recalled the excellent tea I made, but also the incompetent way in which I constructed and tended a ground oven— with their reluctant, giggling help. My presence with “Toyota” on their place with Joyce was the tool for retrieving a consociate history that re-stated relatedness. I was the butt of their leisurely jokes. Then Joyce began to speak in a way that was almost crooning, “We got meat. Come back with me. Come back to your place.” She thereby emphasised that the place was patrilineally theirs rather than her own, balancing the fact that she had the meat. She bade me fetch the huge piece of salt beef that we were taking. Only one of the two girls came, but their relatedness was re-affirmed.

A similar process occurred with the granddaughter whose windshield had been smashed. This woman’s mother was Warlpiri, remarried, and distant from her Arrernte-speaking daughter. The daughter had children by a number of men and often camped with the family of one of Joyce’s sons. From time to time she engaged in heavy drinking. A community meeting had determined previously that grog runners into Ntaria, when caught, should be confined to an outstation. This young woman was caught and elected to go to the empty outstation of a classificatory father, a husband’s brother’s son (HuBrSo) to Joyce. The weather changed and heavy rain began to fall. People were returning to Ntaria fearful that the roads would soon be a quagmire. Joyce prevailed on many, including the police, so that the granddaughter might return. She emphasized the plight of her granddaughter’s son who had influenza. This great-grandson was a lovely boy and especially close to Joyce. She called him tyeparre, meaning “precious” or “dear one.” She argued that punishing the woman was also punishing the boy. In the end, Joyce had her way. And later, though Joyce often said that this woman had “gone the wrong way,” she cared for her when she was raped by the affine of a relative. She said, “Drinkin’ women can’t fight!” and feared that the young woman’s fate would be the same as two other relatives, one rendered barren through violence and the other through sexually transmitted disease: “She bin ruined by that husband. She got nuthin’ there anymore. She don’t know to look after kid. She got nuthin’.” In this violence of the everyday, the demands involved in servicing kin became disproportionate. The autonomy of some seemed willfully extended while the authority of others seemed to have lost its grip. In this circumstance etiquette failed and overturned an aesthetic of life. In both these scenarios, the lump of meat produced or left by relatives suggests a previously

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differentiated sociality beginning to collapse on itself. The subtle deployment of ngkwaltye to acknowledge many forms of relatedness here gives way to blunter acts. In this context, Joyce and other Arrernte sometimes said that they felt that their heads could burst apart, echoing Tjalkabota’s father’s remark on conflicting knowledge in the early days of settlement (see chapter 3). In this context, reciprocal service and the sectioning of identities become little more than a tangled disorder in which the desire for autonomy on the part of some undermines others’ relatedness. Death and funerals juxtapose the grief of loss with efforts to rebuild relational being. Following a funeral service, and in public, relatives sometimes harangue and abuse each other in displays of grief. In these orations, etiquette and aesthetic, indirection and obliqueness are dispensed with as relatives struggle to sustain a social order. From my field notes: [A man] died from a heart attack alone and locked in his outstation house. The circumstances of the death and the body were chilling. A relative found him in a mangled state beside his starving dog. Part of his face and shoulder had been eaten away. At the funeral, when people left the church, an elderly cousin was striding up and down crying and screaming. She said that [the dead man’s] mob were “rubbish people.” They knew that fella was mirnte [sick] and they didn’t look after ’im. She spoke in English so that the whitefellas would hear as well. She was laying off responsibility and shaming us all.

The tragedy revealed the practice of relatedness stretched to breaking point. The death of this man’s siblings and the “runnin’ round” of other brothers (father’s brother’s sons, FaBrSos) meant that over time the ailing man had become isolated on his outstation. Busy in Alice Springs or at other outstation camps, relatives had temporarily “forgotten” his condition. No one had visited him for more than a week, it seemed, even though he did not live far from Ntaria. A similar outburst at a funeral followed a death that occurred just prior to one of my returns. I asked people in a quiet way what had happened to produce the woman’s agonistic statements. This was the account I put together from various versions. It seems that some fellas had been down by the Finke, maybe sniffing petrol and smoking marijuana. They were fooling around in the water, larking around and so forth. The ketyeye kwerrke [little girl] had been watching with her own mob and went in to join them. One of the boys jumped in and onto her back. He tried to rape her. He broke her back and

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then drowned her. Someone else related that this werne [boy] ran and perched on [the Lutheran pastor’s] roof. He had painted himself with a “powerful” ngangkere [sorcerer’s] design. People gathered outside [the pastor’s] place yelling and throwing stones. Then he jumped. Everyone was so terrified they just parted and let him through. Now that little girl’s auntie and granny are rerte rerte [mad, unhinged].8

At another funeral, the daughter of the deceased publicly berated a granddaughter who came to the funeral drunk. On a further occasion, as an old woman lay dying in an Alice Springs hospice, an affine berated the woman’s daughters for not praying enough. In each case these dramas involved attempts by the speaker to evoke a sense of responsibility or else displace it onto others. People were smitten by their inability to care for relatives. They were also contending with the challenge to their own self caused by so many deaths. This became apparent to me in a different type of incident. Traveling with women and kids to an outstation, we came to a fork in the road. We could take the route of the main Areyonga road or else the back track. A grandson of a woman in the car had died in a vehicle rollover on the main road. A nephew (classificatory son) had also died at a camp along the back track. We sat in the car, suspended in indecision, as she struggled and then could not bring herself to choose one direction or the other. Either path would take her across terrain that would make her feel overwhelmingly sorry regarding these young relatives she had lost. We returned to Ntaria, where the woman avoided one whole camp due to the recent death of a daughter. There seemed to be no place for her and no identities that were safe. In the face of events like this, the practice of relatedness along with its etiquette begin to collapse as a subject’s own self increasingly is pulled apart. In another startling case, a family refused even the funeral that, in the face of death, renews relatedness among the living. From my field notes: Kwementyaye had died in the last six months, while I was away. There had been no phone call. [The carpenter at the resource centre] told me that he died in the morning and was buried in the afternoon. Relatives said that if a coffin couldn’t be made in time they would bury him in a blanket. Their mother couldn’t take it any more. They just wanted it finished. [The carpenter] said that he had only heard of this once before in all the years he had worked in indigenous communities. Later I asked [an Arrernte man] in a sideways fashion, why would a family bury a relative “quick, real quick like that”? He said that maybe “someone” would do that if it was the eldest son and that family was “too sorry.”

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At death, the Arrernte follow procedures that are common in other communities. Goods of the deceased are burned, sometimes even a house. Nowadays, more often, houses are painted. Cattle are purchased by the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC) and replacements are sold back. A similar practice occurs with cars and trucks. Keening women sweep the ground where the person has been, including, for instance, an office workplace. The term kwementyaye is used to address and refer to others who bear the name of the deceased. If the person is spoken of at all, it is generally done with a description of relatedness, “my elder brother,” “my mother’s mother.” People depart the place where the deceased was camped and reside elsewhere for about a year. Spatially and in terms of the various things that were vehicles for relatedness, the person’s being is erased. Memory receives no stimulus. These practices have been sustained within a context in which a people’s broader field of relatedness and thereby their identities remain intact. Events at Ntaria through the 1990s too often saw rapid erasure of relatedness on a large scale. A woman might have lost two daughters and a son, four sons, or suddenly, all her grandchildren. In this circumstance, more is involved than erasing one identity through subverting memory. Rather, the very self is placed under threat. Ntaria women in particular responded in angry declamations refusing responsibility for deaths but also witnessing to a suffering self. Others sickened and became withdrawn. Others still asked me to take them to Adelaide or Sydney. At the same time, funerals are rarely small, and a small funeral with few relatives is regarded as a disturbing affair (see Austin-Broos 2001b). Women sit in hunched groups outside the church. As their keening gradually increases, the immediate relatives arrive and enter the church by a side door, to see the deceased for a final time. Male evangelists attend them. The coffin lies open in front of the altar of the Ntaria church. It is closed before the funeral begins. As this process continues, youngsters who may not have met distant relatives are walked around and introduced prior to the service. It is also an occasion for adult relatives to meet each other, camp together for a few nights, and catch up. At the funeral of a powerful man, male relatives may still cut themselves on the legs or across a shoulder as a sign of grief. Once a predominantly feminine act, I have seen only males do this at Ntaria. After the service, a motorcade proceeds to the cemetery. Moredistant relatives and friends gather outside the church, and after the motorcade has begun, they walk by various routes to the cemetery so that, in a large funeral, the entire population on foot or in a car seems to converge on the open grave. Close relatives generally sit at the graveside, the women with their heads and bodies covered by blankets. Further hymns are sung

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and prayers said. At the end, anyone assembled may throw a clod of earth or artificial flowers into the grave. Then people quickly disperse back to their camps. The closest relatives to the deceased will return to their “sorry” camp, often the place of a kwertengerle who lives at a distance. Relatives and friends perform the various daily tasks for those who are “too sorry”— cooking, keeping a fire, collecting pension checks, running messages, and looking after kids. Funerals for the young are generally somber and sad affairs. Alternatively, when a large funeral is held for an elder, the gathering of people from many regions lays out the relatedness of that person’s life. The unfolding of this relational tapestry seems to comfort the close relatives who remain. Arrernte funerals are therefore also festivals. They are occasions that bring large concentrations of relatives together for short periods of intensive interaction. This juxtaposition of despair and hope leads me to connect the larger Ntaria funerals with another type of aggregation: the gatherings that involve regional meetings, sporting carnivals, and the like that Western Arrernte attend especially in spring and autumn. These gatherings include regional land council meetings for royalty distributions and the discussion of policy; sporting carnivals such as Larumba’s and the big one, Yuendumu Sports (Australian rules football, softball, foot races, band competition, secular traditional dance, and the like), Ntaria’s Kaporilya Day, and the round-robin football carnival held over Easter in Alice Springs. To these perennials can be added festivals sometimes with open ceremony at Lajamanu, Harts Range, and Ernabella; the even more far-flung Barunga Festival outside Katherine; and smaller family gatherings on country of the type hosted by Ralph Malbunka. As violence and relentless death challenge relatedness and the self, festivals and travel act to refurbish them. Even in crisis, the practice of being “together but separate” is reproduced through this regional round of aggregation and dispersal.

Conclusion In 2001, Peter Sutton published his courageous address on violence in remote indigenous life. One of Sutton’s arguments was that the suffering involved is not simply proportional to the loss of traditional culture. Some groups that endured as traditional ones are among those that now sustain the highest levels of violence, poor health, and the like. He argued that circumstances in these communities are not due simply to marginalization but rather to the “co-presence” of incompatible institutional forces from two societies. In addition he referred to archaeological evidence concern-

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ing cranial injury, evidence of excessive violence exercised by men against women in indigenous societies past (Sutton 2001, 152–53). Sutton concluded by noting that some “rethinking” of culture is needed “in a context where community members, not their critics and enemies, . . . produce the initiative for change” (156). In Sutton’s view, kinship is critical: “So long as kinship remains a major basis rather than a mainly private aspect of the political economy of a people, it is unlikely that they will pursue the desired benefits of the post-industrial world very effectively or at great speed” (156). Sutton can be read to argue that the tensions between kin-based and market-based society produce new causes of old propensities for inter- and intrafamily violence where women suffer most (see 153). Anthropological debate fastened on Sutton’s reference to cranial injury and the message taken from it by some that the root of the problem lies simply in custom which must change. Cowlishaw (2003) responded to Sutton in these terms, observing that his particular position pathologizes Aborigines. Hope and vibrant sociality, she argued, are not necessarily incompatible with high recorded rates of violence, death, and ill health. “I discovered in the supposedly depraved and distressed Indigenous spaces of Bourke a social world of ironic humour and satirical performance, and a site of counter-discourses to White hegemony” (17). Notwithstanding that the township of Bourke in New South Wales has a different and much longer history of workforce incorporation and fluctuating recession than most of the remote north and Central Australia, her point is well taken. As the Arrernte experience reveals, violence and imagination come together. Even in the act of mourning, hope is rekindled, and the rigors of relatedness are salved by “visiting” and festivals. Cowlishaw calls for a greater focus on the “meaning of suffering” in indigenous worlds and emphasizes the rage that often lies behind both “destructive and self-destructive acts” (9). Her argument also implies that to depoliticize and thereby pathologize indigenous violence undermines the political project of indigenous rights. The picture she paints of ironic and satiric acts of counterdiscourse accompanied by a violence born of rage presents an appealing account of indigenous life as resistance—unbowed and fighting back. Yet Cowlishaw does not address the phenomenon of social suffering produced by structural violence. This phenomenon involves both the incompatibility of institutions that Sutton emphasized and their structural positioning in a marginal world that led the Arrernte into the mission and then into welfare dependency. Encouraging the Western Arrernte to live remote, with no careful reflection on economy or the delivery of education in a less-institutionalized world, has been an integral part of their troubled transition to modernity. Cowl-

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ishaw overlooks this type of positioning and thereby seems to wish away a violence she rerenders in terms of intended political acts. Although there is great frustration and personal rage among many at Ntaria, only occasionally does this violence manifest as politics. The structural impact of government policy, which held a people on the margins using the mission and then enmeshed them in a contradictory moment of tradition and modernity, has shaped Western Arrernte life. It also has produced a singular violence against the Arrernte as human subjects. Settled life with government transfers, both during and following the mission days, has promoted a localism that has sorely tested the etiquette and aesthetic of relatedness. The principle of “together but separate” has been increasingly difficult to realize in the conditions of settlement, motorized transport, and a cash-and-commodity world. As the practice of relatedness has become more difficult to manage, its anchoring in notions of the transcendental has been undermined as well. The weakenings of “Arrernte” and “God’s law” have also weakened forms of authority among the Western Arrernte, thereby promoting the practice of relatedness as sheer willfulness. Bossism based in resource competition increasingly replaces older law, and the etiquette of demanding and sharing goes askew between generations. The pressures on social life and psyches that ensue are reflected in my field accounts. This circumstance brings two types of effect. One is confusion and anger as authority falters along with the practice of reciprocal services. This experience is described as kaperte kurne, or headache. One’s head feels as though it will explode, a state manifest in personal violence, substance abuse, and desperate harangues, even at funerals. A second type of effect is the form of withdrawal that comes with irreconcilable loss, when a relative is buried without a funeral, when a woman has no clear path, when “worries” culminate in stroke or lead someone to say, “Take me with you” when I drive to Sydney. Women imagining these one-way trips are also contemplating social death—total removal from a relatedness grounded in place. This is violence against the subject, against the very coordinates of being. The danger that confronts this subject is dislocation, and also the radical disruption of relatedness; a prevalence of death that is so great that relatives of those deceased begin to feel erased, both in person and in place. Beyond the rage that Cowlishaw sees, this violence is uniquely real for the Western Arrernte today. It was these Ntaria events that put me in mind of a honey ant hunt, and life as a standing fight.9

G pa r t t h r e e

Outstations and Being Remote

The violence of the everyday examined in part 2 finds its structural counterpart in Arrernte marginalization and its implications for outstation life. By the late 1970s, civil rights, including land rights, provided the means for a homelands movement. In 1982, and in accord with the land rights act, the Finke River Mission formally relinquished its lease to the traditional owners and withdrew to Alice Springs. Hermannsburg became Ntaria again. Many Western Arrernte moved to establish outstations on their land and developed a life of transit between an outstation, Ntaria, and Alice Springs. Living remote, however, brought marginalization. With the demise of the mission’s domestic economy, many Western Arrernte became welfare recipients. Moreover, constant passage between outstations and service centers intervened in schooling kids. The Arrernte found themselves embroiled in a state-sponsored return to tradition that was also their medium of modernity. Pressure increased to be market individuals as Western Arrernte were also encouraged to live remote and be traditional. Each of the next three chapters pursues an aspect of this circumstance: in chapter 7, the outstation movement and its factionalism fueled by white politics and a system of centralized resources; in chapter 8, the collision of social imaginaries involved in Arrernte aspirations for outstation life and the demands of bureaucratic governance; and finally, in chapter 9, the state intervention in Western Arrernte lives that brought troops to Ntaria in 2007. This event seemed to vindicate a discourse of difference as pathology in Australian society.

G chapter 7

Factionalism (or, The Secret Life of an Outstation Movement)

B

itter factionalism marked the transition of Ntaria from mission station to an outstation system with an anchor in land rights. Two groups dominated local politics, each one identified with a prominent family. The factions were relatively stable through the 1980s and 1990s, and although conditions have modified now, they remain a central part of Arrernte experience. For the purposes of this discussion I will call these factions the outstation and Ntaria mobs. The former included some of the groups located on outstations and using the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC) as their resource base.1 The latter included one large Ntaria group as well as various other town and outstation residents.2 This faction’s resource base was the Ntaria town council. In large part, the respective leaders defined each group’s identity. In the early years that I spent at Ntaria, the acknowledged leader of the outstation faction was Norman Ratara. The Ratara and Renkeraka families were recognized as senior custodians of the Ntaria estate, one of the five land trusts established on the old mission lease when it became Western Arrernte land under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976).3 Like many of those who identified with him, Ratara lived on an outstation and traveled to Tjuwanpa and Ntaria to use town services. The leader of the Ntaria faction was Gus Ntjalka Williams. He did not reside on outstation land, though a number of his allies did. As council chair, he lived and worked in Ntaria itself. His right to country around Ntaria was acknowledged only through a female link that made him, in ritual terms, subordinate to the senior custodians.4 However, Williams argued that his own patrilineal group had been displaced from around Ntaria in the course of settlement. In short, he claimed that he too should be recognized as a senior Ntaria custodian. Though his argument has some historical foundation, Williams lacked 179

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political support among senior men, including the Ratara and Renkaraka groups. Williams was Ntaria council chair and had numerous links with indigenous groups in Alice Springs and beyond. These connections, however, could not secure the ritual recognition that he sought. In accord with their respective leader’s attributes, the outstation and Ntaria mobs also might be described as neotraditionalist and modernist. However, it is crucial to note that these terms evoke not only degrees of engagement with an indigenous past but also with the mission order (cf. Gerritson 1981). Members of the outstation group valued their continuing contact with the Finke River Mission (FRM). Some of the Ntaria group were more engaged with the secular state that moved center stage during the policy period of self-determination.5 During the 1990s, rhetoric between the factions abounded and emerged at most Ntaria gatherings. For example, a meeting to discuss petrol sniffing at Ntaria in 1997 found one participant claiming that “some people said” that Tjuwanpa paid youths to be sniffers, which led them to register with the TORC Community Development and Employment Program (CDEP) rather than with Ntaria’s. This charge came at a time when the size of federally funded grants was linked to the number of CDEP participants that an organization had. The speaker’s implication was that TORC had secured its resources corruptly, and at Ntaria’s expense. In various public statements, members of the Ntaria faction blamed outstations for the town’s problems with “grog.” They remarked that grog runners were protected by their outstation relatives. At the same time, the council was reluctant to take initiatives that addressed issues of substance abuse and domestic violence. Some council members proposed that these were family affairs. If people wanted to be “just natives runnin’ round,” that was their business. On the outstation side, women were ferocious in their disparagement of the Ntaria faction leader. In the early 1990s, when the Palm Valley land claim was in progress, women said of him, “Ire werre ware!” (He’s just a boy!), meaning that “he doesn’t know” because he was not “made a man” through initiation. When a land claim was held for country south of Ntaria that opponents nominated as Williams’s place and he declined to participate, a similar rhetoric proclaimed him countryless and therefore “maybe” not a relhe (Arrernte person). “Justta yellafella,” someone said.6 By the early 2000s, it was rumored that his sister’s husband had sought to reroute a section of Dreaming track to strengthen Williams’s claims. Opponents were outraged by this allegation. Women remarked that if he would not “stand back,” the town leader should be “pushed back” whence he came. Williams in turn proposed that his neotraditional adversaries were migrants from the

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south who had “come up” with the missionaries. An ally observed that various men among the outstation faction had their countries and outstations only because they were “good boys” on the mission. Characteristically, the Rataras seldom made public comment. Nonetheless, among their allies, sentiment ran deep. In the course of two decades, both male and female members of the factions clashed using fighting sticks and in some cases hurling stones and pieces of wood or concrete. The battles’ residue was strewn across the basketball courts. People with injuries were flown from Ntaria to the Alice Springs hospital. Midway through the 1990s, Norman Ratara died prematurely, and later his widow suffered debilitating strokes. Although sorcery was not invoked, many among the outstation group were of the opinion that their faction leader died of stress that was then visited on his wife. Later misfortunes involving the Ntaria faction leader’s family were seen as their just deserts. Over and above these personal tragedies, the anger, resentment, and felt injustice on both sides made life at Ntaria a brutal affair. Factionalism framed Ntaria’s everyday violence. Past discussions of Aboriginal politics or political authority have underlined its egalitarian and even rhizomatic nature embedded in the practice of rite. With this view has come an emphasis on the “ethnocentricity” of stateless societies; hostility toward strangers leading to violence and also to feud.7 These features of preinvasion society have been used to interpret modern factionalism as simply old-style “kinship and conflict” relocated in settlements or land claim procedures.8 Sometimes the intensified nature of conflict is attributed to the imposition of European forms (see Merlan 1997; Martin 2003, 2005). I wish to propose that the Western Arrernte’s factional politics was as much a product of the present as the past. It involved a transition from the mission to institutions of market society and the bureaucratic state (see also Nicholas 1965). Moreover, this circumstance included Western Arrernte families in the decision making that these institutions brought. Competition between family groups replaced a mission autocracy. This was the nature of the factionalism. Nonetheless, two further factors deepened the conflict: One was a politics played out between groups of whites that involved a transition between different types of broker. Initially this politics involved departing mission staff and incoming personnel from the newly established Central Land Council (CLC). In time, however, it became a conflict between mission and secular forces at large. For a period, TORC, with its erstwhile mission links, and the secular Ntaria council seemed to proceed along different routes. The second factor that brought heightened factionalism was the centralization of resources that came with

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a local economy based mainly on resource transfers from government. In the 1990s, TORC and the Ntaria council became the hubs for separate outstation and town CDEPs. Competition between the factions was intensified by local perceptions that one group of families or another controlled or influenced these outlets. The growth of outstations belied the fact that far from involving a dispersal of resources among tiny egalitarian groups, remote community resourcing involved a considerable centralization of goods. This centralization, along with white politics, intensified Western Arrernte factionalism. This account traces the emergence of factionalism through the mission’s departure, the politicization of land rights, and the rise of centralized resource transfers as the mainstay of the Western Arrernte’s economy. In these events, the Western Arrernte people were not simply passive agents. To the contrary, some played vigorous parts in these protracted events. Yet this engagement also came with an imperfect knowledge of the state and market society which the Arrernte sought to engage. As a consequence, an unreasonable burden of expectation was placed on outstation life, not only among the Arrernte themselves but also among white policy makers. The outcome was entrenched marginalization and personal distress in the wake of the hopes invested in outstation life.

Entering the Cash Economy Phillip Scherer was a pastor in the Finke River Mission at Haasts Bluff and Hermannsburg. His recollection of the Hermannsburg mission was published posthumously in 1988; in it he described, as he called it, “a day in the life of Hermannsburg.” Here is an extract from Phillip Scherer’s diary: It is Monday, 25 September 1961. . . . A slight breeze blows in from the east, and the temperature at 6.30 am stands at 53 degrees Fahrenheit. I have taken up my position on a seat outside of the church, from where I can observe most points of the compound. . . . Tado is peering round the corner of the cashstore, eyeing me off, possibly wondering what I am doing. Eventually he wanders over to tell me he is attending Conrad’s confirmation class. . . . There come Sebastian Minawara (with linen ration-bags hanging from his hip-pocket), Oliver, Hartley and Aaron. . . . From behind the old waggon-shed . . . another group appears: Cornelius, a wood-chopper; his elder brother Gottfried, a stockman; Malcolm, one of the tractor-drivers; also Phillipp Rabinja and his brother-in-law,

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Colin Malbunka, an evangelist. They are closely followed by several schoolboys. All these are early on their way to the “eating-house” where morning devotion is to be held. . . . As I enter . . . twenty-six men, eight women and seven children are already seated. . . . [Later], the workmen make a beeline for the bulkstore where they will collect their week’s rations. These consist of 10 lbs. Flour, 3 ozs. Baking powder, 1 1/2 lbs. Sugar, 3 ozs. Tea, dried fruit, sometimes potatoes and onions, a plug of tobacco and a box of matches. . . . [I am back at my seat] in time to see William turning on the water-main of the 40,000-gallon storage-tank next to our house. William has been gardener-in-chief in the community garden for many years . . . Christine Mickan blows her whistle to let the school-children know they are to come and change their clothes. . . . Lawrence’s son, Ambrose is already chopping wood, while Nancy, (William’s daughter) is pouring out her third tubful of soap which she makes under my wife’s supervision. This soap, when sufficiently set, will be cut into blocks to dry and be handed out to the “native” women on Friday afternoon for the family laundering. (Scherer 1988:1–5)

The first thing to note about Pastor Scherer’s account is the ease with which its representations conform to common and widely discussed semantics of colonialism. The “natives” are introduced via the actions of an indolent child. The familiarity is one-way, and adults are presented as subordinate. People are identified mainly by their first (Christian) names and according to the work they do.9 In this rations-for-service regime, payment is intertwined with Christian rite. Scherer’s account conveys the mission’s disciplining power and the iconic status of soap. This is not to say that there was no cash economy at Hermannsburg. By the early 1950s, workers at particular tasks from stockman through to storekeeper were paid between ten and thirty shillings a week. Moreover, people who worked in Friedrich Albrecht’s industries, including tanning and leatherwork and art and craftwork, were paid cash incentives. Other men and women worked away from Hermannsburg and received wage payments (see P. Albrecht 2002, 17; Radford 1992). However, this cash economy was limited and quickly dispersed by the demands of relatives. More important, it remained subservient to a system in which Northern Territory (NT) “aboriginal natives” or people who “lived like natives” were wards of the state. In 1961, more than 99 percent of NT Aborigines were classified as wards (Chesterman and Galligan 1997, 174–75). As such, they were tied to

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their source of rationed goods and, with the extension of social services, to the designated source of their pension payments. The Arrernte’s legal status thereby intervened in their ability to engage with market society. A second feature of Scherer’s account is the moment it fastens on—a day in 1961. In that same year, a federal select committee recommended the extension of commonwealth franchise to all Aborigines. This enfranchisement was accomplished in 1962 when provisions that discriminated against Aborigines were removed from the Commonwealth Electoral Act. This change followed others in the area of social security benefits. In 1959, the commonwealth proposed that benefits for invalids, the aged, and widows should be paid to Aborigines who were not “nomadic or primitive.” Maternity payments were also added to the existing child allowance. These were the payments made to missions and comparable administrative centers on pastoral stations and reserves. Agents were required to deposit a percentage in each person’s trust account (Chesterman and Galligan 1997, 60, 165, 161–63). Notwithstanding enduring contraints, these moves foreshadowed citizenship with rights. They also destabilized the colonial rations-for-service regime as cash began to circulate in settlements. In 1965, the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (CCAC) heard a claim from the Northern Australian Workers Union for Aborigines to be included in the Cattle Station Industry Award (Sanders 1985, 140). The claim was successful. Nonetheless, the decision was made subject to a three-year lead time so that the industry could adjust.10 The Wave Hill walkout of Aboriginal station workers came in 1966. Subsequently, more than thirty men applied for unemployment benefits, which they were refused on the grounds that they wilfully withdrew their labor. It was open to them, the Department of Social Security (DSS) argued, to resume employment under the Wards Employment Ordinance. Under that ordinance, Aborigines were paid about one-fifth of a white man’s wage (see Sanders 1985; Chesterman and Galligan 1997, 175). Still, the pastoral award put pressure on the state to increase its payments to those who worked on missions and stations. As a consequence, in 1969 the previous cash-and-kind regime was exchanged for a cash-only one (see Sanders 1985, 142). These payments were known as a “training allowance,” the notion being that work was rewarded modestly because it was also training. Following the election of the Whitlam federal government in 1972, it was determined that all indigenous Australians should be eligible both for award wages and unemployment benefits. To that end, training allowances were terminated formally in 1974. However, policy confusion over unemployment benefits delayed this change until 1978 (Sanders 1985, 141,148). Moreover, the role of train-

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ing allowances was replaced at least in part by Special Works Projects that financed some part-time work for remote Aborigines. Paul Albrecht (son of Friedrich and for many years FRM superintendent in Alice Springs) has remarked that these policy changes heralded the settlement’s transition to “a full cash economy” (P. Albrecht 2002:41). The transition was in fact, however, to unemployment benefits. In 1973, a federal interdepartmental committee estimated that at least in the Northern Territory it was likely that around two-thirds of Aborigines in the workforce would be relying on welfare (see Sanders 1985, 150). Among Western Arrernte, “large scale payment of unemployment benefits” was reported to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) in 1978. In June 1981, the DAA’s Ron Morony reported that all remaining Western Arrernte allowances would be withdrawn and that most outstation groups would move to unemployment benefits.11 As I discuss later in this chapter, outstations had begun to proliferate as civil rights increased. In this context, Morony’s reports had a further significance: they marked the emergence of a shadow economy in Arrernte life where welfare became the major source of income for outstation residents. This downside of outstations—caused by their remoteness—was initially masked by other dimensions of the land rights process. Living on country gave something back to erstwhile hunter-gatherers who had had their land usurped. Moreover, both indigenous and nonindigenous advocates saw outstations as a vehicle to find the balance between traditional life on country and a life in market society. In time, Community Development Employment Programs would be a major part of this effort (see Sanders 1985, 158). Concerned that “young fellas” would be welfare dependent, Aboriginal elders welcomed CDEPs—an elaboration of the earlier Special Works Projects. As work-for-the-dole schemes that provided additional infrastructure grants, they became the preferred option for outstation groups. This transition from the mission to inclusion in a cash economy but marginalization in market society was informed by other cultural and political developments.

The Mission’s Decentralization Project For many mission staff, the most notable thing that voting brought was the indigenous right to drink (P. Albrecht 2002, 33, 39). In 1969 Gary Stoll, the Hermannsburg superintendent, remarked, “An increased amount of drunkenness amongst the leaders of the community seems to be leading to confusion among the people.”12 A further comment noted “the number of deaths

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not accredited to sickness or other natural causes . . . the fear, suspicion and in some cases, subsequent revenge this generates could turn into a major social problem.”13 These issues of alcohol and payback emerged in the context of increasing civil rights, circulating cash and aspirations to autonomy. Elected councils were the mission’s first attempt to address these issues. In 1963, a village council was established as an elected group of eight. The council was modeled on similar ones in Queensland and conceived of mainly as an extralegal agent of law and order (Sommerlad 1973, 31). Although this group had no legal power, it could intervene in fights and other misdemeanors or else report them to police. In the following years, however, the village council had little impact, and mayhem reigned intermittently. Not only drinking and sorcery but stolen cars were a regular occurrence, as documented in the Hermannsburg Mission Superintendent’s Report: “Mr. P___’s car was stolen by twelve boys and returned 3 days and 500 miles later.” Again, “On the night of 13th March, 1971 five youths aged between fourteen and twenty stole the Administration Toyota. They started it by connecting a wire from the battery to the coil and pushing it. The case is still to be heard. . . . On 11th April, 1971 eight youths aged between thirteen and eighteen years stole the utility of Mr. N___ and went for a 200 mile trip around the Glen Helen road. . . . On this occasion the same youths also stole some blankets from the school.” The more serious side of this daredevil activity was reported in November 1971, when the son of a Western Arrernte pastor was killed in a crash on the Hermannsburg road and one of his two companions was flown to Adelaide with serious injuries.14 This was the beginning of a new form of epidemic for the Arrernte that would last for more than thirty years. This youthful mixture of exuberance, desire, and rage signaled irrevocable change. With the introduction of the training allowance and greater freedom of movement, it was clear that the mission’s days as a total institution were numbered. The mission board belatedly consulted T. G. H. Strehlow in Adelaide, and he advised the reinstatement of indigenous authority (P. Albrecht 2002, 40). This advice led to the creation of an elected Ntaria town council, a move seen as an integral part of a shift from mission station to indigenous church. The FRM determined that it would withdraw to Alice Springs, increase its indigenous pastorate, and establish a community church at Ntaria. Civic administration of the town would pass to a secular council. The elected Ntaria council met for the first time on October 18, 1971. One of the council’s first acts was to form an incorporated Ntaria Housing Society. A wet canteen was established with strict limits on alcohol consumption. Plans were drawn up to construct a community hall,

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and a social club was incorporated. Applications to DAA to support various small businesses were discussed.15 Within a year, however, Stoll’s reports were pessimistic. The town council seemed to need constant support, and the village council was “strongly divided between two family groups.” He remarked, “I think it is all part of a power struggle with one particular family trying to move into a position of overall control and another large group trying to prevent them.”16 Family conflict had also erupted in the Hermannsburg school. By 1973, at least some families were requesting that their children be separated in different classrooms.17 Concerned, the mission sent its school principal, Rex Ziersch, to study anthropology at Queensland University under the tutelage of Dr. John von Sturmer. On Ziersch’s return in 1974, a research group was formed, led by Stoll and Ziersch and supported by John Pfitzner, the Hermannsburg pastor. Both Stoll and Pfitzner, along with Paul Albrecht, were fluent Western Arrernte speakers. Their task was to report on kinship organization among Western Arrernte and Luritja people resident around the mission. Doing so, they believed, would help them understand the family conflict manifest in the village council and the school. Concurrent developments at Hermannsburg and at the national level gave their work a specific land-based focus. In late 1970 and through 1971, various meetings were held concerning mining on areas of land west of Hermannsburg. There was discussion of forming an Aboriginal mining company, and Stoll noted that these issues revealed in turn the need for a “workable agreement about tribal ownership.” In his report of February 1971, he made a telling remark: “The thing that all [Aboriginal participants] felt very strongly about was that whether the mining operation be small or large, they want to own it and where possible work it. In the event of it being necessary for Europeans to be involved, they do not want them to become partners but rather employees. The last people they want interfering in their business are government personnel. They also felt that they want Europeans kept off the reserve as this was the last place they can call their own.”18 Soon after, he noted that various Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg were expressing an interest in having a “block” outside the settlement and preferably on their own “tribal” lands. These aspirations were reinforced by developments in federal politics. On its election in December 1972, the Whitlam government acted quickly to establish the DAA and to commission a report from Justice Edward Woodward on land rights in the Northern Territory (see Woodward 1973, 1974). Moves toward self-management and the mission’s withdrawal now began to converge with talk about returning land. In the course of 1973, as conflict and drinking continued, one and then a further four initial groups moved

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out of Hermannsburg. Soon there were seven camps located east, north, and west of the mission. The study group tabled its report for the mission board in June 1974. The report underlined the autonomy of “families” or, as the authors also termed them, “father-son descent groups.” There were striking parallels with Strehlow’s 1965 account: “Each nyinanga [nyenhenge] group established through patrilineal descent and associated with a particular tract of land, sees itself as an independent social and political unit. There are alliances with certain other nyinanga groups, through marriage and mythology. . . . It is clear however, that as far as the local nyinanga group is concerned the normal political, social, emotional spiritual and intellectual life of the group goes on within the group.”19 This section of the report also noted the hierarchical relations between generations and within sibling sets. The picture that the authors painted was one of every “family” on its “block,” autonomous and hierarchically organized by generations. It provided an amenable European turn to the mission’s account of tradition.20 Moreover, outstations and family groups, as the study group conceived them, seemed to provide a solution to the mission’s frustrated ambitions. The apparent failure of the town council also checked the mission’s aim to replace its station with a community church. Following their study, though, staff adopted a new approach: Councils were a European form of organization. Discrete groups of kin on country was the Arrernte way. Therefore decentralization from Hermannsburg to outstations could be an alternative route to an indigenous church: “The only places where there is a vigorous life at present are the two permanently established out-stations at Old Station and Lyiltjirra. These two places see themselves as separate, independent congregations. At both places daily devotions are conducted by Nahasson (or William) and Traugott respectively. These devotions together with regular Sunday services are generally attended by the whole camp.”21 Ziersch reported that in Hermannsburg church activity was withering whereas on outstations “all confirmed people [receive] the sacrament.” A year or so later, he proposed that “each [outstation], in a sense, should comprise its own ‘mission.’ ”22 Remarks on schooling were also included in the report. It stated that the mission school had lost its legitimacy.23 The weakening of central authority in the mission meant that classroom teachers too had less influence. While the report emphasized conflict among families, also acknowledged by Arrernte themselves,24 some years later Paul Albrecht noted a further issue. He observed that with the release from mission control as state wards, Aboriginal parents were also released from previous financial penalties for

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“children’s non-attendance at school.”25 As a result, some among “the more traditional Aboriginal parents” were allowing “their children to decide whether and when they would attend school” (P. Albrecht 2002, 102). The study group’s response was to assign teachers to family groups and confer responsibility on the senior generation. By 1979 this policy had produced twenty-three “family schools,” nine in Ntaria and fourteen on outstations. In these schools, fourteen staff members were teaching 251 pupils (P. Albrecht 2002, 110). The Western Arrernte’s movement into the cash economy as citizens who remained remote entailed their future reliance on welfare payments and therefore their reliance on forms of government transfer. Depending on the form of administration involved, this circumstance could lead to highly centralized resources—a possibility realized with the advent of CDEPs. Yet counter to this centralization was the mission’s focus on families and outstation blocks. Its vision involved a proliferation of small groups on country that would replicate in multiple forms the domestic moral economy of the mission. This aspiration of mission staff, and of Arrernte neotraditionalists, influenced attitudes toward land rights.

Land Rights, Politics, and the Hermannsburg Alliance As early as 1973, Paul Albrecht of the FRM had recommended to the mission board that the Hermannsburg lease be handed back to the Western Arrernte traditional owners (P. Albrecht 2002, 48). Doing so was achieved by a “Schedule 1” listing in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976). In effect, the mission lease was handed back without the need for a land claim. Listing required that the land be mapped and the senior ritual custodians named, along with all those relatives who were either pmere kwerteye (custodians/owners) or kwertengerle (managers). The same mission study group undertook the mapping with anthropological help from von Sturmer and some funding from the Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra. Nonetheless, for Paul Albrecht a preferable path would have involved the issuing of normal Northern Territory leases to individual Arrernte. Better, Albrecht implied, for Aboriginal people to move directly to individual autonomy than to be governed by CLC procedures.26 His views were consistent with the decentralization project that sought to avoid secular control and retain mission links. Others saw this Lutheran view as a quick path to the loss of indigenous patrimony. Individual leases could be bought and sold on the open market. Working with an indigenous leader and an anthropologist, CLC lawyer

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Geoff Eames had the task of explaining the land rights bill to Aboriginal groups (Eames 1983, 272). Soon he was aware that staff from the FRM were engaged in a similar enterprise, but with problematic results: “Their explanations had left people with the clear impression that under the legislation their traditional land titles would be held by CLC staff, and that the staff would decide who could enter the land and how profits from the land would be disbursed. The royalty payments for mining would go to the CLC” (Eames 1983, 273). Regardless of whether this was an accurate account of mission staff efforts, soon acrimony prevailed between the CLC and the FRM. The issues were not canvassed in terms of leasehold property but rather in terms of local autonomy for Arrernte elders and their families. Albrecht and the mission staff opposed proposals for a single land trust for a region or a language group. More specifically, they opposed the proposal to replace the Hermannsburg lease with a single land trust when there were a number of indigenous estates involved. In a 1976 submission to the federal parliament, Albrecht along with other mission signatories observed that senior custodians saw the bill as “being unfair” because “their own authority [is not] sufficiently acknowledged or protected.” In particular, the submission observed that the proposed Western Arrernte land trust, to encompass all of the old mission lease, was “inappropriate and unworkable” in “Aboriginal terms.” Translated verbatim statements from numerous senior men were included to support this view (Albrecht et al. 1976). In his portrait of H. C. Coombs, advocate for land rights and the outstation movement, Rowse remarks on this debate. He shows that Albrecht was consulting with Coombs. Coombs and anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner came to share the view that large trusts and land councils actually could undermine traditional “clan” autonomy. Conflict might be the result. Therefore they proposed smaller councils (Rowse 2000, 142–46). Yet the DAA rejected their view as well. A major concern in policy circles was the inability of small groups (as opposed to larger ones) to negotiate effectively with mining companies, and especially those involved with uranium (Rowse 2000, 148; see also 1992, 52). Nonetheless, sometime after the act was passed, an amendment provided for multiple trusts in the place of a single regional one. The erstwhile Hermannsburg lease would be granted back to the Western Arrernte in the form of five land trusts under the aegis of the CLC (see map 4 in chapter 4).27 The FRM also opposed land councils as such. Their view was that a European structure of this type would undermine Aboriginal groups. Thinking was influenced by the Hermannsburg experience with councils and their rejection of “European organisational models.” Later Albrecht would describe his position in terms of an “Aboriginal imperium,” a governance expressed

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through tywerrenge that included not simply artifacts and rites but also the rules or “law” of procedure for countries (P. Albrecht 2002, 72). This issue set mission staff not only against the Ntaria council and its form of government but also against the CLC. For this reason, Coombs and others have suggested that the mission pursued a strategy of “divide and rule” designed to maintain its control of Western Arrernte lives (Coombs 1978, 40; Rowse 2000, 143). Certainly Albrecht’s and the study group’s nativism misconstrued Arrernte kinship, past and present. Moreover, given Central Australia’s history of invasion and missionization, it seems disingenuous for the FRM suddenly to discover autonomous indigenous culture. Was the intent of Albrecht and the study group simply to deny to a secular authority the roles they were losing in Arrernte lives? Possibly, Albrecht’s 1973 view provided to the Land Rights Commission also lingered on: that if, in fact, the state could not restore tradition, it was better to move to the land tenure operative for nonindigenous Australians. Mixed in with these issues were more intimate concerns. Both mission staff and some Arrernte sought to protect a Hermannsburg alliance shaped in the course of the mission’s life. The earliest outstation camps were in the region of Ellery Creek, just east of Ntaria. They were all located within what would become the Roulbmoulbma land trust under the land rights act. However, a number of the men and women who came from Hermannsburg to settle in these camps were not pmere kwerteye (custodians/owners) or even pmeraltye (one-countrymen) for the region. They were guests. They reflected a coalition of Western Arrernte, Southern Arrernte, Southern and Kukatja- Luritja, and Pintupi people with links to the mission. The men involved commanded various levels of traditional law. In addition, some were ordained Lutheran pastors or soon to become so. Some had simply been prominent figures at the mission in various types of enterprise—gardening, maintenance, and art and craftwork. Others were stockmen and station hands more or less engaged with mission staff. Among them were some who sparked a ritual revitalization. Importantly, these were men whose fathers were socialized in indigenous milieus distant from the mission and other settlements. They were among the last such men to reside at Ntaria. Some had married into Western Arrernte life (see Sansom 1982, 128). Added to these ties was a collective engagement with some mission staff who were also Arrernte speakers, among them Paul Albrecht, Pastor John Pfitzner, Gary Stoll, and later Glen Auricht. They were committed to a new outstation “way” and, with DAA support, acted as conduits for resources. It was within this milieu in 1975 that the cultural revival occurred. It came in the form of male ceremonial performed at Old Station and Kwatjin-

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marra on the Ellery Creek. Various oral accounts indicate that this flowering of rite involved an intense interaction between Western Arrernte men and others from the south and west. The latter included Luther Urbitja, Yankee Elizer, Jack Coulthard, Ephraim Wheeler, Nugget Ngalkena, and Adam Yama. Among the former were Howard Inkamala, Simon Enalanga, Dawson Rubuntja, Raatz Mulkatana, Richard Moketarinja, and members of the Malbunka, Pareroultja, and Ebitarinja families. Rupert Max Stewart and Bruno Tapani were also involved.28 In his report for the last quarter of 1975, Gary Stoll wrote a moving account of two complete ceremonies involving many days and quite a few nights of singing and re-enacting the travels and exploits of various “ancestors.” . . . The impression, or rather impressions, this has made on me is hard to describe. I was staggered by the extent and intactness of knowledge and skills still retained by men ranging in age from their late twenties to mid-seventies, many of whom grew up in the Mission and among whom I would have confidently predicted little of this kind of traditional knowledge remained. The efficiency of the organisation was also impressive as was its complete independence of any European assistance. In fact one felt rather small and insignificant, completely dependent on them as to how one should behave. Another revelation was seeing men one has known for 18 years and many of whom have not impressed one as being other than mediocre, playing a very significant role and being very important in this situation.29

There was also a further, political dimension: It has become apparent that our attendance at these and possibly other functions has been under discussion for some time. One very important reason given for their desire for our involvement was that since we were helping them by “talking to Government” in other words by explaining to the outside world what they’re on about particularly as regards to land, it was important that they teach us “all about their laws.” An indispensable pre-requisite to such learning is seeing the secret ceremonies. (emphasis in original)30

Stoll added that some of the older men were concerned that mission staff involved in a broker role should have the respect of younger men. In this same report and in the first for 1976, Stoll remarked on the close cooperation between himself and DAA officials in their mutual support of outstation

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development. In passing, he noted that “the long-awaited drilling program finally got under way . . . and to date 5 [water] bores have been drilled.”31 Some of the men who were central to the efflorescence of ceremony resided at these camps, and Stoll along with other mission and DAA staff had become their “workers.” With von Sturmer’s help, this group mapped the country that became the Western Arrernte land trusts. They designated the custodians who would be able to decide who might reside on country. Here the ability to “give permission” was also the autonomy to sustain the configuration of personnel involved in the revitalization. Just as important, it enabled land trust custodians to support each other; the more knowlegeable stepping forward as kwertengerle for less-versed pmere kwerteye. In short, indigenous and nonindigenous figures comprised a “historical bloc”of interest and accommodation.32 They acted together to defend a tradition that “itself [was] a product of colonial experience”—a postinvasion Arrernte culture (see Keesing 1994, 45). In fact, similar forces to those that made pepe a local affair—among them the isolation of a German mission in Anglo-Australia—also molded this tradition. Shaped by settlement, it nonetheless became the route to indigenous autonomy on country. This ritual activity offered to Western Arrente a final chance to revitalize elements of a priceless tradition. To a mission that in its pietistic phase had suppressed a living culture, the outstation movement offered historical redemption. Later, the FRM would propose that its policy toward Aboriginal culture changed in the 1970s (see Jones 1992, 99–100; P. Albrecht 2002, 61–74).

Family Divisions Entrenched The mapping of countries required for Schedule 1 listing in the land rights act produced a division of the mission lease into estates managed by land trusts within the CLC. A preeminent family or group of them was associated with each trust as custodians for each estate. Each estate was named: Uruna, Roulmoulbma, Ntaria, Ltalaltuma, and Rodna. In time, they would harbor forty outstations (see map 8 in chapter 8). The Ntaria trust, which would quickly become the site of factional politics, included the country around Ntaria/Hermannsburg, the site of Kaporilya, and land along either side of the Finke River south of the settlement. As recognized in the land rights act, it terminated where the mission lease met the boundary of Crown land, the Palm Valley National Park. A senior custodian of the Ntaria estate, Norman Ratara was also a male descendant of Abel, a man who spoke at the desacralization of Manangananga cave. Later Abel became the mis-

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sion’s chief evangelist. His father, Eratara, was baptized as Salomo on April 2, 1888, at the age of about thirty. He was one of the first adults baptized at the mission. One of the managers for Ntaria was an indigenous pastor whose brother’s daughter had married Norman Ratara. As it happened, her mother’s father had been baptized with Eratara.33 In this way, senior custodians of the estate were interlinked with each other and with the mission. The year 1982 witnessed not only the handover of the estates that had formerly been the Hermannsburg lease but also the reconstitution of Ntaria’s town council. Both developments foreshadowed the withdrawal of the FRM from Ntaria in 1983. The council officially commenced its duties on November 1, 1982, just four months after the mission had relinquished its lease. Initially, it would manage power and water, the mail run, the garage, and the joinery and metal shop and would take responsibility for indigenous and nonindigenous employment. Commissioned in these tasks by the NT Department of Community Development, in time the council would assume a full range of local government roles.34 The council’s resurgence occurred in conjunction with the rise of a Western Arrernte advocate for secular government. The father’s father (FaFa) of this man, Ntjalka, was also baptized in 1888 and appears often as a worker and evangelist in reports from Hermannsburg. He was an associate of Moses Tjalkabota and also composed hymns for the mission. Thereafter, however, histories diverged. The grandfather spent long periods at Deep Well station south of Alice Springs, and his son, Elias Jack, lived mostly in Alice Springs. Elias Jack was Gus Williams’s father. As a youth, Williams attended high school in Alice Springs and periodically returned to Hermannsburg. As a young adult, he developed a tourist enterprise driving visitors by bus into the Palm Valley National Park. In 1969 his first operating season involved “31 trips and 647 passengers for a total of $1942,” and by 1971 he had a contract with the Central Australian Tourist Association to carry passengers four times a week.35 Supported early on by the mission, the relation between Williams and senior custodians and mission staff became increasingly strained. He does not appear among the names of those consulted in the mapping of land, and, notwithstanding his grandfather’s apparent location around Ntaria, he was not recognized as a senior custodian for Ntaria.36 At the time, the link between custodianship and resources was significant. The mission’s intention had been to hand the lease back stocked. In October 1980, cattle on the lease were counted by aerial survey and signed over to the senior custodians. About four thousand cattle were involved, and nine brands were registered across the five land trusts. Also in this period, Stoll’s reports note negotiations between the CLC and mining companies concern-

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Figure 16. Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre sign on the Areyonga road. Photograph by author.

ing lease arrangements for the Mereenie oil pipeline and Palm Valley gas. In early 1983, initial payments totalling half a million dollars were made for natural gas sourced in Palm Valley and carried across trust land.37Almost all Western Arrernte benefited from these payments. Nonetheless, these transactions enhanced the standing of senior custodians most. Williams was not among them. Two organizational developments entrenched the breach. The first involved the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC) built across the Finke River from the town but located in the Ntaria estate (see figure 16). Norman Ratara became TORC’s first president. It was resourced by the DAA. Glen Auricht, previously a lay worker at the mission, managed the center. In time he would develop a close relation with Ratara and raise his own family at Tjuwanpa. The resource center received its first operating budget as an incorporated organization in July 1983. On this date, “responsibility for services to the Hermannsburg Outstations [was] transferred from FRM.”38 All outstation heads were signatories to the incorporation, and the center had an executive body comprised of six of the more influential custodians. As the Ntaria council would service the town, Tjuwanpa would service the outstation system.39 Moreover, for a period at least, TORC drew mainly on federal funding while the Ntaria town council drew more funds from the Northern Territory government. A second organizational issue intensified the breach. Soon after assum-

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ing his position as council chair, Williams sought to reestablish central schooling at Ntaria. On August 10, 1983, the Centralian Advocate newspaper reported his views: “Some of the ‘native’ classes in [Hermannsburg] are conducted ‘under a tree on a tarpaulin’ according to Gus Williams. These ‘family schools’ were conducted outside the well-appointed school complex which has a resource centre, an ablution block, a library, the ‘white’ classroom for European children, as well as former ‘native’ classrooms now used for storage. Williams said because of the present education system at Hermannsburg there were 16-year-old youths who were barely able to write their names.” In response, the school principal was reported as saying that the Lutheran program was being pursued “strictly on the principles of Aboriginal self-determination. . . . Subjects chosen by family heads were being taught in accordance with the NT Education Department curriculum.”40 In 1985 the NT Department of Education provided two staff members for an Ntaria government school to cater to the family of Williams and others who wished to attend it. In 1989, when the Lutheran church finally withdrew its family teachers, there were still two teachers at the Hermannsburg school. It rapidly expanded, though, and evolved into a central school that also serviced four regional outstation schools. As indicated previously (see chapter 3), the final withdrawal of the Lutheran teaching staff involved an occasion of great emotion and some bitterness. It was not simply that some women felt that God had given land to the Arrernte but rather that God through his law at Hermannsburg had helped them get their countries back. The opposition that most outsiders would see between land rights and the mission was not apparent to these women. They distrusted the power of the secular order. In sum, a movement already marked by family politics and a complex rationale intersected with lhentere (white people’s) politics and centralization also marked by the different destinations of federal and NT funding. The Hermannsburg alliance was institutionalized in TORC and in the Lutheran system of outstation schools. As resource hub, TORC would be juxtaposed to the Ntaria council. The struggle over schooling, which neotraditionalists lost, made conflict worse.

Two Sites of Factionalism There were two central sites of the factionalism. The first was land rights. The particular issue was the Palm Valley land claim for a small section of unalienated Crown land adjoining either a southern or a western boundary of three land trusts—Ntaria, Roulbmoulbma, and Uruna.41 The coun-

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Figure 17. Land claim hearing in Palm Valley, 1994. Photograph by author.

cil chair used this claim to test again his traditional status in relation to the Ntaria estate. The claim was a turbulent one that extended from the mid-1980s until Aboriginal Land Commissioner Justice Gray brought down his findings in 1999. Hearings were conducted on-site during March 1994 (see figure 17). The CLC appointed separate anthropologist-consultants for the contesting parties identified as “Renkeraka-Ratara” versus “Williams.” Each party refused to proffer central evidence in the presence of the other, and at the time in Ntaria, there was much discussion of people “stealing” knowledge and talking out of place. Supporters of each side brought counterclaims concerning migration from the south. In addition, Williams drew attention to the fact that the estate had been attributed different “skins” at different times, suggesting that, sometime in the past, a second group had joined his (see also chapter 4). He proposed joint custodianship. The land commissioner’s findings in relevant part were that both the groups held “the same traditions and spiritual affiliations.” However, only the Renkeraka-Ratara group could claim “primary spiritual responsibility” and fell “within the statutory definition of ‘traditional Aboriginal owners.’ ” The bases for the decision were three: (1) that the successful group had been able to produce tywerrenge prohibited to the other group for a crucial site; (2) that the claim of the neotraditionalists was consistently exclusionary; and (3) that the Ntjalka (Williams) group was unable to furnish knowledge

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sufficiently specific to sites within the estate. Explaining why he had not included their names as “owners,” the commissioner remarked, I am not to be taken as having found that they have no interest in, or no entitlement to, that estate under indigenous law. It is plain, as I have found, that they have significant affiliations to sites on the estate. They may well be within the class of persons who should be consulted before a land trust makes any decision in relation to the estate. In time, antagonism between the two groups might diminish, and the claims of Ntjalka group might be recognised. Alternatively, with the passing of the late Norman Ratara, the ability of Renkeraka/Ratara group to maintain its exclusive stance might be weakened. (boldface in original)42

This opinion was strengthened by the fact that the neotraditionalists, at the time, had greater support among other traditional owners. This ritual “showdown” framed by the jural procedures of the state did not deter the Williams group from further challenges to the decision. As the land claim report makes clear, the “epistemic openness” of decisions over sites is as much a politics as it is a cognitive style. Ambiguity, secrecy, and variable story versions allow past ideas about sites to change (see Merlan 1997, 11). Power and alliances can also shift and allow the rereading of authority. Yet without doubt, the legalism of the claim proceedings, the long wait, and the written report, not to mention the extensive hearings, made this decision a formidable blow for Williams and the Ntaria mob. The second arena in which factionalism was manifest involved government transfers to Western Arrernte either in the form of CDEPs, which provided most cash incomes, or in the form of project grants. Although there have been many arguments to claim that CDEP has been a form of “workfare” rather than “welfare,” my experience among Western Arrernte has been that most work lacked either meaning or prospects for development that would make it equivalent to “mainstream” employment. As a consequence, CDEP was tantamount to welfare for individuals; cash support on which people depended for their livelihood. This type of work included garbage collection, town beautification, sewing classes, road and house maintenance, and care of the elderly. It also included regional land care and metalwork at Tjuwanpa. Though apprenticeships were available in these areas, candidates often were ill prepared or lacked the support of an indigenous waged-work context. The work that seemed most satisfying was the mustering of feral camels and brumbies (wild horses), seasonal work among

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family groups using skills that were three or four generations old. Ranger work in the region’s national parks was also popular among young men but provided opportunity for just a few. In sum, CDEPs were make-work schemes that catered to a vulnerable population (see Austin-Broos 2001a). The schemes were distinguished by the fact that they were transfers not to individuals but rather to a community organization that administered the projects and paid participants. Therefore, CDEPs involved operating and infrastructure grants in addition to the sums paid to individuals. Such grants brought more money into the Western Arrernte community than individual welfare payments would. For this reason, CDEPs were strongly supported by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and other administrators who advocated for remote Aboriginal groups. Moreover, as Sanders (1993) has remarked, the centralized way in which the transfers were handled at the local level brought power and influence to indigenous leaders. Yet in many communities, including the Western Arrernte’s, families fought to capture resource niches; outlets they controlled directly or in alliance with whites. Bosses and factions were the order of the day. In the case of the Western Arrernte, these resource niches were the two main centers linked to the factions: TORC and the Ntaria town council. This division became clear when Tjuwanpa made the decision in 1988 to participate in the CDEP scheme. Ntaria had already been involved since 1980. However, once TORC entered the scheme, its list of participants quickly grew (see Austin-Broos 2001a). Even by 1990, Tjuwanpa’s roll contained 140 names while Ntaria had around 40 participants. Through the 1990s, while the numbers enrolled with TORC swelled to over 300, participation at Ntaria remained fairly static and never involved more than 60 participants. This disparity had resource implications. For example, in 1994–95, CDEP wages for TORC amounted to $2.36 million (in Australian dollars). Those for Ntaria were a mere $778,543. There was a similar disparity in capital support: $330,480 and $12,370, respectively (see Papunya Regional Council 1995, 32). The range of activities in the two locales was similar. Yet from an Arrernte point of view, the outstation system had three advantages. One was the opportunity for some youth to be involved in modest pastoral or mustering work or in metalwork at Tjuwanpa. Ntaria could not match these attractions. A second advantage was that outstation heads, usually traditional owners, received housing and a vehicle. They were also paid a premium to act as supervisors for their kin. Well resourced, a third advantage was that outstation groups had more autonomy. In a complex that expanded to forty outstation sites during the 1990s, it was not feasible

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for the Tjuwanpa on-site CDEP coordinator to visit all outstations regularly. But it was a simple task for the Ntaria counterpart located in the town (see also Austin-Broos 2001a). The Ntaria council listed these and other factors to explain why CDEP at Ntaria seemed to struggle. At the same time, the council noted that many Western Arrernte outstation people in fact spent most of their time in the town’s camps. This situation was predictable just because TORC could not replace Ntaria’s range of services to Western Arrernte people. The health clinic is located at Ntaria. Two supermarkets are there. The church is there, and although outstation schools endured, many children attended the Ntaria central school. Sporting facilities for youth, though meager, are centered on Ntaria (see map 7 in chapter 5). The town council objected to the fact that while most Western Arrernte drew on services in the town, the greater part of CDEP capital grants went to Tjuwanpa. This sense of anger and inequity was fueled by the fact that Ntaria’s “no work, no pay” rule could not be enforced on outstations which nonetheless seemed blessed with resources. During the 1990s when the factionalism was at its height, improved housing trickled slowly into Western Arrernte life. Ntaria and Tjuwanpa had separate housing programs. Outstation houses were federally funded, and their number grew at a steady rate. At the time, the housing stock at Ntaria was mainly small stone structures built in the 1950s and early 1960s. Many had deteriorated badly and had facilities that functioned either not at all or poorly. (Later, by 2006, some of them would be bulldozed away.) For widowed affines of outstation owners and for carers who needed to live close to the clinic, the school, or both, the view that they might never receive improved housing was another source of bitterness. Some residents of Ntaria pointed to government largesse on the outstations while others proposed that new houses built in Ntaria were unfairly distributed. The council’s reluctance to address the issue of a women’s refuge and more facilities for youth made matters worse. All these factors added to the heat and strengthened the resistance of the neotraditionalists, who played to their strong suit—traditional claims over country. Often individuals were both belligerent and mischievous. I noted these comments from an influential woman in 1998. She was “going to Napperby [Larumba] to a women’s meeting to ‘give some story—fish story—finish where my country is.’ She would also be going to Tempe Downs, ‘I’ll get that one too, like my brother. That man will be right outside after that.’ Later she remarked, ‘We gotta talk country with my cousin, join up the stories for my son. I got too much son for this place. I gotta get them land. Land is money. He jus’ want the money. He doesn’t care about

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relhe mape [the Arrernte people].’ ” The woman’s remark distils some issues that made this factionalism a tough affair. The factionalism was focused on issues of status and power among male family leaders differently and competitively grounded. The outstation mob embodied a valued indigenous self. In the person of Ratara and his allies, they retained the ability to defend a ritually informed and emplaced identity. Perennial politics over land among Aboriginal people continent-wide demonstrates the importance of this form of identity and power. Williams was frustrated in this course. He could move with ease in lhentere organizations and personally command influence and wealth. Yet none of this allowed him to demand acceptance in ritual terms. Therefore the Ntaria mob turned to compete in the arena of material resources where they were better placed. Initially, when TORC was at its height, the neotraditionalists seemed to outflank the modernists. However, as TORC too became a secular organization and more subject to the bureaucratic state, matters took another turn. I address these events in my conclusion.

Factionalism and the Outstation Movement: A Conclusion Western Arrernte factionalism was intensified by the antipathies between white brokers—that is, between mission staff and the Central Land Council and other secular forces. While the latter two saw the homelands movement simply as land rights, the former sought to preserve an alliance that had been shaped by the mission’s history. In the 1990s, the impact of this Hermannsburg alliance was magnified by the state and its land rights procedures. An adversarial legal process increased the occasions on which both conflict and aggression could be acted out. A decision in print and backed by the state had a further impact. Given that the protocol for further legal challenges to the decisions remained unclear, the written report had an aura of finality. The land claim process thereby seemed to advertise the conflicts at Ntaria. The initial transfer of the mission lease to traditional custodianship and the Palm Valley claim brought immense and appropriate satisfaction to many Western Arrernte. Nonetheless, the legal procedures deepened a factionalism that was modern in the making, not simply tradition unleashed. Factionalism was also exacerbated by the fact that the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre and the Ntaria council became centralized resource hubs operating on behalf of the Western Arrernte people, many of whom were welfare recipients. This circumstance brought considerable power to those who controlled these hubs. Undoubtedly, this situation allowed indigenous bosses to colonize the state, turning its resources to their own ends. At the

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same time, it opened the way for factional resource politics. Disputes over government grants, housing, vehicles, and the like unfolded in tandem with fights over country. This “secret life” of an outstation movement also reveals something else: that the outstation movement was expected to resolve both mission institutionalization and economic marginalization. Representatives of the CLC and other secular service workers saw outstations as a major vehicle of deinstitutionalization. Many Arrernte also had this vision, although for some it entailed continuing links with the Finke River Mission. As a policy adviser, H. C. Coombs viewed outstations as a vehicle for deinstitutionalization and a return to tradition. He sketched this vision in the following terms: “The inhabitants of these groups . . . would be predominantly persons who shared ties of language and religious tradition, together with their spouses. They would also predominantly be those who shared clan or other common descent affiliations. . . . Residence at decentralised homelands affords readier and more frequent contact with sacred sites and the Dreaming tracks of ancestral beings. In addition, access to motor vehicles and money for petrol has greatly extended the range of group interaction, so that men and women from ever more distant communities are called to participate in initiation and other ceremonies” (Coombs 1994, 24–25, 28–29). This is a true description for the early outstation movement at Hermannsburg, and Coombs supported the initiative strongly.43 Western Arrernte, Lutheran staff, and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs all worked hard to expand the system. The religious commitment of Lutheran staff gave an impetus to this effort and propelled the process forward. The Western Arrernte’s movement, with forty outstations in the 1990s, became one of Australia’s largest. Nonetheless, conditions changed. TORC continued to require resources as other initiatives came on stream in Central Australia. As resource competition grew, administrators of the Papunya Regional Council based in Alice Springs (the regional arm of ATSIC) were quick to argue that the Western Arrernte had had their share.44 In addition, the efflorescence of ritual that began on the Ellery Creek was undermined in the 1980s by the passing of the generation, and the specific men, who led it. Ritual activity of the scope that initially emerged soon dwindled and thereby left outstation residents bereft of a powerful cultural engine that might have redefined their lives. Through the 1990s, Christian enthusiasm also declined, and as family politics increased, the lay Lutherans left Tjuwanpa. Inevitably the resource pull was back to Ntaria so that by 2005 the Community Development Employment Project was located again solely within the town (see Austin-Broos 2006b).

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These outcomes turn the focus back to the second role that many hoped outstations would play: to realize an economy that might resolve the clash between emplaced indigenous identity and market society. In 1994, Coombs expressed some typical views.45 Homeland settlements may, for some time, continue to be largely autonomous and self-sufficient economic units. Production, including hunting and gathering, will be directed to home consumption and reduction of dependence on imported stores. Exports, except where the community concerned is linked with an Aboriginal-owned cattle property, will generally be confined to art and crafts and occasional surpluses. Imports will be diverse and include white-style food and clothing, fuel, tools and building materials. They will be financed by sales of artefacts and art, by the earnings of those employed in providing government-sponsored services in education, health, town management and so on, by government grants for capital projects and by receipts from social security payments. . . . Any reduction in the quantity, variety and cost of these imports seems likely to come mainly from new and improved technology in subsistence production . . . It is unlikely, for some time, that activities directed at the external markets (other than artefacts, art, cattle, and perhaps tourism) would prove successful. Their processes conflict with much in Aboriginal tradition and ways of thought, and require a learning jump likely to be too great for tradition-oriented communities. (Coombs 1994, 25–26)

In short, Coombs proposed that the outstations would become the small domestic economies that the Lutherans yearned for too. Unfortunately, he did not acknowledge that most outstation residents were included in a cash economy but as welfare recipients. With this status came rapid engagement with a state bureaucracy and the local factional politics that centralized resources brought. Also overlooked was the power of a cash-and-commodity world to transform or disorganize traditional forms of value. In fact, extensive reliance on welfare payments for at least two-thirds of the adult population would have the same demoralizing effect on Western Arrernte that it has on other marginalized groups around the world. At least for the Western Arrernte, return to country as cultural renewal was not sufficiently powerful to rebuff the impact of marginalization. As a consequence, factionalism pervaded Western Arrernte life. Moreover, its manifestation in everyday violence reflects in fact something else: the structural violence of state policy that placed on outstations a burden that

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was just too great. This excessive burden was something that the Western Arrernte, held on the margins of the state in the previous mission regime, could not have foreseen themselves. Possibly it was something that white policy makers did not want to see. This likelihood is reflected in the quite different imaginaries that Western Arrernte and the bureaucracy brought to outstation life. I discuss these imaginaries in chapter 8.

G chapter 8

When Imaginaries Collide

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o suggest the significance of the outstation movement from an Arrernte point of view, I turn to Charles Taylor’s (2004) account of “modern social imaginaries.”1 My aim is to compare and contrast the expectations and unspoken assumptions that relhe (Arrernte people) and lhentere (white people) brought to the outstation movement. In his discussion of modern social imaginaries, Taylor ascribes to the West a process he terms “the great disembedding.” He means by this a change in which people become estranged from a local life, from identification with one group, and from a ritual approach to the world (see also Polanyi 1944). He draws on Max Weber’s (1958) account of the “disenchantment” that accompanied industrialization to describe this process. By contrast, Taylor argues, embeddedness involves “a certain understanding of human flourishing” as something in the here and now. The notion of life as an inverted image of a perfected form is strange to this milieu. Citing W. E. H. Stanner on Aboriginal religion, Taylor notes his account of a “mood of assent” in Aboriginal culture; a disinclination to “quarrel with life” that comes with “following up” the law. This stance excludes the redemptionism that comes with Judeo-Christian and other world religions that posit the chance through death to transport to a better life (C. Taylor 2004, 58–59; see also Stanner 1966, 40–58). There are many points at which Taylor’s account might be questioned. He assumes that there is just one history of modernity. Yet Taylor’s version of the West’s disembedding is evocative for thinking about a federal government bureaucracy confronting Western Arrernte people, modern in their own terms but still emplaced and kin-based. This brings me to a second way in which Taylor typifies modern imaginaries. In his view, the development of “economy” as an “objectified real205

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ity” is closely connected with the great disembedding. In his comments on the objectification of economy, three points stand out. The first one Taylor borrows from Weber when he observes that economy as an objectified reality begins with the “affirmation of the ordinary” in life (C. Taylor 2004, 74). Other ways of securing the world, including ritual ways, lose plausibility as ordinary nonsacred practices become increasingly revered. The outcome is Sahlins’s “practical reason” as a pervasive culture (Sahlins 1976). Not only is economy crucial to culture, but economy becomes culture’s meaning. Our understanding of ourselves and others is principally in market terms—ours and others’ market capacities and viability rendered in terms of prices in the market. We no longer think of ourselves as first and foremost relatives, and notwithstanding the common adage, generally what we know is more important than who we know. Taylor’s second point about this economized experience of the world is that in his view, economy as objectified reality involves an imagined and interconnecting network of individual agents rather than purposive groups. For Taylor, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is the paradigmatic form of this view (A. Smith [1789] 1976). Individuals by their very nature are thought to act and react in predictable, market ways. Taylor’s third point is linked with the second one. Not only does “economy” become extended networks of individual agents. These agents are also connected through “interlocking sets of activities . . . which form a system with its own laws and its own dynamic,” as “a sphere of coexistence that in principle could suffice to itself, if only disorder and conflict didn’t threaten.” In short, Taylor proposes that modern imaginaries for the first time introduce social order as a natural order in which “things cohere because they serve each other in their survival and flourishing.” This ordering is now “unhooked” both from ritual life and from polity, embedded in the discrete agencies of individuals acting naturally. Taylor seems to suggest that these notions are also the beginning of modern social science, and especially liberal economics (C. Taylor 2004, 75–77, italics added). I found this history of a modern imaginary striking for two reasons. First, it seemed to capture quite well the type of economic rationalism, some would say “neoliberalism,” that has become an integral part of Australian government in the past thirty years. The credibility of “the market” is high, irrespective of political hue. Moreover, as Sahlins (1976) would suggest, in a late capitalist world, this notion of economy is a central summation of the social. Many observers would propose that it is what we are. Second, Taylor’s account was striking because it evoked for me an equally vivid and different Western Arrernte imaginary that also speaks of the manner in which things cohere, survive, and flourish. This imaginary

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is hinted at in T. G. H. Strehlow’s comments on Arrernte marriage: “It was of the utmost practical importance that all populations in their njinanga [nyenhenge] sections should be kept as far as possible at full strength. Only in this way could it remain feasible for marriages to be arranged on a kind of reciprocal exchange basis between members of different local groups. The Aranda [Arrernte] genealogies show that marriage arrangements had become normalised to a very high degree within certain definable geographical limits” (T. Strehlow 1970, 98). Here Strehlow notes one central reason for regular movement between locales by small and labile groups. Foraging across regions was another, and in the case of the Western Arrernte, the waterways of the Finke, Hugh, and Palmer rivers helped, along with their tributaries. The terrain marked interconnecting paths for repeated journeys. Ancestral travels enacted in rite, captured in song, and “followed up” in daily life secured this world of tracks between places. Strehlow’s art of “circle and line” for the Western Arrernte captures this sense of the world that through myth drew an analogue between ancestral acts, geography, and human practice. Like Hamilton (1998), Strehlow underlines that in this world, ceremonial had economic effects so that relatedness, rite, and a foraging life proceeded along separate but interlocking trajectories to realize an ontic order (see

Figure 18. David Mowaljarlai’s The Body of Australia. Redrawn by Doerte Sueberkrueb. Reproduced from Rumsey 2001 by permission of the author, as redrawn from Mowaljarlai and Malnic 1993:205; some details have been omitted for clarity.

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Figure 19. Kayi Kayi Nampitjinpa, Untitled. Image reproduced by permission of the artist, courtesy Papunya Tula Artists.

Pleshet 2003). This view seems to be the import of Rumsey’s discussion of the rhizomatic nature of Aboriginal society and his modified reproduction of David Mowaljarlai’s painting The Body of Australia (Rumsey 2001, 25; reproduced here in figure 18). What makes the painting striking is its modernity—tywerrenge-like design projected onto a map of the Australian continent. Spencer and Gillen provide more familiar Arrernte examples of regional tywerrenge (sacred board) designs that suggest this same sense of interlocking order that was social, ritual, and embedded in country due to ancestral journeys (see Spencer and Gillen 1899, 145–52). A contemporary and secular rendering of this iconographic style is the work of Kayi Kayi Nampitjinpa (see figure 19). In my research I found this notion implied in the statement, “We use t’ walk around this place,” used to refer not only to a country but also to the riverine routes of the Finke river basin. Here I will use these imaginaries—one a model of market exchange, the other of tracks between relatives—to discuss Arrernte hopes for outstation life. These hopes reflected a desire for autonomy that supposed a particular subject. This subject was first and foremost a relative defined through strings of relatedness; a person, as Wagner (1991) terms it, with relatedness “integrally implied.” Autonomy for this subject involved the capacity to host gatherings of relatives on country; to demonstrate the ability and power to coordinate and resource occasions that foster broad sociality and to be the one who “gives permission” in this circumstance. An extension of this capacity is to command the vehicles and other resources to travel elsewhere and participate in the activities of others; to give permission and in turn to request it at other locales. Autonomy is to be a player in the dynamics of ag-

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gregation and dispersal across a region that once marked both economic and ritual life. The implicit assumptions of bureaucracy and its Central Australian service workers involved Taylor’s objectified economy with a subject defined by marketable skills. Subjects acquire these skills as they mature, making life a form of career narrative (see Austin-Broos 2006b). In the natural economy of market society, individual autonomy involves these skills— or market attributes. To be autonomous is to be self-sustaining within both labor and commodity markets (see also O’Donnell 2007). To be autonomous in this way is to be employed and accumulate cash and things around one’s person. Personal autonomy entails being a market individual. My proposal is that these two imaginaries collided in the outstation system as Western Arrernte people initially sought to reproduce at least some aspects of located and kin-based life while government service workers tried to shape the Arrernte as market individuals. The circumstance was framed by the fact that the outstation movement also involved a passage for the Arrernte from wards of state within the mission to citizens who were marginalized from the mainstream economy and were thereby welfare dependent. Both these situations discouraged forms of experience that would make career narratives and the market real. Relatedness loomed large rather than waged work because the latter was intermittent and often lacked sense; a shadow economy of casual work financed by government transfers. At the same time, people were rewarded in the form of houses, vehicles, and welfare for staying in place, for returning to country. This was the undue burden placed on outstation life. Could this type of state-sponsored tradition really reconcile countervailing regimes of value drawn from market society and local indigenous life—even among a group estranged from traditional rite? My proposal is that it could not. Yet my interest here is not simply in critique. Rather, I wish to address an Arrernte modernity in which economy is not naturalized yet and in which relatedness and being located, with their concomitant values, still play a prominent part. In this chapter I will discuss two types of text that reflect these different imaginaries. The first includes a range of Western Arrernte accounts of the outstation movement to Old Station and Ljiltjera. These two places, respectively to the east and west of the Finke River and Ntaria, were the first two outstation sites. The second form of text involves one further Arrernte story and various reports on the outstation movement written by lhentere. The latter include a report to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) by a member of the mission staff and passages from various reports on the outstations’ Community Development Employment Projects (CDEPs) written by government staff in the 1990s. For the most part, these texts talk past

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each other in striking ways. In plain words, building institutions to sustain the Arrernte living remote proved more difficult than many people had imagined, be they missionaries, the Arrernte themselves, or service staff. Before I reach the texts, however, I place the Arrernte accounts in context.

“Shifting,” a Western Arrernte Metaphor In 1998, when I talked with Western Arrernte people about the outstation movement, a very clear patterning of memory emerged. People remembered “shifting.” This movement was from one place, Ntaria, to another place or series of places that were “quiet,” whether or not they were well resourced. Comparisons of Ntaria “noise” and outstation “quiet” were as common for the past as they were for the present. Most people remarked that at the time, in 1974, there was “too much fighting and drinking” at Ntaria. These issues pertained to relations between “families” and between “kids in school.” Problems of town government, elections, representation, and the like were not mentioned by anyone as a reason for shifting.2 Rather, the issue was that drinking, arguments, and waning mission influence were causing high levels of conflict. If matters of governance were not salient for the Arrernte themselves, neither did the Arrernte view a growing cash economy as a source of problems, as some mission staff did. Talk was more of checks and food than of cash or wages. No one specifically linked alcohol with earnings. A typical Western Arrernte statement on Ntaria was that in the mission days, people only quarreled for a reason, whereas at the time when shifting began, people were quarreling “for anything” and “all the time.” The noise was incessant, even from adults. For one woman, the movement to an outstation presented this contrast: on waking at the outstation, the only noise she heard was children talking. “Too much argument,” “noise,” and “trouble” also were interpreted as “too many family” at one place. A second feature of these remembrances was an emphasis on shifting to reside among a smaller group. Usually this group involved close kin and affines, the latter sometimes coming from a different language group—generally southern Luritja or Kukatja-Luritja from the west. These were people linked through marriage or ritual interest to Western Arrernte or Pertame (Southern Arrernte) people. Kwatjinmarra near Old Station grew quite rapidly. However, this expansion set in motion a series of breakaways so that Kwatjinmarra spawned a series of other outstations along the northern base of the James Range and trailing west from Ellery Creek toward Ntaria. Similarly Ljiltjera, which was proximate to Ntaria on the other side of the Finke,

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Map 8. Western Arrernte outstations, circa 1996.

was followed by a line of outstations moving west in the direction of Areyonga along the Krichauff Range’s northern base—Gilbert Springs, Alkngarrintja, Ilkarrilalama, and Ipolera (see map 8). Further outstations followed these and other early sallies to the east and northwest. Being an outstation movement associated with land rights, most camps were in proximity to mythical sites regardless of whether those sites retained ritual significance. In the case of sites with a major continuing significance, the camps were properly distanced from them. Gilbert Springs, Red Sandhill, and Ipolera were of this type. Often the precise location of camps was also governed by pragmatic issues—where one could find shade and, if possible, water and be somewhat protected from wind; in proximity to a creek to sleep in. Sometimes these were places that the mission had established as serviced sites for mustering and other pastoral work. Some early outstation roads were made by grading cattle tracks. In a number of cases, the mythical record suggests and midden research would confirm that there was a historical overlay of traditional campsite, mission cattle camp, and newly established outstation. The underground water reserves, especially along the southern edge of Missionary Plain that meets the northern base of the James and Krichauff ranges, present a limited set of possibilities for human settlement

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even when coupled with the technology of bores and long-distance pipes (see map 8). A third feature of Arrernte remarks was that the outstation movement, with its associated land rights, was not differentiated clearly from other, earlier outstation initiatives linked with Hermannsburg. Just as Old Station (Pmokaputa) began as an outstation to Henbury pastoral station and was later included in the mission lease, other early camps were also cited: Haasts Bluff was designated as “Old Albrecht’s outstation” for evangelical purposes, established in 1939. Undandita cattle camp that also served Glen Helen station was supported from 1948 by the mission as a way of bringing people in from the west and locating them for evangelism. Namatjira’s goat camp and the artists’ camp at Tjuwanpa around 1953 were described as outstation precedents. Even the goat camp at Labrapuntja on the Ellery, maintained during the 1880s, was classified as an outstation. Manasse Armstrong, Friedrich Albrecht’s tanner, was allowed an outstation in 1959, not on his own country but, as one of his sons related, on the Finke just north of Hermannsburg. This and other early initiatives foundered due to lack of resources, both transport and food and water storage. Resources and especially water loomed large in these accounts. People remarked that, in the first instance, they slept in a dry creek or in a humpy (hut), under corrugated iron carried to the site. Often water was scarce, transported from Ntaria by truck in forty-four-gallon drums. If there was durable and potable water at the site, it was carried from a creek or water hole in kerosene cans and the like. Having a bore sunk was literally a watershed. Sometimes people decamped to their outstation site taking with them a herd of goats or more commonly the expectation that pension checks would be brought with the “shop” truck. One of the drivers of this truck was known, humorously, as Peter Merne (food). Distribution of pension checks, cashing, and purchasing were done from the truck at each site.3 Where motor transport was available and men had guns, hunting for bush turkey and kangaroo was common. Foraging as a daily enterprise was not. Foraging as a form of recreation sometimes occurs after church on Sunday afternoons. Yet in their accounts of the outstation shift and the Ntaria everyday, women remark that foraging is difficult now. Only fishing in the Finke brings plentiful food. These characteristics of outstation stories reveal three important things. First, the import of these stories was that “shifting” is a perennial state. It responds to resources and to human affinity and, ideally, will take one back to country in the longer term. “Shifting” becomes a homology through which the Arrernte sought to subsume settlement in known practice. Even

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in the midst of this second major change, from mission to modernity, they sought to assert continuity. The upshot was that, in their accounts, there had always been a homelands movement for those who came to Hermannsburg. When there are “too many family” at one place and life gets noisy, shift (also see Sansom 1982, 122–27). Second, the salience of this homology reflects the lack of salience that state institutions have had for Western Arrernte. The Arrernte placed less emphasis on being wards of state, institutionalized in the mission, and increasingly subject to state bureaucracy than they did on locality and kin dynamics. I do not mean to suggest that the Arrernte have failed to notice the various forms of authoritarianism to which they have been subject through the past hundred years. Autonomy was a major reason for shifting. Yet apprehending domination or ill-founded authority is different from grasping the governmentality across a continent that has supported Ntaria/Hermannsburg. In particular, the transition from a largely rations-for-service regime to unemployment benefits could not convey the growing implications of being encompassed by the welfare state. Similarly, requests for work on behalf of the young that brought CDEPs to Ntaria and Tjuwanpa did not in themselves anticipate the massive impact of large-scale welfare dependence within a community. As a consequence, Western Arrernte people focused on their own concerns, on the ways in which shifting would facilitate relatedness and promote their own ideas of autonomy. Finally, if national institutions and their values were not salient, modern technology was. The stories underline the reliance on technology and manufactured food to sustain 1970s small-group, arid zone life. For the Western Arrernte as they were then, and today, outstation life requires a constant water supply and the means to access manufactured food. In turn, it means motorized transport and road maintenance to support it. The implications of this change in terms of the experience of space and time are manifold. Most important, for the descendants of the last generation to walk across the land, maintaining the practical and ritual knowledge of their countries has become quite difficult. This circumstance reflects the “time-space compression” of contemporary Arrernte life (see Harvey 1990). Crowded settlements encourage the experience of “no space”—no appropriate place to camp in relation to significant others (Munn 2003). As interactions become more dense, immediate, and variable, sociality becomes more volatile. Enter motorized transport. As the management of social relations has become more demanding, passage between places has been more frequent and sped up (see also chapters 5 and 6). As a consequence, the opportunity and incentive to engage with sites and different ecologies has declined over

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time. This is not to deny that motorized transport allowed people resident at settlements, who remained ritually engaged, to return to particular sites. However, for groups of Western Arrernte who by 1980 had been at Ntaria between fifty and ninety years, this engagement involved just a few. For most Western Arrernte returning to country, the “ready-to-hand” technology of settlement propelled them toward new modes of sociality and time-space even as they appeared to pursue tradition. As they sought to recapture a remembered world, its present materiality was also working to change that world. In sum, the outstation movement bore a clash of imaginaries. A return to tradition that did respond to Western Arrernte hopes at the same time was state-sponsored—it rested on government transfers—and largely dependent on technologies that would change the new generation’s view of the world. I turn now to the texts.

Outstation Stories and the Western Arrernte Imaginary One set of stories concerns Kwatjinmarra east of Ntaria and north of Old Station (Pmokaputa) on the Ellery Creek.4 The first was provided in 1998 by Denis Ebitarinja (pictured in figure 20), who after his father’s death became the senior custodian for the Roulbmaulbma estate. The estate is named after a major honey ant site on the Ellery. Denis recalled the move to Kwatjinmarra and subsequent moves as the camp grew. Denis Ebitarinja at Arrkapa (Arkankapata) When mission bin here a long time, I bin workin’ here as stockman, then we bin shift to ’nother place. Kwatjinmarra. We stoppin’ there, my father and me. All the people come to Kwatjinmarra, they bin stay with us. Lotta people there. They bin pass away [now]. Nancy’s mother and father. Joyce’s uncle, Ungwanaka. After that my father said, You’ll have t’ shift to ’nother outstation maybe make ’im camp at Old Station [Pmokaputa]. Well, I shifted there. They bin make ’im garden there, grow ’im up grapes. Jack Coulthard been there before he came back to here [gesturing east to Tnawurta]. Kwatye kngerre [plenty of water] there. My father said Jack Coulthard can stay. Later, we moved to Red Sandhill [Ilbal’ Alkngarrintja]. Nahassan big brother, John Ungwanaka, stopped at Old Station. We settle down now at Red Sandhill. Lotta people settle down there. Lotta grapes at that old garden at Red Sandhill. No horse there. Then we come to Arrkapa. I bin ask my father, “Well, can these old fella stop here?” Some of this people, they don’t want to move too

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Figure 20. Denis Ebitarinja. (“Dennis, tribal elder for west Aranda people, 1994.” Photograph by Bob Miller. nla.pic-an11322419-7. National Library of Australia.)

far away. I bin shift back to Arrkapa then—all my family to Arrkapa. Too many family at Red Sandhill. Came here with Nancy [and] all my brother. All them [brothers] bin pass away. That tree, other side of house, we bin use ’im, make ’im tent, with canvas. We bin stoppin’ there before Wally [Walter] finish [die]. We bin have a school here too. I bin make my outstation here, Arrkapa. Later, I make fence for horse. Plant them tree. ’Nother bloke bin ask me, “I want to make outstation too. I got too many family.” That one was Entata. Well, I bin give that other side for that family. Rosie and ol’ Kenneth Entata. He come over to Hermannsburg and stay with mission people. That’s why I bin give ’im an outstation. He can stay there. I said, “You can go back and stop with all your mob on country, go back to Ellery Creek. That’s my father’s country.” That’s why we get Gary Stoll and Rex Ziersch to talk about it. Mission see it’s our land. It’s right we stay here.

This account is a travel story about moving from place to place—from Ntaria to Kwatjinmarra and Old Station, Tnawurta, Red Sandhill, Arrkapa, and finally, the Entata camp at Tjamangkura. At each place Denis designates

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his father as the owner; the one who gave the OK for others to shift there. Denis himself assumed this role once he made Arrkapa. He underlines the weight of his authority by listing the relatives who have “passed away”—his father, his father’s brother Walter, and his siblings. For most Arrernte of late middle age, the toll of lifestyle disease in the last two decades of the twentieth century has increased the burden on those who remain. In turn, the autonomy that comes with authority has been more difficult to realize. Denis employs icons shared with other narrators to indicate the making (mpareme) of a place as an outstation camp. Once there was water, gardening began, most often in the form of trees for shade and grapevines. Grapes were a mission crop, popular for juice.5 Denis was a leading stockman for the mission and a skilled horseman. He indicates that “settlin’ down” at Arrkapa also meant making corrals. As this cluster of outstations became more settled, a schoolhouse was built at Red Sandhill. Denis’s account is equally weighted between a series of permissions to make campsites and the things and practices brought to sites from settlement life. His account is a paradigm of outstation stories—shifting and making camp with a new technology. This travel story is also a story of identities. The Ebitarinjas made their shift onto country around Ellery Creek in conjunction with another group, the Ungwanakas. While the Ungwanakas’ country lay south at Irbmankara, or Running Waters, on the Finke River in the borderland between Western Arrernte and Pertame, the forebears of Denis and his father came from the western reaches of the Western Macdonnells. Their connection into Ellery Creek had been through Denis’s paternal grandmother. Moving south towards the mission, his male forebears intermarried and then carried forward the knowledge of Roulbmaulbma and surrounding sites. The Ungwanakas, on the other hand, had followed the missionaries up from the south and were custodians for stories and sites on the Finke. Some of these stories travel through the Roulbmaulbma estate and past the “junction” (Rubula) south of Ntaria, where the Ellery Creek meets the Finke. In short, both groups, one Western and the other Southern Arrernte, were in the process of relocating in the wake of settlement. For the Ebitarinjas this meant a relocation as custodians; for the Ugwanakas, a relocating on country as guests while they retained their southern Irbmankara estate. The Ebitarinjas welcomed the Ugwanakas, and features of settlement life encouraged this connection. Both were prominent mission families, though in different ways. Denis’s father, Gottfried, and his brother Walter along with their male siblings played at least in modest part the role of traditionalists (see Gerritson 1981). They were also watercolorists of the Her-

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mannsburg school.6 William Ungwanaka was the manager of the extensive gardens made feasible by the Kaporilya pipeline. He was also an evangelist and a prominent person in the mission social order. While Denis as the significant son of his generation became a ritual cognoscente, a respected horseman, and a skillful producer of traditional artifacts (spears and boomerangs) for tourists, one of William’s sons, Nahassan, became an ordained Lutheran pastor and teacher at the Hermannsburg school. Denis Ebitarinja had married one of William Ungwanaka’s daughters, Nancy, a cousin (MoBrDa) of Joyce’s and, in skin terms, of mine. Hence Denis’s personal reference to Joyce at the outset of his story. In similar fashion, the mission as settlement had drawn in the Entatas, an Eastern Arrernte group who converted to Lutheranism. Kenneth Entata became an evangelist, and for the duration of his and his wife’s lives, they were guests on the Roulbmaulbma estate. In the 1990s, one of their sons was still residing at Tjamangkura. Apart from the mission staff, Stoll and Ziersch, the other name that Denis Ebitarinja mentions is Jack Coulthard, a name called by every person who provided me with a story of the shift to Kwatjinmarra. Coulthard was among the most knowledgeable for the region, one of a small group of men who were outsiders to the Western Arrernte domain, and moved via Hermannsburg to Kwatjinmarra. These men had done stock work together in the vicinity of Tempe Downs, Henbury, and Owen Spring stations. These three stations lay to the southwest, southeast, and east of the mission. They are also located in the drainage system of the Finke, Hugh, and Palmer rivers that traverses Arrernte and southern Luritja land. Coulthard came from the region of Tempe Downs cattle station and the country watered by the Palmer River. He was likely the son by a Luritja woman of one of two brothers, Bob and Bill Coulthard, who owned Tempe Downs for a short period in the 1910s (Bowman n.d., 27). As a young man, he worked with Bryan Bowman, cattleman and amateur historian, at both Tempe Downs and Glen Helen stations. Two other prominent men among his group were Yankee Elizer, a Pitjantjatjara man originally from Docker River, and Luther Urbitja, a Luritja or Pintupi-Luritja man whose country lay south of Mount Leibig in the far west. Nonetheless, he was born quite close to the mission at Old Station. Along with other workers on these stations including Gordon Abbot, William Ungwanaka, and Lucas Robinya, Jack, Luther, and Yankee had been workmates in the region. As relative outsiders, though, the latter three men had been less tied than others to the mission order. Along with other later arrivals at the mission drawn from the Western Macdonnells, these men supplied the knowledge for the ritual revitalization of the mid-1970s. Denis

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Ebitarinja notes that his father nonetheless remained pmere kwerteye for Roulbmaulbma. The importance of the Ebitarinjas’ role, father and son, was reflected in the fact that Jack Coulthard’s son, Kevin, would not speak with me until I had consulted Denis Ebitarinja. Reluctant at first, Denis gave me his spare and elegant story only after I had observed that Jack’s son would not speak with me unless he did.7 Kevin Coulthard’s story of the homelands movement mainly concerns his father. In its tumbling elaboration, the story underscores a social imaginary of regional networks of emplaced identity onto which Kevin grafts the narrative of his father’s pastoral work. He finishes his story by noting the separate and reciprocal forms of responsibility that he and others have for the places in the region from which his father came. Kevin Coulthard at Old Station (Pmokaputa) My father was workin’ at Tempe Downs Station, first station was Urambinji, west of Tempe Downs. Then they shift back to Tempe Downs station. He used to work at Orange Creek,8 Henbury Station. I was maybe ten years old then. He was shiftin’ round, shiftin’ round with camels— and main place was Tempe. When they ring up from Henbury to build a yard, he used to go. Also Palm Creek station. He was workin’ there too. Coulthard was kwertengerle [manager] for Irbmankara, on sacred side. Before, he was workin’ at Glen Helen ford with old Bowman, and then Glen Helen station, further up at Hermannsburg Creek. That’s Carl [Inkamala’s] place there. Outstation time. All them poor old bloke. Yankee, Coulthard, Luther, that old bloke come from Murantji, west of oil rig, sandhill place. Old Braeden. They all come from that place [Tempe]. I seen that place. That was a real good place. All those people come to Hermannsburg. They get used to this place. They want to stay here. They don’t want to go back. They workin’ with old Murray Pearce and he tell ’em to get their outstation here. That was 1973. People who come here [to Old Station] come from outside. Some fella come from Papunya. He knew these people. My father, lakenhe [like that]. He was workin’ with the camel train. Oodnadatta comin’ this way. Father told me this story. He was a boy workin’ with them and all those half caste blokes, kunye. Camel train went as far as Alice Springs. Mail came from Henbury to Irbmankara. Other side of Irbmankara, that was where Lalkara yard was [country for Joyce and her siblings]. All those people come from Henbury way.

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Well, that mob move from Hermannsburg. Too much drinking, fighting. They want family to stop separate, away from trouble. Then they had ceremony. Lotta ceremony. All those old bloke pass away now but I got Irbmankara story. Kwatjinmarra first outstation. Then Ungwanaka mob talkin’ about Apma Kapurta [Old Station]—that’s Pertame language. Then we build big fence around here. Gardening. And after that, my father and uncle talkin’ with Nahassan to get outstation for my father. Maybe Illamurta, then Tnawurta was better. First one [was] too far. My father gettin’ sick. Tnawurta was Coulthard’s outstation. It was the second one after Red Sandhill. And then Arrkapa. Nahassan Ungwanaka talked with Coulthard and said that was a good place. Runnin’ Water was fallin’ down. My father was gettin’ old. Illamurta fallin’ down. Also Lalkara down to Henbury. Awe [yes]. When he was workin’ at Henbury he was a shooter. Walkin’ round with donkey. Shootin’ cattle, pretty cruel too.9 He stayed at Tnawurta. Workin’ at Ntaria in fuel yard. Workin’ with old Murray Pearce, doin’ stock work. I was doin’ all the mustering here [at Old Station]. That well still here from Henbury days. We make it a bit bigger, put stone wall inside and put stone step there. Tiger Tjakaljeri, he was an old bloke, poor old bloke workin’ here. His mob come from Haasts Bluff and passed there and then they come in to Papunya. Haasts Bluff was first outstation [for the mission] from Ntaria. My father pass away at Tnawurta. My sister couldn’t look after him and I bin look after him. And I send her back to Addie Ferguson, too busy, can’t work two way. Elfrieda’s daughter lives at Tnawurta now. My father brother, Seth Coulthard, he take over at Tempe now— after land claim. My site is Running Water. I am kwertengerle for my wife. That’s my job. That’s the place I gotta look after. Some people live other side of Henbury. They got outstation there. Also Swan family. I don’t know what they call that one. Barry’s gone to Illamurta.

Part of Kevin’s story concerns his father and his one-countrymen and friends. He characterizes his father in terms of his beat: his travel for work between pastoral stations across the region, one of which was Hermannsburg (see also Beckett 1978). He typifies this as a “half-caste” life among other like men who worked closely with lhentere people. In the midst of this description, he also refers to his father’s ritual responsibilities, as manager for Irbmankara and traditional owner for Tempe, where he “came from.” Kevin refers to the pulling power of Henbury as the initial pastoral

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station that drew in Arrernte people from the Finke and Palmer river basin. A significant number of these people went on to Hermannsburg as well as other “poor old blokes,” including Luther, Yankee, and Tiger Tjakaljeri, the elder brother of another Lutheran pastor. His use of the term kunye, meaning “sorry” or “pity,” is the usual way in which an Arrernte person conveys the bittersweet remembrance of old people past. The shift to Kwatjinmarra came in response to “too much drinking, fighting” and led to “lotta ceremony.” He traces a sequence similar to that laid down by Denis of movement from Kwatjinmarra to Old Station, Red Sandhill, Tnawurta, and Arrkapa. Nonetheless, Kevin’s story concerns the Ungwanakas more than the Ebitarinjas. The Coulthards and the Ungwanakas were pmeraltye, fellow countrymen.10 Their shared origins are signaled when Kevin notes that Old Station also has a Pertame, or Southern Arrernte, name, indicating that Southern Arrernte people commonly walked around that place. It was therefore with William Ungwanaka’s son, Nahassan, that Kevin’s father discussed where he might settle down. Various other places were rejected as “fallin’ down”—too lonely and resource poor for an outstation. Tnawurta would be the one. Nahassan’s service to Jack was returned by the fact that Jack, as manager for the Ungwanakas’ Irbmankara estate (by repute), tutored Nahassan in its ceremonial. Kevin’s second wife is sister to the late Nahassan Ungwanaka. Kevin notes that with Nahassan’s death, he has “taken over” his father’s kwertengerle role for Irbmankara. His uncle (FaBr) looks after their own place on Tempe Downs. Kevin Coulthard’s story is notable for its account of the way in which European pastoral settlement overwrote emplaced, indigenous culture. It is also notable though for the way in which that culture, changed but not erased, restates its salience in the outstation movement. Past ritual connections are reimagined, albeit in modified form. Kevin’s last statements concern the region his father came from and the Pertame countries that he, the Abbots (Barry), the Swans, and the Ungwanakas still look after. At the same time, Kevin’s story references the historical context of settlement and concedes a white employer’s claims on his sister’s time. A third story for Kwatjinmarra (and Red Sandhill), comes from the widow of Nahassan Ungwanaka. Rahel Ungwanaka comes from the Haasts Bluff area west of Hermannsburg and was linked to the mission through her father, an evangelist. Her home place allows her to refer to the origins of the Ebitarinjas, also “from long way west.” With her husband “pass[ed] away” and her children residing on the Roulbmaulbma estate and away from their own place, she emphasizes the residential interests that the Ungwanakas

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have in Roulbmaulbma. Like her son-in-law, Kevin Coulthard, Rahel’s status is as an affine to guests. Consequently she focuses on the manner in which she helped her husband make Red Sandhill. Rahel Ungwanaka at Red Sandhill Mission time, long time ago, we go to Kwatjinmarra, just for camp, just campout, and then come back again, stay at Ntariala. Then, too much grog, we should go and go to Old Station and make a humpy house. Jack Coulthard, Luther Urbitja, Jack’s kids, ketyeye ikwere mape [all his kids], and his granddaughter and grandson. They were all at Old Station before we moved. We shift from Ntaria and we make ’nother humpy house at Kwatjinmarra (on Ellery [Creek] there, near bitumen). Long time ago nanny mob [the mission goatherd] was there. Early day, Denis, everybody bin livin’ at one place. Thwenge [maybe], Denis’ father comes from long way west. [Denis] there through Nancy. He marry ’im and stay with father-in-law. Different, different story for that place out west. Other story this one [around Ellery Creek]. Three different auntie there: Imbitjala, Nola, and Laureen. They all come from Tempe way, Jack Coulthard mob, nyente kwete [all together]. We stay kwerke warre [a short time] at Kwatjinmarra. Then we shift from there and come back to Red Sandhill. We shift only one time to Red Sandhill. Other mob, Luther’s sisters, they come back this way lookin’ for water. We only get ’im down the creek. We use 44 [gallon] drum. No kwatye [water]. We bin stay at Red Sandhill and we make ’im watering cart. We got a car and we use ’im to bring that water. We start to talk, “Oh, we want ’im water, somebody gotta come t’ talk about it.” And my husband is teacher and he always come to teach other teacher. He comin’ to Tjuwanpa. They talk about bores, my husband. Bore goes in and gardens grow up then. I always help [my husband] and get stores. Always Peter came with store truck and I buy with the pension. Then we have our own car. And we bin stay here this long time now. We can’t shift to ’nother place. We stop one place. We make ’im little school. They teachin’ at my place. They had a meeting, “Oh, we gotta make ’im school for children.” They goin’ with sport. Teachers take ’im to Alice Springs for swimming, for look around. Make ’im marre [good] but they like to stay here, ontheir-own-place. They take ’em for camp at Boggy Hole. Take ’im to ’nother place—south—ketyeye mape. They went to Canberra. Good place here. Only ketyeye mape talkin’ in the morning.

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Stories for Ljiltjera, to the west of Ntaria, and other camps spawned by that shift—Gilbert Springs, Alkngarrintja, and Ilkarrilalama—were given in the main by a younger generation. These narrators were youths or children when the initial shift occurred. The first two stories come from Mattheus and Ralph Malbunka, sons of the two brothers who established Ljiltjera and Alkngarrintja, respectively. Both these men were Arrernte Lutheran pastors. Their sons’ stories comment on the mission, homelands, and the “future.” Their focus is on work and things, especially motor vehicles. In style, their stories contrast with those told by Denis and Kevin. The two sets in fact reflect two different generations and a shift in emphasis from beats and place to a commodity world, its politics and work.11 Mattheus and Ralph Malbunka at Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre Ljiltjera (Mattheus) My old man had a talk with mission and stop here. There were mission cattle at Ljiltjera. Old Traugott, my father and mother and all the kids. We had tin shed. People made a humpy when we first moved back. We made little house with sheet of iron. We was all young fellas sleepin’ out in summer. We really like campin’. Water came from spring, and a small tank. We pumped from spring into the tank. That was a rainwater tank. We started growin’ vegetable and stuff. Lotta time I left Ljiltjera. I went t’ Kwala, Old Station. I carted water to these place because they didn’t have any there. We had a small car there, comin’ in and out for shoppin’. We had an old International truck. Ron Greeves use t’ lend us a little Volkswagen to bring stuff. Peter Kirsch, we used to call ’im Merne. He took stores out and we use t’ stop ’im in the road. Mission gave our land back to us. Lotta arguments start when the grog came in so we had to shift. Old fella went to mission board and talk to ’em ’bout givin’ that land back. He went with Nahassan Ungwanaka, to ask for land back. That old man didn’t go t’ land council, he went to mission to ask ’im. Alkngarrintja (Ralph) We come back from Neutral Junction.12 We come back and stay at Gilbert Spring, 1976. We start puttin’ up tank and windmill. Me and Jacob and Herman. We helped a bloke to put that up. We had plenty water there. Mission left some cattle with us. I was workin’ with the mission. We trucked away 9,000 head of cattle, at East End, Waterhouse, West

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Dam, Ljiltjera. There must have bin left about 1,000 head of cattle to start with. Mission didn’t leave nothin’. But then people sold cattle for grog, or killin’ ’em for nothin’. They never think about raisin’ cattle for the future, and then there is no cattle at Hermannsburg. Gilbert Spring was the main place. Lot of places where cattle bin hidin’ out. More easy now with fencin’ and long race. We brand ’im and ear mark—easier to keep ’im now but it’s real hard work. Sometime my kids want to come in. They think it’s more important hangin’ round in Hermannsburg or town [Alice Springs]. I tell ’em, I thought about my future. Now it’s time to think about your future. [Mattheus interposes:] “He bin tell his son from Sugar Creek.” [Ralph affirms and continues:] I tell my [deceased] brother’s sons to go back and look after that place. My father showed me Dreaming, but I didn’t bother about it. Maybe some of it is in my head. I bin thinkin’ about it when I went to Bachelor College. I was goin’ into whitefella world. Just forget the old way. But now we gotta learn that way. Mission didn’t stop us goin’ back to our culture but we have to grow up big and learn ’im.

These stories present an outstation shift and also elements of the ontological shift in which the Arrernte have been engaged over generations. Travel is still an important theme though the focus on regional emplacement is replaced by travel between outstations and Ntaria or “the mission.” Ralph in particular introduces the theme of work but detaches it from a notion of beat. In his and Mattheus’s stories, work involves building up or making (mpareme) a station using contemporary technology and things— sheet iron, tanks, trucks, cars, cattle, windmills, dams, and fencing. The politics between white brokers—the mission and the Central Land Council (CLC)—is registered in both accounts, not least because both these men were sons of Arrernte pastors. Ralph also struggles with the fact that little of the mission herds now remain on Arrernte land. Was this the mission’s or the Arrernte’s fault? Again, Ralph grasps for a narrative future for both himself and his sons through the medium of work. He returns, however, to another future—engagement with rite in a “whitefella world.” This reference speaks to the Arrernte’s incorporation within secular bureaucracy and to the role of the CLC. With the mission now long past, work and ritual knowledge are the routes to influence. Ralph’s sister Mildred gave an account of their outstation, Alkngarrintja (alkngarentye) in both its early and later days. Meaning literally “eyes turned away,” the name is the term for mythical women who resist the advances of men. Alkngarentye figure in love-magic songs associated

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with a number of sites. The songs are also linked with other traditions, in particular the native cat (tyelpe) and the hare-wallaby (kwarlpe). Ralph and Mildred’s Alkngarrintja lies close to Gilbert Springs or Ltalaltuma, a major Western Arrernte native cat site. This Alkngarrintja is also located near a water hole called Inthorrita (nturrerte), named for the rock pigeons that congregate there. The water hole is on the Gilbert spring, which flows north from the Krichauff Range and into Missionary Plain. Its underground source is the locale of Ltalaltuma. The custodians for these sites are Malbunkas, who assumed their patronymic from Pmalbanka, a tyelpe ancestral leader. Ltalaltuma became “Gilbert Springs” in the context of settlement. Its plentiful water made it a major mustering site for the mission’s cattle herd. Its relative proximity to Hermannsburg also made it the place where meat was butchered for weekly rations. Like Kaporilya and Jack Coulthard’s beat, Alkngarrintja and Ltalaltuma reveal the layers of inscription typical of Arrernte sites (see also Rumsey 1994). This multilayering is evident in Mildred’s stories for Alkngarrintja. Central to her account is her father’s premature death: Western Arrernte lawman, Lutheran pastor, and prior to his ordination, pastoral worker and butcher at Gilbert Springs. Her heterogeneous memories bridge the generations. Mildred Malbunka Inkamala at Ntaria and Alkngarrintja We came into Ntaria first, 1973. My father decided. He was sayin’ he was goin’ back to father’s land. I heard him when I was a kid. So, he get Gilbert Spring in 1976. Alkngarrintja we stayed at. That was the first place just across the creek from where Ralph catches horses. Dad used to talk, “I want to go back to my father’s country.” He had all his children. Elfrieda just crawlin’. Pastor Albrecht took ’im there. That was just for one week. [But] he told my father, “You gotta stay the whole year [at Neutral Junction].” That’s when all the evangelists were sent out. Evangelists were out at other place and then come in to do courses at mission block. It was like campus. Gustav and Trauggot wanted him to come back. He was missin’ for a long time. He said he gotta come back to Gilbert Spring. His big brothers want him to come home. So Albrecht gave him goats and they were brought in truck, out to Gilbert Spring. They breed up plenty. We had lotta goats but every time there was a little one, dingo take ’im. Sometime, they hid ’im in a cave—we found two there. Awe, and he started doin’ garden too. He put in veggies and we had a pump at the creek to

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pump water upwards. And we had spring water for drinkin’ water. We used to get drinkin’ spring water in a bucket. Someone give him tent, big army tent. Six tent. For Melvin Malbunka and Florence [his wife] and Lazarus had his tent with family. And my auntie Emma and Bill Malthouse [parents of Alice]. Jacob and Petrus. Della wife [of Hezekial]. And Bobbie Malbunka was there that time. We were short of mota-car. Dad used to borrow Trauggot’s truck. When Dad died they burnt everything down. . . . People didn’t check up for sugar in those days. He had diabetes and he died of stroke. . . . We left, but we come back here. He was doin’ a course with John Pfitzner. We were stayin’ in Ntaria at west side when he died. That’s when I met Carl [Mildred’s husband]. Father told Jacobus to grade that area over there so he could go back there. That’s when my father died and that’s when the argument start [over sites and land]. It was wonderful when my father was alive. Ralph was drinkin’ hard [afterwards]. He was just by himself, gard’nin’. . . . Elfrieda and I used to help. Lazarus was there but he was always goin’ huntin’, shootin’.

Mildred walked me around the Inthorrita water hole and spoke more specifically about the place. The extract from my notebooks describes our walk. Standing on a hill just above the Inthorrita waterhole, Mildred pointed out where six tents—“our houses”—had been pitched on the land sloping down to the spring. She noted “Emma’s and old Petrus’ house,” places for the senior generation, and “our house, just tent” and her brothers’ tent. Up on the hill, looking down on the creek “We had a tank here. That FRM truck use t’ come ’ere and park. Use t’ bring pension money for Billy Malthouse and Emma, and Della, the old ones.” Pointing across the creek to the other side, she said “See, Ralph’s got a square there [to break horses] comin’ down to the waterhole.” Gesturing in the other direction she then remarked “That’s our Red Sandhill, Ilkarrilalama, that old man sitting, stretching his leg. Our Red Sandhill is a men’s place. Father said we [women] can’t go there. Lower part, you know, like men’s balls.” Turning back to the waterhole, Mildred said “We use t’ go down there for water. That place is arrkwetye [a women’s place]. There’s a lwekere [(mythical) women’s camp] there” pointing north along Gilbert Springs to the banks and rock outcrops. “That one’s

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like woman’s part. We could go and drink there. ’Nother place for water was down there,” pointing south along the creek. “Past that, nothin’ for us [women].” Higher up along the creek and quite out of sight was the men’s tyelpe place, Ltalaltuma [the “cutting place” where the hero Malbunka introduced the male rite of subincision to the Western Arrernte]. Looking across the creek again, Mildred pointed out the “sand pits,” large patches of loose soil on the other, west, side. “Imanke [long time ago], bulls used to come and roll. That was old time brown dirt. Not red sand.” She remarked that “Mr Pearce” graded Inthorrita so that kids could swim. “Ralph uses this spot, traps lotta horses. Dad was happy all the time, to see nturrerte there. He was proud of all that pigeon.” We walked a little down the slope, and she showed me the caves where the goats gave birth. Mildred also pointed out the pigeon droppings around the cave. Nturrerte rested there when it was very hot. Mildred said, “Nturrerte was big Dreamtime story. My father was proud when he saw those birds. He [would] say, ‘All my nturrerte girls.’ ”

Mildred raised her eyes and remarked that usually you can see the cattle on the other side of the creek. However, rain had made the ilperle (tea tree) grow and hidden the view. In the mythical traditions of hare-wallaby and native cat, alkngarentye who have been secured by men are likened to nturrerte, or crested rock pigeons. Having secured his wife, the hare-wallaby gazes on rock pigeons “cooing plaintively,” crested rock pigeons with “fine clear eyes” (T. Strehlow 1971, 484). Close to Ltalaltuma, rock pigeons and other pigeon species are described as “sitting on the river banks all around” and “cooing to each other . . . ceaselessly” (T. Strehlow 1971, 508–9). This imagery references the fact that for the Arrernte the throat is the site of desire and also of vulnerability. Who controls murmurs in the throat controls the person murmuring. The cooing of pigeons around a water hole, their fatness and abundance, their glistening feathers in the sun all suggest a compleat life (see also T. Strehlow 1971, 511 n. 462). Mildred’s story is notable for the manner in which it puts in place the pragmatics of outstation life and a mythical heritage (see figure 21). Values of quite different orders are brought together at the place. Her account is also notable for the personal cast it gives to the fact that the Western Arrernte’s homelands movement rapidly lost the story men who gave coherence to the outstation shift—men like Coulthard and Colin Malbunka. In

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Figure 21. A water hole at Gilbert Springs between Inthorrita and Ltalaltuma. Photograph by author.

the context of pastoral life, this was the generation that had produced a transformed genre: narratives of settlement grafted onto region; narratives of work beats grafted onto travel stories; narratives of sedentary life grafted onto place. This grafting would be challenged by the Arrernte’s shift from a domestic moral economy to market society and the welfare state.

When Imaginaries Collide A Western Arrernte imaginary of located relatives and tracks or beats between them could survive in the 1990s because the Arrernte responded to settlement. If people sought to assimilate settlement to a sense of regional emplacement, they also sought to adapt themselves to the mission’s domestic economy. In the early days of the outstation movement, many Arrernte and mission staff shared the view that family-based economies would be a central part of daily life. As they moved to outstations, the Arrernte sought to replicate the small-scale economies they had seen on pastoral stations and the mission. Gardening, modeled on the mission’s post-Kaporilya practice, was the most accessible activity once a water supply was secure. Often it was supplemented by waged work, some of which was back at the

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mission. In most cases, Arrernte people had no access to the cash or credit that would allow them to purchase pastoral equipment. Moreover, when the departing mission handed cattle over, most Western Arrernte had no experience in either husbandry or management to maintain their stock as an enterprise. At a later date, mustering feral cattle and horses for sale would prove a more feasible task. Elders, both women and men, welcomed work for youth and acknowledged it as a prominent value in their outstation stories. They were not unmindful of the nature of sedentary life. In Joyleen Abbott’s account, work for money as much as relatives acts to constitute a place. Following years on pastoral stations, Joyleen tells how she and her husband shifted to Uruna to make their Wallace Rockhole camp. Joyleen Abbott at Wallace Rockhole All our lives we workin’ station no money, just tucker. Have lotta kid. Meat from butcher and billycan tea. [My husband] bin workin’ all the same for station. Workin’ everywhere, Henbury, Indracowra, Tempe Down. Nothin’ for women. Men get little bit, end of season. Easter and Christmas, we go to Hermannsburg to get ration, see relative ’cause we got no money. We come from Owen Spring and at Camel Farm, and then we camp here. Part of mission lease here, off Owen Spring. We talk about it, for one and a half year, at Waterhouse. We stay there ’cause Barry [her son] was workin’ at Hermannsburg. He was mustering bullock with Murray Pearce. “What about you ask mission boss?” We want to come back. 44 [gallon] drum to catch water from Waterhouse. It was hard. We cart with bullock. Campin’ in the creek and under trees. Ask Murray Pearce t’ help ’im. We ask for grapes, grapefruit, oranges, and one strawberry to start. Water with truck, an’ Murray Pearce buy ’im grapes and [I] pay ’im back, little bit, little bit, then we sit down here. Work with shovel and rake. Brother-in-law and wife, eight people come here when my kids were small. One little pension house [tin shed], no money t’ start with. ’75 or ’76 government come an’ I ask ’im for bore because I grow lotta orange. Government say, “No worries, ’cause there’s a lot of improvement here.” They push y’ broom because I’m workin’. After that I ask for house, like shed, you know. . . . Then house come for everyone, then store come. . . . After, we ask for new power. Government come with lotta black mota-car. Whole government come. . . . 13 I never ask for money first. Itye [no]. I ask Murray Pearce after I work, make my own improvement for my family.

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Notwithstanding Joyleen’s account, told with steely humor, her generation could not anticipate the impact of marginalization in the welfare state. The work that had some sense in the mission’s centralized and authoritarian regime had far less on tiny outstation settlements. Confusion and frustration were reflected in the fact that some outstations sought to set up shops, like Ntaria’s. Wallace Rockhole’s was successful. Others were not. For the more remote, to whom would they sell? Some sought finance for service stations, another enterprise that Western Arrernte “knew about.” Glen Auricht, builder and initial lay Lutheran manager of Tjuwanpa, worked hard to establish a local service industry in domestic construction, road maintenance, and metalwork. Working mainly with unskilled youth, naturally progress was slow. During the early 1990s, the discourse of rights overwhelmed these attempts at local workforce training. Under the direction of the regional office of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), house building was contracted out. While the housing stock increased, so too did untrained youth with poor employment prospects. The adoption of CDEP in 1988–89 with its strategy of “community development” through “employment projects” could infuse only a modest amount of mainly casual work into this milieu. The texts that reflect these developments begin with an early outstation report to the DAA from the last mission manager. Colin Jericho’s comments are notable for the fact that they objectify economy and also moralize it. Actual work is linked with other valued dispositions, including industriousness and cleanliness. The mission’s surveillance of Arrernte people here began to dovetail with government bureaucracy’s aims to introduce paid work. At this time, though, Jericho’s reports still described small domestic economies rather than a labor force and only the initial engagement of the Arrernte with welfare. Jericho wrote to the DAA in 1978: Quarterly Report on Outstations from Finke River Mission Manager Colin Jericho to Department of Aboriginal Affairs This report will give a brief summary of each outstation’s activities for the past four months. . . . Arkankapata (Arrkapa) DE because of no permanent water supply has not lived at Arkankapata for the whole of this period, however while not at his outstation he has lived with NU at Ilbal Alkngarintja. He has done some fencing at his outstation and has intentions of moving there in the immediate future. No money is available to equip his bore until after June.

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Ljiltjera TM always has lived consistently at Ljiltjera. Recently a new fence for his garden area was erected and he now has quite a big garden. Ljiltjera is always kept quite clean. . . . Pmokaputa WU has moved from Ilbal Alkngarintja and is living full time at Pmokaputa. The outstation is kept clean and tidy and a good garden has been established. BB and family also live at this outstation. Kwatjinmarra JC as always is permanent at his outstation. He has a good garden and keeps the area clean and tidy. J very seldom has any requests. Tnawurta LU also lives consistently at Tnawurta, his outstation. He has a small garden and keeps his place tidy. Ilbal’ Alkngarrintja NU is another leader who has consistently lived at his outstation. The garden suffered somewhat earlier this year because the cattle kept breaking down the fences and demolishing the garden. He has now erected a new fence and wishes to start a new garden. Cleanliness is not a strong point of this outstation, although this could be attributed to people living there over whom he has no control. Kaporilya NR continues to live at his outstation. He has been engaged in some fencing activities doing most of the work himself. He also had a request for a fowl shed which has been erected. Labrapuntja CR has continued to live at his outstation. . . . A new engine has been purchased to replace the old unit used for pumping water. There has not been a lot of responsibility shown in maintaining the engine pump or effort put into keeping the waterhole clean.14

In the same year, Colin Jericho reported a “total weekly income for aboriginals [sic]” of $17,134, or roughly $24 “per head per week.” He notes that

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among cash recipients, roughly 12 percent were receiving unemployment benefits, and thirty-two of these recipients were resident on outstations.15 Neither the Arrernte’s nor this mission imaginary addressed the cost or resource demands that outstations would involve. As expectations and costs rose, increasingly their significance was interpreted in terms of dependency that precluded market autonomy. Through the early 1980s, reports from mission and then Tjuwanpa staff to the DAA reveal a situation of experienced largesse on the Arrernte’s part and then increasing frustration on the part of both the Arrernte and service staff. After the supply of bores, demountable houses, and a number of outstation vehicles, demands rose as more vehicles were requested, as bore work and building could not keep pace, as growing resort to unemployment benefits undermined training, and as group financial management faltered. Embedded in this circumstance was a conflict between autonomies. Circulating cash and the purchase of vehicles for most outstations allowed Western Arrernte more autonomy than they had had for generations to realize relatedness: to visit and congregate at camps maintained by relatives and away from the prying eyes of whites. At the same time, regular travel and increasing reliance on welfare and government-funded services spelled dependency in the eyes of staff. Excessive consumption of alcohol on the part of junior and senior men only made the picture worse. Even by late 1979, Jericho was reporting to the DAA that some Western Arrernte needed to be called to account: “GA who is the European advisor for the outstations is having problems meeting the demands of the people as regards keeping their bores going, building houses, ablution blocks etc. It appears the people have certain expectations of the Mission as regards to what we should be doing, even though they have the ability to perform some of these tasks. It will be necessary for us to spend considerable time with the family leaders to impress upon them that they should take their share of the work and responsibility for their outstation.”16 Subsequently, Glen Auricht sought to give equal weight to both Arrernte and market autonomy. He saw his role as equally involved in service and training. Nonetheless, following Tjuwanpa’s incorporation in 1983, Auricht was soon registering concern with budget deficits. In a report to the DAA for November 1986, he noted: Operation funding deficit—this is the most difficult area to maintain within the budget. The sheer dimensions of our work area make it most difficult for our Resource Centre to be seen by the outstation people as

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acting fairly in distributing housing, building maintenance and repairs, fencing, water reticulation, use of equipment etc. The deficit in these areas is the effect of trying to balance the urgent needs fairly within our budget allocation. One way DAA could help in this area is for their field officers to visit the outstations more than once a year to first hand assess their needs.17

Like other outstation systems, the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC) turned to CDEP as a means to fund at least in part the rapidly growing costs of servicing its participants. A CDEP scheme was implemented in 1989 as the number of outstations approached forty. Its funding source was ATSIC, which had succeeded the DAA that year. This development brought the Arrernte’s outstation system more directly within the purview of market society’s state bureaucracy at the very moment when Western Arrernte seemed to enjoy considerable autonomy as well as mobility between sites. Within a few years, though, the tension in these developments emerged as a stretched outpost of state administration sought to contend with benefit payments to a highly mobile population. Maintaining CDEP lists for each outstation, keeping track of individuals’ movements, and monitoring alternative payment regimes soon made the scheme’s administration a nightmare. At the same time, the effort spent on this task detracted from service delivery to outstations and, even more, from effective engagement with workforce training for the Western Arrernte. The following entries from CDEP “Staffbooks” between 1991 and 1993 record payment variations for reasons ranging from ceremonial commitments and sorry business through sickness and family allowance issues to incarceration in the Alice Springs jail. 11/91. Tangentyere council [in Alice Springs] says VC is on ceremonial leave and still on their CDEP books for pay. Until we get news from them we can’t pay him. When they terminate they will let us know the dates they have paid him. 3/93. NL collected two pays today. He said he is returning to Mutitjulu for sorry business but BW (his wife) is staying at Ulpunda. I said he will have to phone us. If he doesn’t return in one week we will need to review his CDEP status. 2/92. Spoke to CE. He says he is staying at Eight Mile looking after the children. N is in hospital again. Change rate. 2/92. TM off Faye’s family allowance CDEP staying with MW and BW in Alice Springs. Change rate please.

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3/92. BR rang today, wanted his pay sent in. Wants A to pick it up for him. He said he’s been in gaol. J. checked with correctional services and confirmed. I said we’ll give him one pay and the rest has been re-banked. We would not pay him for time in gaol. Will pay rest of time with tucker money.18

For this period, five thick books were filled with these handwritten adjustments. Entries in other books recorded payments transferred both between Tjuwanpa and Alice Springs and Ntaria, and a broad swathe of towns across Central Australia. These transfers involved outstation residents traveling for ceremony, school excursions, sporting events, or to visit relatives. Entries also commonly recorded the movement of Western Arrernte people down to Port Augusta or Adelaide on the southern coast. For example, 12/91. CC asked whether he could take 4 weeks to see his children at Whyalla in South Australia. I said “Yes” provided he keeps in touch with us. We’ll keep him on CDEP for two pays. Then, if he doesn’t come back, he goes to tucker money. He phoned today and said he’d like to stay for full 4 weeks (been away 2). I said we’d send his pay down. 12/91. DM rang from Port Augusta regarding MF who has claimed UB [unemployment benefits]. If granted, DSS [Department of Social Security] will fax us M’s “resignation” from CDEP.19

The constant temporary shifting of a number of people solicited an unusually detailed form of surveillance over Western Arrernte lives as it also generated an administrative tangle. As the outstation system grew, the growing competition for resources between groups also fueled conflict. Some older mission families were attacked by others more recently come to the outstation system and less engaged with the elders of the land rights generation. They were also less solicitous of the lay Lutherans who had remained to work at TORC. Soon conflict between some Arrernte and staff became entrenched. And while these matters proceeded, staff from administrative services in Alice Springs and beyond sought to devise innovative ways to teach outstation residents about money and its management. A large poster display entitled “The Money Story” was carried from settlement to settlement. It sought to convey the fundamentals of budgeting and credit and debt in the broad categories of services, housing, wages, and recurrent expenditures. In a clumsy way, it deployed the iconography of sand drawings to make its point; the same iconography used to display the mun-

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dane travel stories of Arrernte and other Central Australians (see chapter 1). This time, however, the arced lines that represent individuals seated in a camp, around a fire, or beside a water hole were used to represent individuals seated around a wrench, a petrol pump, and a hand holding Australian dollar bills. By the late 1990s, TORC’s annual wages bill for CDEP was over three million dollars, and the combined budget for wages and capital and recurrent expenditure passed four million. Budgets were often overspent, especially in the category of housing. At the same time, training programs in land care, horticulture, road grading, metalwork, office work, mechanics, and art and craftwork waxed and waned.20 Increasingly, complaints came from politicians in Canberra that too few remote Australians had entered mainstream employment. The issue of their remoteness from labor markets was all but ignored. So was the fact that until the late 1960s these erstwhile hunter-gatherers had been held with state support in a rations-for-service mission regime. Having adjusted to settlement life, the new transition from mission to modernity was in fact predictably rough. In the course of the 1990s, at least three major reports on Tjuwanpa and its CDEP were written—in 1992, 1995, and 1997.The first and the last of these had, respectively, a “five year development plan” and a “three year operational plan” attached. The first and third reviews were done by private consulting firms, the second by staff from ATSIC and a range of federal government departments. In 1994, two lay Lutheran staff members were dismissed for “unsatisfactory attitude” and “serious breaches” although no financial improprieties were shown. Barely two years later, and after the death of his mentor, Norman Ratara, Tjuwanpa manager Glen Auricht also resigned. His departure marked the end of the Hermannsburg alliance between senior custodians and nonindigenous Lutherans with knowledge of Western Arrernte culture and history. No subsequent staff would speak Western Arrernte. In the later 1990s and into the early 2000s, TORC had a steady turnover of managers, one of whom was an alcoholic, and imposed administrators. Between 1997 and 2005 there were at least five managers. In March 1999, an experienced staffer from the Alice Springs–based Papunya Regional Council of ATSIC submitted a report on his visit to Tjuwanpa and the outstations. He wrote: The organisation continues to experience significant staffing difficulties. . . . The Accountant is reported to be of limited value to the organisation and will be departing in the near future. . . . The Essential Services Officer is a community [Arrernte] member

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with limited technical skills and work experience. Much work remains undone. The organisation is unlikely to replace this employee with a better-qualified or more experienced worker for political reasons. This problem is unlikely to go away. The CDEP Co-ordinator appears to be very keen and is attempting to address many of the issues. However, he is yet to demonstrate that he has the capacity to make this very large CDEP productive. . . . CDEP Participants. I seriously question both the number of “active” participants and the number of hours worked by most participants. Work plans are not being implemented on site and most participants can not even be found at their outstation or work site. The CDEP is not being utilised to assist the community; it is simply a source of income. . . . The Community mechanical workshop is operational and provides valuable support services for outstations. However, its commercial activities are an expensive failure. Its losses are seen as just another government subsidy to the entire community. . . . 21

The report concluded with some mitigating remarks on TORC’s now indigenized management council: Progress has been made but there is still a-long-way-to-go. The Council is now functioning and learning the skills required to manage its own affairs [but] the community/organisation is just holding on. It needs more support, both physical and financial, from the mainstream agencies and ATSIC.22

In a face-to-face discussion with the author, he observed that the Western Arrernte’s outstation system was not “viable” in the longer term. For that reason resourcing should be pulled back to Alice Springs. Young Western Arrernte and other remote indigenous youth should be encouraged to come to town for training. ATSIC was disbanded by the federal government in 2003. The management of CDEPs for remote communities was reabsorbed into mainstream administration (the federal Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, or DEWR).Tjuwanpa’s projects were integrated with Ntaria’s. And finally, while TORC and outstations still remain on Western Arrernte land, the vision of an outstation system with its own economy has been much diminished. In 2007, CDEP was severely curtailed by the federal government. Its future under a new Labor government, elected in 2008, is uncertain (see also chapter 9).

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Conclusion The Arrernte stories cited here make it clear that every narrator had some engagement with a world of “work” as well as a world of tracks and place and kin relatedness. Yet, accepting particular settlement values—that the subject is defined in terms of work and not as a relative—does not entail imaginaries of naturalized economy abstracted from locatedness. Among Western Arrernte, this experience of the world and its forms of value varied with generation and between individuals. Commonly, however, those with whom I spoke maintained social imaginaries that grafted work onto networks of relatedness stretched across a region. They were moderns who, in Charles Taylor’s terms, were still “embedded” to some degree. Anthropologists have pointed to the intersections of a foraging life where well-worn tracks have been routes for marriage, ritual life, and economy. Friedrich Albrecht understood that for the Finke River Mission (FRM) to convert Western Arrernte, this nexus needed to be picked apart. Christianity required that the Arrernte be sedentary and thereby weaned away from this imaginary of tracks and localities (see chapter 3). Hermannsburg’s domestic moral economy put in place a different integration of economy, sociality, and rite with its own Christian imaginary, and the FRM tried to decentralize this order when it encouraged outstations. Yet neither in the mission nor in outstation life did local forms of rural industry, craft, and service work comprise an easily sustainable economy. As a consequence, neither in the mission nor in outstation life could the Arrernte reproduce, albeit in altered form, the regional autonomy of their previous hunter-gatherer life. Held on the margins of a new and larger system by government transfers following the mission’s demise, Western Arrernte responded accordingly: They crafted a scheme that was mainly circulation and only in small part wealth generation. They called on their kin relations across a region to circulate along their beats the goods of this new administrative order. This was the Arrernte’s involuted system of relatedness geared to address their marginal position in a cash-and-commodity world (see chapter 5). Yet as an order of value, market society and its state bureaucracy demanded more of the Arrernte than the mission regime had. Ultimately it demanded the end of any domestic economy that was not viable in its terms. The striking thing that the bureaucratic texts reveal is the manner in which the Australian state has worked to prize apart economy and Arrernte ideas of place. To be emplaced or “remote” as an indigenous Australian now carries the presumption of market nonviability. Services, training, and life itself therefore should be centralized. This taken-for-granted attitude in

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CDEP reports demonstrates the experiential gulf that the Arrernte were required to bridge. As administrators involved in CDEP stressed training and waged work, outstation leaders were keen to deploy their newly won means to travel the region. Servicing relatives and beats often prevailed over waged work and even primary schooling for kids. In time, this change in priorities shifted the focus in CDEPs from small domestic economies to workforce training. The shift was from outstation autonomy to the autonomy of market individuals, but as policy ideal more than practice. Half-wrought unemployed market individuals, who would prefer to be cruising country, fueled a Western Arrernte anomie. Suddenly, but not so suddenly through the 1990s, the violence of policy and the everyday seemed to overwhelm Western Arrernte continuity. This was the collision of social imaginaries that marked the Western Arrernte’s outstation movement.

G chapter 9

A Very Remote Emergency

O

n Saturday June 16, 2007, news broke across Australia of a Northern Territory government report that detailed sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in a wide range of remote communities. Although such issues had been canvassed before in national and local ways, this document made the matter concrete and confronting. It also added to previous reports of substance abuse, poor health, domestic violence, widespread school nonattendance, unemployment, and premature death in remote town and outstation life.1 This time, though, the issues brought screaming headlines: “GrogFuelled Sex Attacks Rife in Black Communities,” “Generation at Risk in Sex Abuse Crisis.” They marked the national release of the two-volume Little Children Are Sacred report (see Wild and Anderson 2007) and the federal government’s declaration of a state of emergency in Northern Territory communities. The prime minister and his minister for indigenous affairs announced their decision to send troops into more than sixty communities to “stabilize” them and to conduct health checks on children ages fifteen and younger. The actions were modeled on interventions in the Pacific such as the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). One government adviser proposed that the emergency was comparable to measures to contain failed states—an irony in view of the fact that Australia’s treatment of indigenous people has been described in the past as an “internal colonialism” (see Beckett 1988b). Two weeks later there were troops in Ntaria, as a couple of telephone calls and one e-mail confirmed. A few among the elderly recalled to me the Alice Springs army camp of World War II. A published account in a women’s magazine, Marie Claire, reported of a health worker, Mildred Inkamala, “Pulling on her clothes, Mildred, 50, half-walked, half-ran to the health centre a few hundred metres from her home to see uniformed men unload238

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ing equipment from an army truck. From the safety of a small sandhill, a group of frightened women watched, clinging to each other and crying. Many of their children had already run away to hide.” And this remark was cited from a Western Arrernte man: “What they should have done is come quietly to the council, sat down in the office there and said, ‘Excuse me, can we put this to you?’ And we would have said, ‘Yes, that’s OK.’ But they never came.”2 Soon a federal health team was in place at the Ntaria clinic. Clinic staff had agreed to provide their records to the visiting team. It was estimated that the general health of two hundred children might be checked. Three months later I visited Ntaria and found that issues of drinking, housing, and employment were more immediate concerns than health. Women were grateful for less grog in town, at least, but still concerned about unemployed youth. In an awkward way, one of the senior men raised the issue of child abuse and totally condemned it. No one had been charged at Ntaria, though it seemed that all were labeled by the emergency. By this time, five hundred pages of legislation had passed through the federal houses of parliament in Canberra. It was only the minority parties that sought to question the legislation in significant ways. Both the Liberal government and Labor opposition endorsed the bills. In the face of a looming general election, Labor was reluctant to test the critical faculties of the electorate or the depth of its xenophobia. “Saving the children” was a position that allowed moral certainty for most. As a consequence, on the bill’s first reading in the lower house, the minister for indigenous affairs was left facing an eerily emptied chamber. The legislation came in the form of a Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill (2007) and two ancillary bills dealing with social security, families and community services, and sundry other issues. Major measures included banning alcohol in all communities of more than one hundred. Fines of up to seventy-five thousand dollars were prescribed for transporting grog. It was planned that for the next twelve months, the federal government would “quarantine” half the welfare payments of most individuals for spending on the “priority needs” of children—food, health, housing, clothing, education, transport, and funerals. Thereafter, this quarantining would proceed according to the behavior of individuals. As one observer put it, “Those who are convicted of drug or drink offences, who fail to pay their rent, or who fail to care for their children or ensure their regular school attendance, will lose control of family welfare payments, which are to be redirected to those who will act responsibly. The system is to be administered by a Family Responsibilities Commission with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members” (Manne 2007).

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In addition, the Community Development Employment Project (CDEP) would be curtailed as a failed form of welfare. In effect, this measure involved “transitioning” remote CDEPs into the framework of Job Network and Structured Training and Employment Project (STEP) providers responsible to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR).3 Job Network is a privatized form of job placement contracted to government. STEP ties government training projects to actual outcomes in continuing employment. STEP was used at the Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Center (TORC) before, but in a piecemeal way because available full-time and continuing employment is scarce for either trained or untrained Arrernte people (see Austin-Broos 2001a). The work of labor economists and demographers suggests that, if this type of strategy is to be successful, a massive increase in jobs is required (see, e.g., Gregory 2005; J. Taylor 2003). Ethnography also suggests that creative resolutions are needed to bridge the experiential gap between forms of service to relatives and impersonal waged employment that both bear the name of “work” among Western Arrernte (see Austin-Broos 2006b). The tension in these types of sociality—in being a relative and a market individual—belies the pristine conceptual world of policy. The legislation came in the context of proposals from the Cape York Institute (CYI), a private think tank headed by indigenous leader Noel Pearson and substantially funded by the federal government (see Cape York Institute 2007, 76–106; Behrendt 2007). The emphasis in its recommendations was on indigenizing local service employment, privatized placement, small business aid, and financial support for migration for both indigenous education and work. “Orbiting” or circular migration from outstation communities to the coast and back was the recommended mode (see also Manne 2007, 39–40). The specter of total control came in the clauses that enabled the federal government to lease communities for five years. Such leases would allow the state to appoint its own community managers with powers to control municipal funding, dismiss local councils, and oversee all external service providers. In addition, the legislation revoked the ability to cite traditional law as a mitigating circumstance for Aboriginal offenders. Under the new Emergency Response package, pornography was banned from remote communities. Implementation plans for this ban and the ban on grog were not announced. The legislation had two fundamental aims: One was to “normalize” communities in legal terms. The other was a strategy of state paternalism. Normalizing involved introducing leasehold to promote private property ownership in communities with land rights. Normalizing also involved sub-

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sidizing indigenous house purchases and dispensing with permits so that there might be more economic and social commerce between indigenous and nonindigenous people. The second aim of the government response, which followed the military patrols, involved the control of indigenous income and expenditure in a fashion that brought a level of institutionalization not seen since the Western Arrernte were wards of state. While these latter measures, with health checks, were the state’s response to child abuse, the former involved its response to socioeconomic change. Legal advice was taken by the federal government that these “emergency” measures to “benefit” communities (and not disadvantage them) did not breach the commonwealth’s Racial Discrimination Act of 1975. The military intervention and its partner legislation had both philosophical and pragmatic underpinnings. The measures did not require a frontal attack on land rights, which the government would have been reluctant to launch in an electoral year. Nonetheless, the spirit of the policy was that anything that marks indigenous Australians as different in legal terms should, if possible, go. This view persists in spite of the fact that even the conservative press has contested the popular view that land rights inhibits economic development (see McDonnell 2005). Most Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory is not of interest to the market, and the state has the power to require mineral development on Aboriginal land in any case. Where the Western Arrernte are concerned, the land still suffers from the exhaustion incurred by early settlement and pastoralism. The emphasis on normalizing the legal frame in fact stemmed from neoliberal tenets that governments should not fund forms of regional development. Providing the framework for enterprise is all that citizens should expect. With this notion came a discourse of making Aborigines “work ready,” meaning that they should have skills training and be morally coherent. Emphasis on moral renovation came from Noel Pearson, who had written and campaigned at length on the view that widespread alcohol abuse is a cause of violence and despair rather than a social effect. In a similar vein, Pearson argued that race is an “impediment” but not a disability for determined individuals (see Pearson 2000, 34). His political strategy has been to build autonomy among communities and their indigenous leaders so that they could be negotiators with the federal government and not merely cursory advisers.4 Although their positions are not the same, Pearson’s views have been amenable to Australian neoliberals because they have focused on individual uplift—a type of “Operation Bootstrap” for indigenous people—rather than structural change.5 Where Pearson might advocate this course from a position of skepticism concerning the state, its power, and its commitment, neoliber-

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als have endorsed the making of market individuals as a political principle. Ironically, the embrace of state paternalism to achieve this outcome created a quandary for ideologues. Hence the emphasis on a moral emergency regarding children that made the situation exceptional. The pragmatism in this response concerned matters of government cost. A military presence followed by controls on welfare expenditures were centralized measures easier and cheaper to execute than time-consuming local consultation. The military was also an easier option than additional police in communities that are alien and remote to other Australians—including the police. Relations between indigenous Australians and the latter are perennially tense and yet communities do need proper policing. Issues of truancy and domestic and public violence would be controlled better if law-and-order services to remote areas equaled those in urban Australia. Thursday is payday at Ntaria, and on that night and those that follow, mayhem can ensue. Frightened women run to a teacher’s house or to the nurses’ compound, protected with barbed wire. Two duty officers circle the Arrernte camps in their patrol car as a gesture to law and order. Yet police very seldom enter the camps. This reflection of the state’s indifference has been masked in the federal intervention by applying paternalism to pathologized people. Again, blaming welfare and sexual pathology among a few for widespread social suffering conceals the Western Arrernte’s marginalization, resulting from two key moments in their history: the initial missionization that invasion brought and then the recent ill-wrought transition from mission to modernity. For many “ordinary Australians,” though, a program that starts with individual pathology and extends across fifteen years in very remote locations proved attractive. Not long after the 2007 bills became law, the headlines petered out. These events unfolded some six weeks after I completed the first draft manuscript for this book. In the place of this chapter was another one on remote communities and economic rationalism. My intention was to juxtapose a Western Arrernte history with a neoliberal discourse. It was part of my aim to show that noting social suffering and even offering policy critique is not enough. An adequate response requires addressing the enduring structural issues that require more than individual moral renovation— chief among them the conflicting forms of value that keep indigenous Australians remote and thereby marginalized from market society. This is a historical situation that demands a thoughtful government response, one that can also acknowledge the impact over time of the state. The neoliberal discourse that commanded my attention had been building for some years. Ostensibly, it received its vindication with the Little Children Are Sacred

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report. The government’s swift reaction even suggested embarrassment; a tacit acknowledgement perhaps that it should have acted before or should act now to defuse a potential election issue. Yet what seemed prescient in my book also gave me pause for thought. With the discourse that surrounded intervention came a slippage between structural issues, social suffering, and individual pathology. Was it by accident that government action finally came via a report on sexual pathology and in the course of repudiating policies on outstation life that were once bipartisan? I posed these issues in order to clarify how it was that I concurred with much of the policy critique and yet found the intervention and its discourse confronting, even racist. How could it benefit the Arrernte, for instance, to render them almost wards of state again? These questions led me to consider events in terms of why I wrote this book.

The Emergency, the Arrernte, and Fieldwork As I did fieldwork through the 1990s, it became increasingly clear me that my focus would be the transition from mission life that land rights and outstations brought. As chapter 8 relates, I was struck by the clash of social imaginaries involved in Western Arrernte accounts of the initial outstation “shift” and the requirements of CDEP. The former placed a focus on emplaced kin relatedness and networks of association across a region. Commonly, narrators of the outstation movement sought to graft ideas of work onto this imaginary, but these accounts were travel stories of movement between particular places and people. They contrasted with the support for individuated workforce training in a centralized and impersonal bureaucracy. Still, these imaginaries did not reflect a simple clash of incommensurable cultures. As more than one Arrernte narrator underlined, movement out of the mission was as much “decentralization” as it was a homelands movement. The aspiration was to replicate small domestic economies of the mission type on each outstation or in each regional complex. Brumby mustering, pastoralism, and gardening were the aim, along with occasional hunting and gathering. In this context, the brief of the newly established TORC was service delivery, especially infrastructure, to these scattered domestic economies. Integral to this goal was a training component developed by TORC’s first manager, Glen Auricht, also a qualified builder and, as I have noted in chapters 7 and 8, a fluent speaker of Western Arrernte. His aim was to train young men in housing construction, centering activities on TORC. In conjunction with Western Arrernte elders, Auricht had wished to keep Tjuwanpa separate and local. Developing a service industry as work

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and service to kin and training known instructors would help bridge competing values. However, matters changed as CDEP became the major remote communities funding tool of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ASTIC). Self-help housing was rejected for houses as a right. The external contractors employed by ATSIC provided neither training nor employment for youth. In addition, the centralization of grant funding that CDEP brought intensified Western Arrernte factionalism.6 In this milieu, a seductive politics of rights and bureaucratic centralization triumphed over local efforts to constitute a dispersed but connected Arrernte community. As reports to ATSIC’s Papunya regional office show, increasingly the emphasis was on training individuals and reducing service costs. Following Auricht’s departure, TORC became a bureaucratic tangle of intermittent training, shadow enterprise, and stumbling service delivery. There was without doubt some success but not enough to make a local economy work (see Austin-Broos 2001a, 2006b). In sum, bureaucratic centralization and its intended outcomes had proved no easier to implement than the domestic economies with which Western Arrernte began their shift. One of my motives for writing the book was to tell the story of this Arrernte experience in the face of the optimistic accounts of Indigenous Sector and outstation success that infused the academy in the east (see F. Morphy and Sanders 2001; Rowse 2002, 230–33; Altman 2005). The disinclination to acknowledge widespread social suffering seemed to rest on notions of protecting culture and on a marked reluctance to address how the institutions of market society, including the bureaucratic state, had affected and would further change remote indigenous Australians. The Arrernte’s history has been a complex one, and this academic immersion in localism seemed inappropriate. Another and more intimate motive was involved: my observation over many years of the suffering and courage of Arrernte women, children, and some men in the face of everyday Ntaria life. Let me recapitulate the various incidents recorded in the preceding chapters. Malnutrition appears in chapter 3 as the product of mobile parents and a grandmother with too many mouths to feed on too few pension payments. At that particular time in the field, I was shocked to discover that while camping with the relevant group, I had not realized the children were malnourished—skinny and grizzling, yes, but so were so many other kids left with grandmothers. This incident also records the humiliation of an elder in the face of unreflective service staff and the support of Gus Ntjalka Williams, a Western Arrernte man. In chapters 1, 6, and 7, I record cruel deaths, mostly by accident or else unintended. Yet death from feuds, an elder killed while mediating one, a small girl raped and drowned by a doped youth, young men dead from alco-

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holism, and physical assault and rape of women were part of my fieldwork. So were child neglect and the physical effects of petrol sniffing. In addition I watched the involution of demand sharing, the Arrernte’s sophisticated system of circulation that, in the context of marginalization, became a trap for ineffectual demanders; for the young who fall between carers; and for the old who perpetually give to stay in social life and yet receive little back. I watched my friend Joyce Robinya Malbunka struggle over many years until the struggle was too much. This effort included my futile attempt to open a secret bank account with an Ntaria outlet. These phenomena of a collapsing local economy and involuted and violent social relations led to the view stated early in this book: that the Western Arrernte have been through not one but two forms of change. The first and well-known one was the initial invasion in the late 1800s with the arrival of pastoral settlement and the Western Arrernte’s incorporation into mission life. This change swept away both their country as they had known it and the economy of a hunter-gather life. Ritual attenuation followed. People fell back to the Finke River Mission, with its focal point at Hermannsburg. Moreover, after the drought of the 1920s, mission pastor Friedrich Albrecht moved to develop apprenticeships for youth and became convinced that Hermannsburg should become an industrial village in the desert. The lease was also a pastoral station and, in addition, Aboriginal people were set to gardening, fancywork, and other crafts and ultimately to tanning and the production of art. Though Hermannsburg operated partly as a cash economy, much of the Arrernte’s work was done as service in exchange for rations. It was this domestic moral economy that the second change was meant to replace. Land rights and the outstation movement promised real autonomy to a people who had been invaded, dispossessed, and subordinated in the mission. Yet, as Will Sanders (1985) records in his insightful discussion of 1960s policy debates around unemployment, it would not be easy to replace the mission’s economy. As I described in chapters 5, 7, and 8, CDEP was an outcome of this policy dilemma—a half resolution through government transfers of the fact that Western Arrernte, like other people living remote, had limited access to waged employment. This brings me to the present and to my observation that a state-sponsored return to tradition for the sake of autonomy has coincided for the Arrernte with the first full incorporation in a cash economy, but often as long-term welfare recipients— included in the cash economy but also marginalized in market society. The hope for autonomy within one imagined social order has been undermined by dependence in another.

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This experience has carried with it forms of ontological shift sometimes linked with modernity; two types of taxing transition that Arrernte people must interpret. The first is between a social order in which the subject is preeminently a relative and one where subjects identify themselves through a career narrative. As I have remarked before, this transition is signaled by the different ways that we locate ourselves—not “Who are you related to?” but “What do you do (for a living)?” In short, a transition from kin-based society to one in which the market is central. The second transition is from value located in place to value in movable things. A world with a regime of value grounded in a region and its geography begins to give way to one objectified in commodities and cash. This transition is earmarked by the enduring debate about land rights and private property, the respective legal renderings of these experiential worlds. In short, to be the individual that market society and even CDEP expects, Western Arrernte must be prized from kin relatedness and from their emotional links to place. The violence that is readily seen in Western Arrernte life today is informed by these conditions of forced transition, but on the margins of market society—“forced” because the meaning and value of market society disorganize other regimes of value without quite delivering on modernity. Western Arrernte face this modernity lacking the status orders of mission or traditional life but also mostly unemployed and thereby without the types of status (except in a negative sense) that market society provides. Lacking an integrated status order, authority is undermined and, as old people say, “them kid got no way (tyaye).” But which ways are the right ones? Observing this dilemma led me to write the book. The government’s response to the Little Children Are Sacred report focused on issues of sexual abuse, violence, and welfare, issues that my fieldwork also raised. And yet I watched with dismay as events unfolded because the response seemed to take individual pathologies and project them onto a people. Failed communities, it seemed, had to be saved by the state. Entirely absent from this reaction was the knowing struggle of people like the Western Arrernte and their own awareness of the needs of kids. Equally important, the state’s response could not locate the social suffering of children and adults within the framework of the structural violence that I have recorded—both the enduring legacy of invasion and the policy conundrums that are not the fruit of just one side of politics. If outstations were the wrong approach, how might one accommodate being remote and being part of market society? Does this mean there cannot be a Western Arrernte modernity? Hard questions to resolve, they suggest why the shift in discourse might have been from difference to pathology—and not for the first time in talk about indigenous Australians.

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The Emergency, Difference, and Sex In an interesting discussion of “sex”—its constitution in ethnographic reports on Aborigines, and its disappearance again—Povinelli makes some telling remarks on Australian discourse. Her focus is Spencer and Gillen and their Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899). Her interpretation is speculative but nonetheless interesting for its insights. Povinelli argues that the impact of Spencer and Gillen’s text made all modern social science slightly Australianist. Her point is that the comparative study of sociomoral life proposed by Durkheim was grounded in the observations of men like Spencer and Gillen that even the “savages” of Central Australia, with their mesmerizing ritual practice that involved “sexual excess,” were part of a moral humanity. Durkheim’s notion of the social as constraint, and thereby as moral, found its most compelling presentation in just those contexts that appeared at first sexually “indulgent,” totally without constraint. This was also Freud’s view in his Totem and Taboo: “For internal and external reasons, I shall select as the basis of this comparison the tribes which have been described by anthropologists as the most backward and miserable savages, the aborigines of Australia” (cited in Povinelli 2002, 71). If even these benighted subjects had morality—beyond their apparent savage ritual practice—then surely morality must be universal. Povinelli suggests the way in which this fin de siècle science could have led Spencer to a focus on heterosexual acts even in the context of a much richer techne for the body among Australian Aborigines. She points to the intense engagement in traditional rite between corporeal effusions—blood, saliva, semen, sweat, and spoken words—and a diverse nature. She labors to address a different human experience. Moreover, in this context of ethnographic reinterpretation, she suggests that the focus on heterosexual excess possibly was shaped more by European categories than indigenous ones. That may well be, but for the discussion at hand the important point that Povinelli makes is that this excessive sex among savage Arrernte created a dilemma for twentieth-century thought. As an earlier intolerance became repugnant in twentieth-century society, Aboriginal “sex” was purged from ethnographic texts in order to present a more acceptable indigeneity to white Australians (Povinelli 2002, 109). Difficult facts to digest were largely hidden by the 1960s when Aborigines were finally included in the census. In Povinelli’s view, social anthropology came to the rescue, especially as practiced by W. E. H. Stanner and A. P. Elkin. Excising the work of Róheim, T. G. H. Strehlow’s “Songs,” and Les Hiatt’s rituals of pseudoprocreation, she notes, “By 1936, most British-trained anthropologists, and the British

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administrators and police they trained, shared the general sense that the social order of primitive society consisted of delicately balanced local systems of heterosexual reproduction and its regulation—or, in the disciplinary rhetoric, its prescriptive and proscriptive rules, forms and sanctions of kinship, marriage and descent” (Povinelli 2002, 119). Elkin turned his own critique on other, ignorant missionaries who lacked the training to see beyond indigenous promiscuity and child marriage (see Elkin 1944). And as Aboriginal Australians received more civil rights, Stanner published the following view: The old printed record concerning Aboriginal custom is replete with misunderstandings of the religious symbolism. Observers vested mere externals—the vehicle or symbolizing means—with intrinsic significances. Preconception usually ensured that the attributed meanings were deprecatory, often odious. For example, ritualised acts of sex, which seem usually to be but ecstatic means of symbolizing non-sexual things, were taken as evidence of bestiality. Hence, probably, the view of the amiable Mr. Dredge, the early nineteenth-century protector who described the Aborigines as “men of Sodom, sinners exceedingly.” But the more recent Freudians have also given the sexual symbolisms a grotesquely exaggerated significance. (1965b, 235)

As students of Elkin, Ronald and Catherine Berndt displaced the sexuality in their study of it by arguing that the “sex refers principally to fertility and to the increase of the natural species, and not to eroticism” (Berndt and Berndt 1951, 148). Povinelli exaggerates the one-sidedness of Australian anthropology. And yet she is right about the opinion makers. Stanner and Elkin were the influential ones and those most likely to sanitize an ancient civilization. Similarly, in 1981, Lutheran mission superintendent Paul Albrecht reported of the Western Arrernte an equally remarkable fact: that their initiation rituals were compatible with Christianity because they had mainly a “social significance,” a fact that his missionary father had not understood (1981, 6). Such is the elision that a history of invasion can produce. In sum, at the time when indigenous difference was most readily acknowledged in institutional terms through land rights and outstations, the nature of that cultural difference had itself been sanitized for urban settler Australia. Let me make clear that it is not my intention here to associate contemporary issues of child sexual abuse with other indigenous practice, sexual or otherwise, ancient or modern. Yet Povinelli’s account does suggest some-

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thing significant about nonindigenous society. The early sexualization of indigenous culture in ethnographic literature followed a logic that was practical as well as academic. Spencer and Gillen’s texts made a seminal contribution to social science. They also helped justify the displacement of “savages” in the face of European settlement. In Spencer’s view, the Arrernte’s future in modern life was limited by their ancient and degenerate adaptations (see Spencer and Gillen 1927). They were, he pronounced, something like the platypus, an evolutionary dead end. Forty years later, though, when the hills were alive with self-determination, indigenous culture had become thoroughly divested of corporeal ritual practice. In terms that Europe had itself constructed, Aborigines had become desexualized. Perhaps it was predictable, then, certainly “natural” in discourse terms, that intervention of the recent radical form would be visited on a resexualized people, this time in aberrant, modern ways—as wife beaters and pedophiles. Once again, it seems, opinion makers used pathology to justify action. An extract from the Australian7 for June 22, 2007, provides the relevant tone: John Howard [the prime minister] will seize control of Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory, banning alcohol and pornography and using the military to attack the “national emergency” of alcohol fuelled abuse of children. . . . The unprecedented power grab, involving about 60 townships, comes a week after the release of [the Little Children Are Sacred] report that revealed rampant and often-unreported child sexual abuse in Territory indigenous communities, with children as young as three exposed to hard-core pornography. It described frequent attacks on children by family members and their friends after parties featuring drug use and binge-drinking. “We are dealing with children of the tenderest age who have been exposed to the most terrible abuse from the time of birth, virtually,” Mr. Howard said. “It is interventionist, . . . I accept that. But what matters more: the constitutional niceties or the care and protection of children?”

This news story appeared under the banner headline, “Crusade to Save Aboriginal Kids.”8 It was accompanied by a rare photograph of an indigenous family. In the weeks that followed the June 16 release of the report, there were many more photographs of the citizen-politicians who had introduced these measures. Dotted among them were photographs of similar

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well-intentioned types engaging with Aboriginal children. Not only were remote indigenous men resexualized as deviant in these accounts, indigenous Australians were portrayed again as a people that struggles to care for its women and children. Just as Spencer and Elkin deliberated on violence toward women, child abuse retrieved the discourse used in the course of previous child removals—the Stolen Generations (see Manne 2001). This time there would be no removals but, rather, a projected reinstitutionalization. This analysis is not about the facts of abuse that the Northern Territory report details. They concern widespread incidents across a range of communities reported truthfully by Aboriginal residents. Rather, I am concerned with the use of these facts in discourse. My proposal is that this emergency and the carriage of it by politicians fit precisely my understanding of a politics of moral order wherein major structural disadvantage is masked by pathologizing communities (see Austin-Broos 2005b). This politics of moral order, a tool of a xenophobia, typically proceeds by questioning a group at the core of its domestic life—at the site of its intimate gender relations and social reproduction. If these are pathologized, then eo ipso the group is too. This particular focus is striking in view of the mounting record of critique that followed Noel Pearson’s (2000) initial public statement.9 In view of the existing public record, it would have been so easy to observe that in any social circumstance where 75 percent and more of adults are on lifelong welfare, pathologies of similar magnitude occur, not due to welfare per se but to forms of marginalization that disorganize social life. Social suffering breeds pathology, but they are not the same. My unease regarding the government’s response to the Little Children Are Sacred report was explained by its embeddedness in a continuing discourse on indigenous excess. This discourse was established already when Baldwin Spencer wrote. The distinctive feature of the neoliberal version, unlike Spencer’s, was its stripping of cultural specificity from the Arrernte and others in the name of market principles. What it left in place was mere indigenous pathology.

The Emergency and Neoliberal Discourse Noel Pearson’s statement in 2000 possibly marked the beginning of broad public debate on outstation life. A lawyer and graduate of Sydney University, Pearson grew up at Hopevale in Queensland, a sister Lutheran mission to the Arrernte’s at Hermannsburg. He wrote:

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The right to self-determination is ultimately the right to take responsibility. Our traditional economy was a real economy and demanded responsibility (you don’t work, you starve). The white fella market economy is real (you don’t work, you don’t get paid). After we became citizens with equal rights and equal pay, we lost our place in the real economy. What is the exception among white fellas—almost complete dependence on cash handouts from the government—is the rule for us. There is no responsibility and reciprocity built into our present artificial economy . . . Passive welfare has undermined Aboriginal Law—our traditional values and relationships. . . . Passive welfare, grog and drugs are finally tearing our society apart. (Pearson 2000, foreword)

Pearson’s portrait of the moral decay caused by welfare was graphic and provided fuel for less-versed critics. Passive welfare and the grog and drugs epidemic have caused exploitation to develop and become embedded in our social systems. People are deliberately taking and not giving, expecting rights and not being responsible. In other words, taking advantage of other, usually weaker members of our society. . . . Wives and girlfriends, parents and grandparents, are placed under tremendous pressure . . . (Pearson 2000, 31, 17)

In his conclusion, Pearson observed that belated citizenship in 1967 gave us two things. Firstly, . . . land rights and increasing recognition of our human rights—and this has been a good thing. Secondly, . . . passive welfare as an economy—and this has been disastrous. (Pearson 2000, 99)

Pearson’s care in differentiating the desirability of land rights, and the specifying history they allow, from the effects of marginality was not replicated in other remarks. Foremost among these others was editorial comment in the Australian. In 2005 a notable editorial juxtaposed universal human rights to the group rights of a politics of difference: “It is time to treat Aborigines in the bush as individual Australians, not subordinate their

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human rights to traditional ideals.”10 Five months later the language was stronger. The Australian in another editorial spoke of land rights, outstations, and self-determination as “a failed experiment in self-government by wrong-headed idealists of the 1970s,” adding this rider: “It is time to acknowledge the desire to preserve ‘traditional’ culture does not justify leaving indigenous Australians to rot.”11 These editorials came in the wake of a policy paper produced by Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin for the neoliberal Centre for Independent Studies. Their target was recent policy makers rather than indigenous Australians themselves. Their focus was on H. C. Coombs, who along with W. E. H. Stanner was an advocate for outstations and land rights (see chapter 7). Hughes and Warin interpreted land rights as “communal land ownership” and thereby as an impediment to “economic development.” They argued that the social ills associated with poor housing, education, health, and life expectancy flowed from communalism and its concomitant separatism. They wrote, “In contrast to the liberal vision that saw Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders working in all occupations and living at the same standards as other Australians, Coombs’ model separated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from the rest of Australia [knowing] that low living standards would be the consequence” (Hughes and Warin 2005, 3). They parodied Coombs’s 1980s proposal that hunting and gathering might still be an economic mainstay—a parody justified in desert Central Australia—and suggested that it is just this idealism that had rendered communities “dependent on transfers from working, capitalist Australia” (3). They proposed that Coombs’s “utopian experiment” founded “a socialist, communal, customary economy and society in remote Australia” (1, 4). Moreover, in its promotion of first language schooling and cultural retention, the experiment became apartheid. The use of permits to deny nonindigenous people unchecked community access “prevents non-Indigenous Australians from visiting, let alone living, in [these] . . . ‘living museums’ ” (4).12 In Hughes’s judgment, Coombs had many willing helpers, or “curators,” in the making of museums. Missionaries were the first not to treat indigenous people as equals.13 Like modern-day socialists, they limited remote indigenous education and denied indigenous people effective leaders (Hughes and Warin 2005, 2). Such actions prepared the way for Coombs’s willing associates, “the non-Indigenous public servants and private service industry ‘rentiers’ who derive comfortable livelihoods from present policies”; also the “academics and consultants whose incomes [these policies] substantially boost” (Hughes 2005, 3). Hughes and Warin did not blame indigenous Australians “for the effects of the remote community experiment” (Hughes

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and Warin 2005, 8). Yet in dismissing policies aimed at autonomy as utopian or socialist, Hughes and Warin also stripped remote indigenous life of its specificity. This effect was intentional because in Hughes’s view, remote issues are simply economic, not cultural or regional, ones. Lack of employment is made worse by remoteness but “not caused by it. Nor is it an ethnic problem. Non-indigenous welfare ghettos exhibit the same dysfunctional” features (Hughes 2005, 7).14 I have stressed this fact myself. Hughes and Warin draw a different conclusion, though—that therefore incapacity defines remote Aboriginal people: Adults in remote communities are overwhelmingly illiterate and innumerate. They do not have enough English to express themselves. They cannot read the instructions for simple do-it-yourself jobs. They cannot read food labels, medicine instructions or cleaning material warnings. People do not know their fortnightly, monthly and annual incomes and expenditures. Digitalisation of CDEP and other welfare payments has exacerbated the difficulties of protecting incomes from communal obligations and “book-up” (buying on credit)—both typical of traditional and poor communities. Very low literacy and numeracy makes banking a nightmare. . . . There are no newspapers and no books. Mainstream radio programmes cannot be understood. The only television and DVD programmes that are watched require no English because they substitute violence for a storyline. (Hughes and Warin 2005, 6)

The authors described in quite other terms the kin phenomenon that Sansom (1982) called “the concertina household.” They write, “In many instances, a single bedroom can house a family of six to eight people. Foam rubber mattresses cover the floor. There is no room for furniture. There are no tables, no chairs, no wardrobes and no cupboards, let alone desks for children’s homework. A young girl is lucky to have an airline bag for her clothes and toothbrush” (Hughes and Warin 2005, 6, 10). The notion that there might be regimes of value invested in person and place rather than portable things is absent from this account. That there might be imaginaries in play other than the market is itself unimaginable. Newspaper columnist Christopher Pearson reviewed Hughes and Warin’s report under the headline, “Slum Total of a Failed Vision,” accompanied by a photograph of Coombs flanked by young indigenous advisers.15 Pearson cited Hughes’s opinion that higher income fosters culture. Yet he qualified her view: “That said, there are some perverse elements of hunter-gatherer culture that aren’t likely to survive protracted contact

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with modernity. They include ritual violence, witchcraft, necromancy, fatal curses and the belief that most misfortune, sickness and mortality is due to malign, human intervention and demands payback.”16 Surely Christopher Pearson would agree with Roger Sandall that “creative destruction is the law of historical advance” (Sandall 2001, 3). Some years earlier, Sandall had rued this principle’s neglect: Romantic primitivism swept all such progressive policies away. Planning for the future and looking forward was out. Looking backward became the proper way to look. . . . Transfixed by the Culture Cult, a hyperidealized vision of traditional life was adopted, and the effect on indigenes of romanticizing their past has been devastating. . . . If your traditional way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is “rich,” “complex,” and “sophisticated,” how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things. If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? . . . Numerous mutually reinforcing social pathologies have produced a state of affairs so grim that Australians cannot bring themselves to discuss it publicly except in the most guarded manner. . . . Nobody any longer believes in a solution, and much of the nation is on the edge of political hysteria. (Sandall 2001, 4, 14)

Neoliberals proposed two solutions. One, described by Helen Hughes, is to build local economies but without reliance on the government transfers that CDEP has involved. Nor did she envisage the continuance of a mixed traditional and modern economy in the style of anthropologist Jon Altman (see Hughes 2007; cf. Altman 2005). Rather, she proposed market and legal reforms, and ultimately public investment. She wrote, “Uneconomic communities cannot simply be abolished or moved. This would not only cause great hardship, but merely shift Indigenous problems to fringe settlements and ghettos. If remote community dwellers are to be able to opt for a decent life, in addition to policy reform, very considerable investment will have to be made community by community in transitions that will deliver real education, good health services and private housing so that employment can replace welfare” (Hughes 2005, 2). Confidently put, but very difficult to deliver, as a host of writers have detailed. They include policy maker John McDonnell (2005), who critiqued Hughes in Quadrant magazine; ANU demographer John Taylor (2003, 2005), who reminded readers of the demographic explosion in remote Australia; and economist Bob Gregory

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(2005), who noted the collapsing labor market in rural areas for indigenous and nonindigenous youth. These factors turned the eyes of some to another alternative—wholesale outmigration. Gary Johns, erstwhile Labor politician and now a policy consultant, proposed this course. His views were grounded in market economics and an implied a critique of Hughes. Johns cited Altman’s words in order to voice his own disquiet that “while concern is widely expressed about the economic viability of out-stations, the very basis for their limited dependence—flexible CDEP income support and remote area exemptions in relation to welfare payments—is being dismantled. More viable economic alternatives are not in place. There is a real danger that in seeking imagined economic independence, new government policy will reinvite the extreme dependence that many of today’s out-station residents experienced in townships in the 1960s and chose to leave in the 1970s.”17 Yet Johns rejected measures to support outstation life proposed in Altman’s “hybrid economy” model of public, private, and indigenous sectors (see Altman 2005). Rather, Johns supported structural adjustment including outmigration. To prepare for this adjustment, individuals must be changed, and government policy must support the process. Johns’s formulation was both clear and confident: “The challenge for government is to stop funding programs that militate against the migratory solution.”18 Further, Johns proposed that outmigration to population centers would be just a first step. As matters stood in places such as Alice Springs, with very limited employment for the unskilled or semiskilled, pressure would bear down on towns. Fringe camps would proliferate, and federal policy would become contentious among white residents. Johns counseled government not to capitulate on new policy simply in order to placate white voters. Nonetheless, his unease remained, and so in a rhetorical way he posed questions to the federal minister for indigenous affairs: How would the right incentives to migration be managed in communities, and what would be the response to rapidly increasing fringe populations in regional towns? Johns used parody to reinforce his argument. He described the regional mobility of remote indigenous people as “a recreational lifestyle for a leisure class.” He remarked, “They may be attached to customary lands, but they have no difficulty leaving them, often for non-work purposes.” He specified the latter in the following terms: “people move to other places to use the resources of kin (that is, to bot from their family).”19 In the process, education for the young was a casualty. A mobile life mixed with heavy drinking and domestic chaos could not foster schooling. To his credit, Johns underlined elsewhere that the effective delivery of education involves more than par-

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enting and pedagogy. It also involves the existence of workplace opportunities that provide incentives to literate education. Hence he proposed that schooling in remote communities is as well “an instrument in economic integration” (Johns 2006, 4). If communities lack employment, though, the young should be prepared to migrate. The sense in this, Johns proposed, is found in that fact that rates of remote indigenous unemployment are three times higher than urban indigenous rates (2006, 15–23). Migration would reduce unemployment. In Johns’s hands, the notion of a “leisure class,” with its conspicuous leisure and consumption, did more than parody outstation residents (see Veblen [1924] 1970). It also carried the negative message that they are free riders—those who accept a public good, such as military protection or welfare payments, without contributing to the cost. Writers on the free-rider problem commonly remark that resolutions are difficult due to the fact that issues of fairness are involved. In any particular historical circumstance, what constitutes fairness? These types of question are posed appropriately for the Western Arrernte. According to Johns’s plan, movement would be not simply to Alice Springs but farther south to Port Augusta or Adelaide, about thirteen hundred kilometers (or a little over eight hundred miles) away. Such a move en masse would challenge the Arrernte’s sense of self, their very life. Johns used parody and implied disparagement to tender this proposal.

Conclusion I have placed the federal government’s response to the Little Children Are Sacred report in three contexts: (1) my own engagement with Western Arrernte life, (2) a broader Australian discourse of the sexualized other, and (3) a neoliberal discourse of indigenous pathology. My fieldwork among Western Arrernte revealed both the structural violence and the social suffering of Ntaria/Hermannsburg. At the same time, it also introduced me to the imagination and innovations of a marginalized people. The use of homology in Arrernte life is but an index of the many ways in which new practices have been tried. Yet clearly, the issues of relatedness and attachment to place as they bear on market participation need to be negotiated further; a difficult process directed to incompatible values that can come only slowly through the work of individuals and families. As Gregory (2005) has observed, there is a marked contrast between many Third World peoples and remote indigenous Australians: even facing circumstances of acute suffering, most of the latter are reluctant to embrace wholesale migration. This hesitation may

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reflect recollection of past rewards, in the form of housing and private transport, for being remote. It certainly reflects two other things: the disparate values that the Western Arrernte retain and a suspicion of racialized urban milieus in which they would be a minority. If localism by itself is no answer for the Arrernte, then more links out to a wider world will require reflection and experiment. Because the choices are difficult ones, it is all the more important that those who make or influence policy are properly apprised of particular indigenous histories. My problem with the discourse that preceded and surrounded the emergency involved the way in which it stripped away both the cultural and structural specificity of a people, leaving only moral pathology and state control as the response. Denying the state’s past roles as well as local indigenous practice, except in aberrant forms, makes for a tacit assumption that federal government knows best. A further point concerns the tenor of the discourse: It is burdened with self-righteousness and distance from indigenous people. This is striking due to the fact that the policies discussed were substantially bipartisan in the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, the government that intervened in 2007 had itself been reluctant to respond in the preceding years, even faced with a plethora of reports about remote communities. As Sanders (1985) has observed, the unemployment was first predicted in 1973. In fact, recent history shows the tension between assimilation and self-determination, integration and autonomy, as the variable condition of one fabric. Because this dilemma is enduring, outstations were overburdened with policy expectations—both to provide a cultural autonomy and to realize a market integration. Moreover, whether any government can find sufficient jobs to replace CDEPs or an equivalent scheme still remains a moot point. The history of government transfers and remote indigenous life is far from over. So the matter is not so much a debate between cultural romantics and economic rationalists or even between “individual” and “group” rights. Rather, the matter is shades of difference in a policy forum guaranteed to be tendentious. Commencing with invasion and a forced sedentary life, the Western Arrernte—by virtue of the mission and its state support—were ill prepared for the institutional ravages of market society on confined outstations pushed to the margin. The lack of preparation was in part a product of policy, but policy that will always be partial, imperfect, and disputed. This being so, the thing that shocks the most in neoliberal discourse is the violence of the language. Mouthed by market warrior-ideologues and aimed at their opponents, still the language reveals most about the former’s view of indigenous Australians. The discourse related here as presented by Hughes, Christopher Pearson, Sandall, and Johns reflects a failure to address indige-

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nous people as human agents, as if everyone concerned is bathed in pathology. Reading these portraits of degradation, one could be led to wonder what the Western Arrernte have to live for now. If life is a standing fight, on this view, why fight? This perspective makes the language more than an attack on political opponents. By implication, it also treats the Arrernte and their confreres as absent or disabled. Their lives are determined, not discussed, for how could genuine interlocutors accept such words as their descriptors? These accounts that consume difference entirely in pathology also refuse any way of life outside a market imaginary. In so doing, and as policy preambles, they bring their own violence. This is not to say that anthropologists themselves have not been involved in this type of violence. Academics who have studied remote indigenous Australians in the course of the twentieth century have concentrated on kinship, ritual, and jural life. Economy has been addressed mostly within a consultancy framework, with a focus on the administration of transfers. There has been very little stepping back to gain a perspective on the state and society—or on a phenomenology of changing indigenous subjects. Either a bounded ethnographic model or consultation for the state has intervened in a more critical view of remote indigenous life. As a consequence, the power of market society, the historical particular that Weber observed would be universal, has been split from ethnography. And this was in fact the ethnography employed by Stanner, Coombs, and many others when they imagined outstation life. The emergency’s lesson therefore lies in the detailed recommendations of the Little Children Are Sacred report. Unlike federal government, it offers a range of grounded and local institutional measures that must begin with the cooperation and motivation of indigenous people like the Western Arrernte of Ntaria. Such engagement is also required for advances in education, more local jobs, and migration for higher education and employment. In short, the nonindigenous need the indigenous in order to address the present (see Dodson 2007). In view of the government’s emergency measures, it is ironic that Noel Pearson entitled his initial 1999 address “Our Right to Take Responsibility.” Whatever the outcome of this intervention, the national discourse would be more discerning and less strident were opinion makers prepared to engage directly with remote communities in their own domain. The pundits would be less detached and possibly more able to support those who have hard decisions to make.

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he anthropologist Géza Róheim, who worked at Hermannsburg in 1929, recorded numerous dreams, and some of them expressed the felt distress of change among a desert people. Told to him by a Western Arrernte man, Róheim relates a dream concerning the desecration of caves: We went down the creek to [Heavitree Gap]. There we went to [the sacred caves of the witchetty grub totem], and we saw that everything was demolished. Konja, konja! [kunye, pity] We felt very sad about it. Then I told the old man that Erapma always used to take me here and instructed me in the myths. After this we went to another sacred cave close to the creek, but this, too, had been spoiled. He showed me [the graves of various senior men] and said, “This is where they are making the railway line.” . . . On the way back I passed through Jay Creek [then a government school for half-caste children west of Alice Springs] and saw many children there. I went to the sacred cave there but there were no tjurunga [tywerrenge, sacred boards]. (Róheim 1988, 86)

Rendering the dream, Róheim comments, “Where are the old men who were heroes in his youth? They are all dead. And where are the sacred tjurunga, the glorious tokens of past days? They are gone; and the sacred caves have been robbed of their contents, desecrated by white intruders” (Róheim 1988, 86). It is a testament to the toughness and imagination of the Western Arrernte that their twentieth-century history could be so rich notwithstanding great loss. The point underlines that continuity is made, not given, by human practice and imagination. In turn, it reveals how T. G. H. Strehlow could be right about the impact of invasion on Arrernte culture and yet not 259

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see that while the Western Arrernte retain an identity, continuity will be maintained. One condition entails the other, and this is as much the poetics of a people as their classical song and rite. In remarks she made not long before her death, my friend Joyce Robinya Malbunka reminded me of this. One day she talked about Boggy Hole (Alitera), farther down the Finke River. This was the place where Constable Willshire patrolled the route between Henbury, Middleton Pond, and the Finke River Mission (FRM), looking for cattle thieves. When we went to see the ruin of his small station, Joyce was overcome with grief and remarked that at that time many relhe (Arrernte people) died. We quickly left the place. Later, she referred not to the side of the large water hole where Willshire camped but to its western side, a popular picnic spot and closer to Ntaria. She recalled much happier days when, as a child, she swam in Boggy Hole, jumped in, and caught fish. “Did you use a net?” I asked. “Itye [No]. I jus’ jump in an’ swim an’ push ’em over, trap ’im [underneath the bank] an’ catch ’im. All the time.” She recalled us going with others on a fishing trip to Boggy Hole. We used nets then. That was when Judith (father’s sister’s daughter, or FaSiDa, to Joyce) could not come because she was “sorry.” She was nursing a broken arm, part of a payback that began when her husband was murdered in Alice Springs. Their sons responded. Judith’s fractured arm was part of the settlement (Austin-Broos 1996b). She kept trying to climb on the truck and Joyce kept pushing her off, saying, “You’re a sorry woman. You can’t come!” Judith had the arm in a sling and a black cloth draped over her head. Despite the seriousness of events, everyone was laughing. On that trip, I swam the river just north of Boggy Hole with a net and then a mob of women slowly walked or swam toward it herding fish. That time, Joyce said, “We caught lotta fish, big mob o’ fish. ’Nother time,” she said, she went there with the wife of the ingkarte (pastor). A group of women stayed two nights and Joyce “looked after ’em” with prayer and singing. But now, she said, Boggy Hole was “finished,” the water was gone. She had been there with one of her sons, and he showed her the tracks where the snakes had left. “Whole lotta tracks—all goin’ away.” She said that the snakes went, and then the water dried up. That water’s bin there long time. I never seen ’im dry like that. My cousin [from Wallace Rockhole] saw ’im too. She tol’ me that big snake [that] was there, left an’ went to her son’s place. He left a big hole at Alitera. My cousin said that maybe she coulda fallen down. Only this one stopped her [gesturing to a fulsome bosom]. She was proper scared, went home an’ prayed. She prayed ’bout that one whole lot.

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[Joyleen’s son] said we could go to his place. He wants us to go there. He said I could come with my sister. Well, I don’t want to go down there. Too far. Then you come. Well, I said, “I can’ go down there. Diane’s come.”

I asked what the matter was. She hesitated, then replied, Well, my cousin [Pastor Nahassan Ungwanaka] died an’ everyone here gone the wrong way. See all these trees in the Finke? Dry now. Dyin’. Only few new ones growin’ up. Like people. Whole mob dyin’ now. Only [a] few young one standin’ up. These relhe gone wrong way. They don’ listen to God. Well, lakenhe [in the same way], God don’ listen to them.

Some days later we were sitting on a veranda looking at Mount Hermannsburg. She cryptically remarked of the stretch of land right in front of us by the Areyonga Road, “We used t’ find lotta merne [bush food] there, nothin’ now.” This made me recall that in recent times she had mentioned river gums dying in the Finke. A process that I assumed was continuous and unremarkable, she saw as a decisive event. Around that time, Joyce showed me places where her parents camped when they first returned to the mission from Middleton Pond in the 1930s. In those days, there was plenty of water because the Finke was routed differently, and there was ample shade. She remarked that everything was dying now. Her comments were dreamlike, in the style that Róheim reports. Joyce had the sense that the law she lived by, God’s law, was failing, and with it the country where it was emplaced. The suggestion that the snake went south to Illamurta, where Joyleen’s son was living, was women’s idle talk about country and tracks and claims on sites. It was also, though, a toying with notions of emplaced life. I was struck by the manner in which homology, in this case locatedness, allowed Joyce to move between ostensibly different regimes of value. Perhaps at Illamurta, law (which law?) would be recaptured and living would be “straightened out.” These two reveries occurred in each of the moments of change on which this book has focused. Róheim’s nine months of fieldwork in 1929 came at the height of drought when sedentary life, pastoralism, and Christianity changed a Western Arrernte world. The incidence of extreme drought and its impact on a population, exacerbated by pastoralism, gives insight into the manner in which Western Arrernte have seen human beings and environment as coconstituting and as analogues of ancestral travel. Envi-

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ronment and social life, social life and environment, they thrive and fail together. With its displacements and epidemics, the first change of my account, which spanned the fin de siècle and the subsequent drought decades, might be deemed the more violent one. Certainly it is better known outside Ntaria. Yet the second change, on which Joyce remarks, has been violent too, albeit in different ways. Where the first involved a radical displacement from the land, the second, notwithstanding land rights, entailed a forced march into the modernity of cash, impersonal bureaucracy, and the expectations of others concerning Arrernte waged work. Changed already by invasion and the mission, entry into a full cash economy meant a new sociality, new space-time coordinates, and new selves. In a parallel fashion to the spread of money, impersonality flowed through Arrernte life. It is well to remember that prior to the 1960s, Ntaria/Hermannsburg’s social order was built on relative isolation from white society and thereby on an intimacy between indigenous and nonindigenous people (see also Cowlishaw 1999). Where Hermannsburg was concerned, the chief missionaries lived long lives there with their families. Notwithstanding the authoritarianism of the mission, this intimacy allowed Western Arrernte to interpret a white presence according to their sociality, at least to some degree. Hence the consternation in 1989 that while Western Arrernte had worked for the missionaries and looked after them in the early days, the service was not returned as some Arrernte would have wished. Whatever the citizens’ rights conferred in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were important, secular governance also brought Weber’s “rational” bureaucracy to the Arrernte as well as Simmel’s “supra-subjective” world of money exchange (Weber 1968; Simmel 1990). Joyce noted this change when she remarked, in effect, that lhentere (white people) seldom stay long enough to engage an Arrernte sociality. “They don’t look after relhe.” This transition was reflected in staffing at Tjuwanpa, where a succession of nonlocal and unknown managers, who also knew little if anything of Western Arrernte culture and language, followed Glen Auricht. It was also reflected in “the money story”—an attempt to employ an indigenous style of iconography in order to convey the substance of various types of financial transaction. These are transactions though that rely on elaborate forms of organization that extend well beyond Central Australia. As the Western Arrernte shifted out of Ntaria and also out of a local world, the ruptures involved in this change were magnified by their marginalization and the failure of many involved to realize the impact of market society on remote indigenous people. Western scholars have written at length of the manner in which the institutions of modernity powered their way through previous, often local, rural orders. In his account

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of modern social imaginaries, Charles Taylor (2004) renews these insights. They are also crucial to any account of Western Arrernte twentieth-century experience. From hunter-gatherer to sedentary life, and then the equally searing transition from mission to marginalised modernity; these two forms of change have been of comparable magnitude. In my remaining comments, I propose to consider in turn the issues of violence, imagination, and ontological shift. I will focus on the manner in which together they provide a portrait of a historical experience. I deploy my account to make a point about current policy debates concerning remote indigenous life in places like Ntaria. Finally, I make one further remark on anthropology and history. To return to structural violence: Irrespective of individual intentions, the specific changes that I have described were perpetrated by a state and society without consultation with the Arrernte or other indigenous Australians. They involved the usurpation of land, the mission acting as an agent of state to hold people on the periphery, and then inadequate policies to address the transition, when it came, to market society. These patterned effects across a century stem from conflicting values and interests and from unequal power. Although I have sought to show that Arrernte people worked at every point to mediate the impact of events, clearly these were not events that they simply could rebuff or instantly reshape. The upshot of this process has been the extreme marginalization of the Western Arrernte today. Given incentives to live remote in the form of houses, vehicles, and services, the Western Arrernte received from the state only a shadow economy of casual employment. As Sanders (1985) has remarked, this marginalization had been a century in the making, and yet it is only with the recent transition that the implications have become clear. The Western Arrernte’s initial economy was brutally undermined by invasion. Through the mid-twentieth century, they were held with the state’s support on the society’s periphery in the neocolonial order of the mission, encouraged all the while to adapt to that circumstance. Far from being the major culprit in this regard, the FRM within its means, and especially during the period of pastor Friedrich Albrecht, worked to develop apprenticeships and enterprise for the Western Arrernte. They were, however, underresourced, a position that persists at Ntaria today. Finally, with land rights and civil rights the Arrernte were released back to remote Australia, supported mainly by government transfers in a welfare economy. Change has treated the Arrernte and other remote indigenous Australians badly and in a patterned way that denies them full benefits in the society and state of which they are a part. This is structural violence, which continues today not least in the current

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discourse on indigenous moral pathology. The difference between seeing simply pathology and pathology that feeds off social suffering is knowing the history of structural violence encountered by the Arrernte and other like indigenous Australians. And yet the Western Arrernte have endured with quiet flair. I have tried to sum just how they have endured by considering imagination in two of its dimensions: as a means to connect the present with the past through metaphor, creating continuity; and in the form of social imaginaries to project a present into the future and thereby instill new hope. Where the former is concerned, four homologies, three of them interrelated, have been central to this account. The first concerns an Arrernte rendering of “life as travel story.” The initial incorporation of invasion and missionization into a travel story, including the location of the knowledge that the strangers brought, helped the Arrernte over time to elide the suffering and address the matters at hand—new regimes of value and a new social order. A second, similar poetic is apparent in the stories of “shifting” from Hermannsburg to outstation life; a mundane move, the metaphor suggests, just like earlier shifts from the mission, and the shifts between camps that marked hunter-gatherer life. Elided here is the very different technology and material and social demands that Arrernte would encounter in the outstation shift. A third homology, “walkin’ round,” stands as an everyday idiomatic counterpart to travel stories and accounts of shifting. At the level of interpersonal etiquette and in claims to identity through knowledge, it speaks to the enduring prominence of place and travel in an Arrernte world (see also Myers 1986, 54–70). The fourth and final homology I instance has two metaphoric components: Christianity rendered as pepe and pepe rendered in turn as “law.” By this means the Arrernte asserted commonality between two social orders, their regimes of value and their transcendentalisms. Christianity could be a law because the complex known as pepe could be given an equivalence in ritual terms and daily life to the province of tywerrenge. Looking at old photographs of Western Arrernte elders “all dressed up like Germany,” as one woman put it, evokes this homology and the hard work devoted to this new ritual form. In her everyday and taken-for-granted ways, Joyce provided me with a sense of the manner in which conversion occurs as a form of cultural work, the making and practicing of another world—and also its assimilation to the known and imagined past. The elision in this homology concerned the centralized and hierarchical regime of the FRM and its sedentary way of life. Among all its other dimensions, the outstation movement is notable for the fact that, through it, many Western Arrernte sought to decentralize the mission and take it back to country.

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Metaphors can also be instruments of hegemony—mobs, owners, managers, spells, blocks, and cruising. These terms drawn from more than one era of English idiom in Central Australia are also an index of the way in which the more-powerful group and its language assimilate the less-powerful group, redefining its sense of being.1 As I argued in chapter 4, this assimilation has affected the way in which Western Arrernte now think about country. Nonetheless, this repertoire of metaphor is the Western Arrernte’s choice within the constraints of a hegemonic order. Pastoral life without doubt became an Arrernte style. The impact of white culture on Western Arrernte idiom is another dimension of hegemonic influence but also of the manner in which continuity is wrought. Not only pepe but also the Arrernte’s interpretation of the growing importance of movable things—commodities and cash—in terms of ngkwaltye (small change and scraps) speak of the work both intellectual and physical involved in placing oneself in a new world. Building continuity through the use of imagination involves a poetics, a creative and aesthetic turn. As all these examples show, however, imagination is also practice, not just thought. The metaphors and homologies that I have noted throughout this study have been generated through experience and the trial and error of finding a way to be in sedentary life. Imagination that sustains continuity with the past is also a part of sustaining identity. The Western Arrernte have worked at it for a century. Imagination has also meant forging social imaginaries. I have suggested three Western Arrernte imaginaries in the course of this book. The first is that which belonged to a foraging people in the presettlement days; an imaginary of tracks and a sociality focused on place and relatedness creating tracks; an imaginary in which ancestral travel, geography, and daily practice were analogues. The second is pepe, not simply a metaphor but also an elaborate imaginary still referred to at Ntaria today as “the Christian people” at Hermannsburg. This was a rations-for-service regime, a centralized and authoritarian one from which Arrernte people traveled out to spread the new law. Notwithstanding its various oppressions, it seemed to be a new way that could be a tyaye rratye, a straight way, for Western Arrernte youth. With its rite and daily life, its pepe, it provided not ancestral law but a God with an ingkarte (pastor) and kwertengerle (evangelists) to anchor relhe in place. The third imaginary I have only hinted at because, like the world it informs, it is unsettled, a “social current” more than an entrenched implicit.2 I refer to an Arrernte modernity on country in which shifting is autonomous again, and motorized. The particular indigenous eclecticism of the imaginaries of Kevin Coulthard, Mildred Inkamala, and Joyce suggest something of the pressure on imagination to stitch life together in challeng-

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ing times. This imaginary seems to refuse hierarchical organization and to pile significance into place and widespread relatedness. At the same time, it registers historical periods—especially the mission past and imanke, an olden times that ended with settlement. This incipient imaginary, which seems to involve (1) the reinvention of being-in-place and a far-flung sociality, (2) a new classification of time, and (3) new regional dynamics of aggregation and dispersal, shows the Western Arrernte exploring both conceptually and in practice a postmission, freer world. This is also a world in which career narratives linked to the market have an unstable position. Juxtaposed with the violence of the everyday, this slower-moving intellectual and practical refiguring imbues Western Arrernte life with its identity and hope. Regional gatherings are grand affairs, and as individuals age, the pull of country strengthens along with concern for the young. I have sought to convey the phenomenon of ontological shift using some theoretical formulations from Heidegger (2002); in particular, his view that the world as experienced is not simply natural but rather a product of the way in which value is invested by a human group.3 I have taken as examples two fundamental types of change in value confronted by the Arrernte: from place to portable things and from subjects, understood preeminently as relatives, to market individuals. To these issues we can add the reinterpretation of ritually defined country as private landed property and its cumulative effect on the Arrernte’s own views of country. At various points in my discussion, in chapters 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9, these issues have been evident. Often I noted them by discussing idiom, both verbal and social: for example, the shift from place to things in talk about kin relatedness; the shifts of meaning involved in the terminology of pmere (country) and “block”; the collapse of an etiquette of “together but separate”; and the juxtaposition of conflicting imaginaries in outstation life. Some aspects of this shift are captured by Charles Taylor’s (2004) account of “the great dis-embedding” that he argues precedes modernity. My own view is that although his argument is in the right direction, Taylor lacks insight into the variety of ways in which modernity can be experienced. The textbook transitions that he describes seldom occur in practice, and certainly not among the Western Arrernte. The implied part of my position which I now make explicit is that when I write of “ontological shift,” I intend first and foremost economy in a broad sense and its ideology. The reasons that this study begins with invasion, although the study does not as such record the invasion, is that, as Helmut Pareroultja put it,4 arid zone Western Arrernte life as hunter-gatherers was “finished” with the advent of pastoralism. The implication of the last three

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decades of the nineteenth century was that, in large degree, one way of life was pushed aside for another. Economy is central in more than one sense. The first is as a means by which I have sought to build a phenomenology of the subject in which all humans are producing beings. I mean by this the material and tool-using aspect of culture that makes all humans interpreters of their environment—as Marx would have it, beings that are constituted through a “definite mode of life” or “intercourse” (Marx and Engels 1970, emphasis in original). Heidegger’s account of the “ready-to-hand”—for example, hunter-gatherer tools and the technology of pastoralism—allows an anthropologist to think about the impact of one made world on another as they confront each other in space. It allows an anthropologist to think about economy as immediately experienced by both indigenous people and invaders. The apparatus of the cultures differed a lot. However, what made this experience a searing one for the Arrernte was not simply the strangeness of a pastoral regime but also its power. The invaders brought much meat and the ability to remain in one place, first, by carting water and constructing wells and even building a pipeline; and second, through domesticated herds and crops. Their buildings created large expanses of shade, protection from the environment. Guns and epidemics were neither the least nor the most of the Western Arrernte’s change—they also sensed the material potential of this new way, for both good and ill. The phenomenology of the subject that Marx foreshadowed in his early work but never brought to fruition is suggested in the Arrernte’s experience—passage between worlds that were not just ideational but also substantially embodied socialities, different in scale, imagination, and levels of technology. It is this dimension of the change that is required to grasp the importance of mission life as a domestic economy. It was only the prosperity of society and state that maintained the mission as a limited local order and, as such, a way station for the Arrernte on the way to modernity. It subjected them to authoritarian rule but also stalled the impact on their lives of cash, commodities, and waged work. The ideological impact of this change is possibly gauged best by the manner in which Christian creationism and settlement life overcame Arrernte conceptionism. In those conception beliefs and practices, the Arrernte sense of a transcendental—the eternal and enduring beyond the everyday—was firmly grounded and emplaced through ancestral travels that created a filigreed system across a region. As T. G. H. Strehlow wrote, conception was personal identity and tied individuals to locality in a metaphysical way, the way of the Dreaming (T. Strehlow 1947, 1955). Nothing in Western Arrernte

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history is more remarkable than Strehlow’s genealogies that record that personal identity becoming devalued currency as more and more Arrernte came in to one of the major settlements and conceived their children there—so much so that conception today plays almost no part in land claims.5 Considered in the light of Heidegger’s ontology, as a phenomenon that loses value as “concernful dealings” turn elsewhere, conception provides a vivid sense of passage between worlds. The displacement of ancestral beings by a transcendental God speaks to the shift from a regional life to centralization in settlements, from tywerrenge to pepe, that is hard to overlook. That the ingkarte, a ritual leader, is now a pastor underlines the change involved. In anthropological circles, the Lutheran missionaries at Hermannsburg have been treated as a paradigm of aggressive evangelists.6 No doubt they were assiduous and pious—and students of language vastly superior to most anthropologists. However, the story of Kaporilya also gives pause for thought about the Arrernte and whether they also tried to rethink their world. This too is part of conversion. The second sense in which economy is central in my text is as Charles Taylor’s “objectified economy”; the market as social imaginary (C. Taylor 2004). Sahlins sums this phenomenon best when he remarks that in contemporary capitalist life “the market” is a central source of our metaphor. “Cost/benefit,” “price,” and what one “puts the money on” are part of our everyday idiom (see, e.g., Sahlins 1976, viii–x, 166–68). As I have argued, the comparable imaginary for Western Arrernte has been a kin-based and emplaced life that rendered the subject first and foremost as a relative. This issue is important not simply as a contrast between cultures that both have economies but also for the manner in which Western Arrernte marginalization for the greater part of a century has left them struggling with different and conflicting regimes of value. As they have employed modern transport and communications to expand their networks and become masters of circulating ngkwaltye, increasing public and government pressure has come to define them in terms of their marketable skills. Marginalization, in part a creation of state policy, has made the Western Arrernte more kinlike in a modern way. The dilemma of “kinship versus economy” has thereby been exacerbated. My proposal is that the violence in Arrernte life is equally a product of state policy, both recent and long-standing, and of ontological shift with both its emotional and social ramifications. In significant part, this violence is the product of unintended consequence but patterned nonetheless. It is unclear to me that this violence could have been avoided following its originary acts. A way to grasp this view is to understand that neither policies

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of self-determination nor assimilation alone address the Arrernte’s current position. An important point that follows from this is that a critical appraisal of Arrernte experience should encourage, not preclude, attempts to accommodate their range of value; put simply, loyalty to place and kin with better education and employment. For most families and individuals this will mean both compromise and hardship, the level in part depending on resource and policy decisions among governments. My final point concerns anthropology and history. In my introduction I noted two other approaches to indigenous history taken by anthropologists. One was to underline continuity in the style of Fred Myers (1986), Howard Morphy (1991), and Ian Keen (1994). The other was to figure indigenous Australia as a people engaged with a modern blackness (Cowlishaw 2004). This study’s contribution is to underline that continuity is made, not given; that a space of difference within the state must be worked at as the Western Arrernte have done. My account has also sought to offer an alternative to ethnographic studies that focus solely on raced experience. While these studies are a crucial part of the ethnographic corpus, it is also important to note that accepting race or color as “the real” of one’s identity is, itself, a historical process. Older generations of Western Arrernte versed in the terminology of “blackfellas” and “whitefellas” nonetheless were annoyed and distressed by indications among the young that they thought of themselves first and foremost as “black” (see Austin-Broos 2005b). Denaturalizing color categories should be part of race studies and, if it is, this takes research back to histories of indigenous experience. This study provides an alternative to these genres. It also seeks to offer something back to history. Talal Asad has made the remark that “among anthropologists, ‘history’ is a notion that few would now dare to despise. On the contrary, all of us solemnly acknowledge it. But what kind of history?” (Asad 1993, 2). The arguments presented here seek to document a certain magnitude of history in Western Arrernte lives. I have described that magnitude in terms of ontological shift, a passage between worlds. The term world, a phenomenological equivalent for “culture,” can be thrown around a lot. In this study it is used to convey that a people, bit by bit, have been required to relearn human experience, to redefine in significant ways their “concernful dealings” and to contend with quite new forms of value. Doing so has required imagination, for the process has often been violent. Most people pass through life without a passage between worlds. For the Arrernte, though, modern times have been much more testing. It is striking to me that Central Australia has attracted many ethnographers with a sharpened sense of ontology. One was T. G. H. Strehlow, who in his

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extensive accounts of “totemic geography” explored in a compelling way man-land relations in Central Australia (1947, 1970). It is not by accident that Strehlow stressed the calamities that had overtaken the Arrernte. In her early formulations of “subject-into-object” and a Warlpiri sense of “design,” Nancy Munn also plumbed relations between people and the land as they were mediated by rite and myth (Munn 1964, 1970, 2003). John Morton (1987a, 1987b) built on some of her work, integrating insights from Róheim (1945). Finally, Fred Myers (1986) in his study of the Pintupi described his work as a “social ontology,” aimed to show how these indigenous Australians with their negotiated practice of relatedness could at the same time sustain a sense of transcendental law that held their social parameters in place. In the midst of the transitory affairs of the everyday, how was the transcendental manifest? As an anthropologist principally concerned with change, I was alerted by these ethnographers to the numerous traces of a Western Arrernte past that were in their present. As I lived with Joyce on my almost annual visits over many years, I began to appreciate the stature of her experience and, through her, the stature of Western Arrernte history. My task became to think about not simply that “other” ontology but rather the shift in which the Western Arrernte became involved and the manner in which that made their experience specific, demanding, and violent in hidden ways. I now propose this shift as a tenor in which indigenous history can and should be written. Though the postcolonial critique brought needed political reflection to anthropology, it does not serve indigenous people well to assimilate their history simply to the dimensions of a taken-for-granted politics. To begin with, indigenous Australians with their various histories can have very different forms of experience in different parts of the continent. Interpreting the circumstance of Aboriginal people through a given set of aims may be no more edifying than interpreting the world in terms of objectified economy. I conclude this study by endorsing Inga Clendinnen’s (2005) proposal that anthropology and history, together, are powerful. I also underline, however, that anthropology’s capacity to analyze experience and its magnitude brings something unique to the partnership.

G appendix a

Kaporilya Song by glen auricht

Chorus:

Chorus:

Kaporilya, pentja marr’ inthorra

Kaporilya, such a beautiful spring

Kaporilya, kwatja kumia inthorra

Kaporilya, its water so sweet

Altjirra thalalhama

God in heaven makes it flow

Verses:

Verses:

1.

1.

Imanka Ntariala nitjata

A long time ago at Ntaria

Wirritja kngarr’ panpala

Severe drought gripped the land

Tharrka pa marna itj’ inthorra

The ground was bare and no food

Relha kngarra iluka

Many people died

2.

2.

Missionary inurra etlarraka

Missionary Albrecht thought deeply

Jes-urna kngarr’ingkaka

And earnestly prayed to Jesus

Knarripata lela angkarraka

Together with all the old people

Relha nyhingalauwuka

They saw the suffering of everyone

3.

3.

Pipeline tjenya mpaaraka

They built a long water pipeline

Kaporilyanga Ntaria-urna

From Kaporilya to Ntaria

Parta urltanta pa arna pulya

Through hard limestone and soft sand

Ekarlt’ inthorra tnyakala

The men worked long and hard

4.

4.

Armstrong, Ratara, pa Inkamala

Armstrong, Ratara, and Inkamala

Rabaraba, Emitja

Rabaraba, Emitja 271

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a ppen dix a

Malbunka, Ngalaia, Pareroultja

Malbunka, Ngalaia, Pareroultja

Ingkarrak’ urrkapuka

All the men were working

5.

5.

Kwatja pitjika, rel’ arrkana

The water came, the people rejoiced

Rel’ etatherraka

Everyone became well and alive

Nurn’ lyarta Jes’-urna dangkilama

Today we all thank Jesus

Era kwatja etatha

He is the water of life

Copyright © Glen Auricht, reproduced by permission in the original orthography with his English translation.

G appendix b

Some Western Arrernte Terms

Pronunciation guides for Western Arrernte are available in both editions of the contemporary grammar by Pfitzner and Schmaal (1986, 1990) and in the Western Arrernte Picture Dictionary (Roennfeldt et al. 2005). Breen’s Introductory Dictionary of Western Arrernte (2000) does not provide a pronunciation guide. However, interested readers may consult the very detailed guide in Henderson and Dobson’s Eastern and Central Arrernte to English Dictionary (1994). There are some differences between Western Arrernte and Eastern and Central Arrernte. Where stress is concerned, Western Arrernte words that contain two syllables generally have the stress on the first syllable. Words with more than two syllables generally have the stress on the first syllable that begins with a consonant. It is usual for the stress to remain on the first syllable when a suffix is added to a word (see Pfitzner and Schmaal 1990, 2). alkngarentye

mythical women of the Dreaming

alturle

west

altyerre

dream, Dreaming, God

anpernentye

skin name (and subsection pairs)

penangke/pengarte peltharre/kngwarreye pwerrerle/kemarre ngale/mpetyane antyapme

will, desire

araye

look!

areme

to see

arrenge

grandfather (father’s father)

arrkngerte

barrier, or block on a path

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274

a ppen dix b

arrkwetye

woman

artwe

man

artwe-lheme

initiate a boy, make a man

awe

yes

ikerlte

strong

ikwere

his, her

ilakekeye

our mob, one’s own patrimoiety

ilpe

womb, also afterbirth

ilperle

tea tree

imanke

long ago

impatye

footprint, imprint, track

ingkarte

ritual boss, cognoscente, pastor

ingkerreke

all

ire/irenhe

him, her, it (subject and object)

irlenge

distant, far away

irleye

emu

irrketye

string

irtetye

mulga

irtnwere

wild dog, dingo

itenye

near, close

itne

they

itye

no, not

iweme

to throw

kaltye

knowing, initiated

kaperte

head

kele

finish, fine, OK

kere

meat

kernte

cold, cool

ketyeye

child

kngerre

large, much

kngerrtye

big, really big

kunye

pity, sorry, poignant

kurne

bad, wrong, sin

kwarlpe

hare-wallaby (spectacled)

kwarre

girl

kwatye

water, rain

kwaye

elder sister, alternative to ngkwere

kwementyaye

term used in the place of the name of a deceased person

glossa ry of wester n a r r er nte ter ms

kwerrke

little

kwertengerle

manager (“on the sacred side”), worker,

275

evangelist kwete

just, together, keeping on

lakenhe

like that

lakenhe ngirre

like that (just about)

lanhe

that, there

lhentere

white person, “whitefella”

lhere pirnte

salty river, the Finke River

lwekare

single women’s camp

lywentye

shade, shadow

ma, me

take it!

malyenweke

those we marry (in-laws), the other patrimoiety

mape

mob, group, “all of us”

marre

good

menhenge

mother-child pair

menhengenhenge

mother-child (group, plural)

merne

food, bush tucker (not meat)

meye

mother, mother’s sister

mirnte

sick, ill

mpareme

to make, build, do

mpepele

in the middle, between, center

nanthe

horse

ngampekele

eternal, everlasting

ngangkere

doctor, sorcerer, shaman

ngkwaltye

small change, scrap, morsel

ngkwere

elder sister; see also kwaye

–nhenge

term for the relation between two individuals, parent and child (suffix)

–nhengenhenge

term for a relation between a plurality of

ntheme

to give

nthurre

very, truly

nturrerte

rock pigeon, crested rock pigeon

ntyarre

many

children and a parent (suffix)

nweke

mine, for me

nwerne

we

nwerneke nyenhenge

our, for us father-child pair

276

a ppen dix b

nyenhengenhenge

father-child (group, plural)

nyente

one

nyente ware pele

one alone but, on the other hand

pepe [or pipe]

paper, church, the Bible, Christian ritual

Pertame

Southern Arrernte

perte

money, cash, stone

petyeme

to come

pmeraltye

one-countryman

pmere

country, camp, house

pmere kwetethe

main site on country, abiding place

pmerekwerteye

custodian, owner of country

purrkirreme

grow tired

rame rame

family, descendants

ramerame wurle

family group

rathepe

baby, twins

relhe

(Arrernte) person

relhe mape relhe ntyarre

us mob people

–renye

coming from, out of, belonging to (suffix)

rerte rerte

addled, mad, senile

rratye

straight, right

rrekere

type of duck

rwerre

underground ridge or shelf with honey ants

terirreme

be frightened

thwenge

maybe, perhaps

thwenge, thwenge itye

maybe, maybe not (common saying)

tnengkarre

dream, Dreaming, story

twerreme

fight

tyarrekngeme

to drag

tyaye

path, track, way

tyelpe

native cat

tyene

relative, friend, intimate

tyeparre

precious, treasured

tyunpe

perentie, monitor lizard

tyurretye

Western Macdonnell Ranges

tywerrenge

sacra, sacred boards

ulpulperne

winged bat

untherlapeme

walking around, hunting

glossa ry of wester n a r r er nte ter ms

urrkapeme

to work (also in ritual context)

ware

only, just

werre

boy

yeperenye

vine caterpillar

yerrampe

honey ant

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G notes

introduction Epigraph is drawn from Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Invasion.” 1. Throughout this text I will often refer to the Western Arrernte simply as the Arrernte. Constant use of the full designation makes for clumsy sentences. Moreover, I will use these terms to refer to the group that shares a mission history, a naming in terms of their lingua franca. It is well to emphasize that this group involves others absorbed into the settlement, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. They include Southern Arrernte (or Pertame) who traveled north to Hermannsburg along the Finke and Hugh rivers from the southern borders of Western Arrernte land. Also included are numerous Luritja, also called Kukatja-Luritja. Apparently Luritja was a Western Arrernte term of disparagement for people who bordered them to the west and the south, including those who called themselves Kukatja in the west. Gradually, the term Luritja, or KukatjaLuritja, has become commonplace for these people and their language. At a later date, as Pintupi moved east to join the Luritja, some of their descendants became identified by their dialect, Pintupi-Luritja, also a minority language at Ntaria/Hermannsburg (see also Holcombe 2004). An important status distinction between peoples is that when the land of the mission lease was returned, the men who were designated senior custodians were resident Western Arrernte. Among their advisers, however, were many from the south and west who had intermarried with them. See also J. Morton 1992a. 2. See Heidegger 2002, 288–99. Were it not for discussions with my colleagues Jadran Mimica and Noah Pleshet, I might never have turned to Heidegger and ontology, even in this modest fashion. See also Myers 1986, 286, on “social ontology.” My use of Heidegger, though, does not entail a view that the subject is simply self-constituting. Rather, subjects act in a field which they control only in some degree (see Asad 1993). 3. I use the term clan principally as a historical reference to that time in which groups were involved in active ritual exchange over time and place. For my account of contemporary sociocentric groups with a patrilineal identity, see chapter 5. 4. The “skin” system, shared by the Arrernte with other central desert groups, is a system of classification, in this case into eight subsections, that define the category of kin

279

280

notes

relatedness in which two people stand to one another. This means that the Arrernte and other like Aboriginal groups can live entirely within a world of kin. The skin system is used to impute forms of relatedness in circumstances where actual kin connections may not be known. This system is also a shorthand for relatedness that allows quick determination of whether any particular person is an appropriate marriage partner. Assigning outsiders “skins” is a way in which a language group can extend its universe of marriageable kin. The eight subsections of the Western Arrernte are divided into two marriage moieties of generational pairs: penangke/pengarte and peltharre/kngwarreye comprise one moiety, and pwerrerle/kemarre and ngale/mpetyane comprise the other. A person of any one moiety subsection should marry someone of a particular subsection in the opposite moiety. A recent authoritative account of this system has been provided by Dousset (2005). 5. Taylor’s (2004) “disembedding” is different from but not unrelated to Polanyi’s (1944) notion of the disembedding involved in the emergence of self-regulating economies. 6. My sources for this account are Kimber 1990; Jones 1992; and T. Strehlow 1971, 1977, along with the many comments in Strehlow’s genealogical records lodged at the Strehlow Research Centre. F. J. Gillen, the postmaster at Stuart and Baldwin Spencer’s later collaborator (Spencer and Gillen 1899), performed a citizen’s arrest on William H. Willshire in 1891. He was tried for murder and exonerated in Adelaide. Nonetheless, he did not return to Central Australia (see Mulvaney, Morphy and Petch 1997; T. Strehlow 1977). 7. I have chosen to use imagination as an analytic term in preference both to culture and to reliance on agency. In a process of marked change and where disorder, conflict, and significant differences occur between generations, the connotations of integration and boundedness that the culture concept brings are too restrictive. Social imaginaries, which I explain subsequently, seems a better term. Where agency in concerned, and following Asad (1993), I wish to emphasize the Arrernte’s ability to constitute a local milieu without necessarily changing the contours of history from which they have suffered greatly. Too many uses of agency descend into naïve attributions of voluntarism. 8. I discuss homology and ellipsis more fully in chapter 1, where I acknowledge debts to both Furlan (2005) and Povinelli (1993a). 9. He in Arrernte English is gender neutral. She is seldom used. 10. I explore the various meanings of pepe, the Western Arrernte word for the English paper and used to refer to the Bible, and Christianity generally, in chapter 3. According to Breen’s (2000) orthography, this word should be spelled as pipe. In this particular case, I have maintained a spelling that is readily recognizable to Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg who grew up with other orthographies. My alternate spelling is out of deference to them. 11. This figure is no more than an estimation because the Australian Bureau of Statistics does not provide data at the aggregate or disaggregate level for individual indigenous language groups. One therefore resorts to the aggregate within a region, in this case Petermann, even though not all of those counted will be Western Arrernte speakers. On the other hand, some of these speakers reside beyond Petermann in Alice Springs, other communities, and down to Port Augusta on the coast. Through the 1990s, various service agencies working at Ntaria gave estimates of a resident population that ranged between five hundred and nine hundred. These figures were greatly affected by whether the majority of outstations were occupied. Twelve hundred has been an established total popula-

notes

281

tion figure, related to the Petermann figure, for the early 2000s. See Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2004. 12. “The Center” is local shorthand for “Central Australia.” Charles Sturt drew near to Central Australia when he traversed the Stony Desert in his expedition of 1844–46. John McDouall Stuart is most closely associated with Central Australia due to his cross-continent trip in 1862. The town of Stuart, which later became Alice Springs, was first named after him. Subsequently Ernest Giles made two trips, in 1872 and 1873–74. The earlier one took him up the Finke River almost to the Western Macdonnells. Finally, William Gosse, who had worked on the telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin, made trips in 1872 and 1873 (see Pike 1967; Hartwig 1965; Duncan 1967). 13. As the Lutherans’ activities expanded in Central Australia, Hermannsburg became but one station of the Finke River Mission (FRM) with its regional office in Alice Springs. That regional office remains today. 14. With regard to the telegraph line, Kimber (1996) reports that the explorer Giles saw trees that had been felled with axes west of the line in 1873. Moreover, the word for male kangaroo, nanto in the language of the Kaurna of the Adelaide plains, quickly traveled up the line to become the standard indigenous word for “horse.” The Western Arrernte term is nanthe. In 1874, explorer Gosse reported “an old preserved meat tin, which must have been carried from the telegraph line” (cited in Kimber 1996, 99). More than fifty years later when the railway went through, this repertoire had expanded to include tobacco, clothes, metal utensils, steel ax heads, glass, and wire, which were all entirely common by the late 1920s, according to Arrernte informants. 15. “Intelligent parasitism,” the expression used by A. P. Elkin (1979, 364ff), became one of the most infamous terms of the Australian mid-twentieth-century assimilation period. It was taken (correctly in my view), to dehumanize Aboriginal people by suggesting that in fringe camps they mainly fed off the dominant society. Nonetheless, Elkin sought to underline by this terminology the real incompatibilities between indigenous and nonindigenous society. These views were first published in Elkin 1951. 16. Royalties came from a natural gas pipeline that stretched across Western Arrernte land. Some grants came from a royalty pool established by the federal government for all Northern Territory Aborigines. 17. This is Rowse’s term (2002, 220–29; 2005) and reflects a rendering of indigenous politics. 18. Other works on Spencer, including his collaboration with Gillen, are Mulvaney and Calaby 1985; Mulvaney 1987; and Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch 1997. Jones (2005) offers a more critical perspective. 19. Carl Strehlow published his work in seven volumes that still have not received a definitive published English translation. Pastor Hans Oberscheidt, lately of the Finke River Mission at Hermannsburg, has produced an excellent English translation of the volumes currently held at Immanuel College, Adelaide. See also Kenny 2005. 20. This little reader was published posthumously in Tanunda, South Australia, in 1928. 21. His major works include Róheim 1930, 1933, 1945, 1974, 1988. 22. Among these critics I count Hiatt (1969) and Peterson (1972) on Lévi-Strauss and Povinelli (2002) and Jones (2005) on Spencer.

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notes

23. Some of the major works and most significant articles include T. Strehlow 1944, 1947, 1965, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1978. 24. By “hagiography” I do not intend simply celebration of the scholar’s work but also the use of his work as a focus for discussion. There is much Arrernte scholarship published and very little contemporary Arrernte ethnography. This tends to lead to a historical or “frozen” view of the Arrernte. See note 18 for works on Spencer. On Róheim, see J. Morton 1987a, 1987b, 1988. Lester Hiatt (1975) has been influenced by Róheim in his work on myth, although he has not written articles as such on Róheim. On T. G. H. Strehlow, see Hill 2002, Inglis 1961, and McNally 1981 for biographical materials. For more particular discussions of or responses to Strehlow’s corpus, see Carter 1999; Cawthorn 2002; J. Morton 1997a, 1997b; and Rowse 1992, 1999. An entire conference was devoted to T. G. H. Strehlow in 2002, hosted by the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. See Cawthorn 2002. 25. Joyce had been a widow for some years when I met her in 1989. The outstation and its country, originally her husband’s, had passed to her sons and daughters. One particular son, her surviving second eldest at the time, was regarded as outstation boss. 26. Dr. John Morton (1992b) was the land claim anthropologist. I am indebted to him on many matters concerning my own research.

ch apter 1: encounter at nta r ia 1. Related clan groups, identified today as descendants of Eratara (Salomo) and Renkaraka, lived in and beyond Palm Valley to the south. Some Arrernte suggest that Renkaraka’s family would have been aware of the missionaries’ arrival long before they approached Palm Valley. 2. Lohe (1977, 13) describes the rain that fell before the missionaries arrived. Arrernte people have remarked that it was exceptionally heavy. Leske (1977), Scherer (1963–64) and T. Strehlow (1979) all describe aspects of the Lutherans’ expectations as they arrived at Ntaria. The travel requirements for the region were set by the South Australian government, which at the time exercised jurisdiction for the Central Australia region (see Lohe 1977, 13). 3. Hermannsburg Mission Station Chronicle, 1877–1933, Lutheran Church Archive (LCA), Adelaide. See entries for 1891, baptism nos. 65 and 67. 4. Schmiechen (1971) gives a full account of these conflicts. 5. A wurlie is a type of Aboriginal shelter constructed from branches, leaves, and interwoven grasses. 6. Hartwig reports that rations were distributed at Hermannsburg, in the first instance between 1872 and 1894 (1965, 609, App. 6). The source for these supplies was the South Australian government. 7. Hartwig 1965, Schmiechen 1971, F. Albrecht 1977 and Bowman n.d. have been my main sources for an account of the both the growth and the contraction of pastoral stations in the region. 8. For accounts of marriage alliances at the time, see Mathews 1908, T. Strehlow 1970, and C. Strehlow [1913] 1991. 9. My attribution of ellipsis here is based on the fact that in other contexts referring

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both to the past and the present, Western Arrernte are very ready to observe, “That’s not his place. He should have asked.” I am indebted to Povinelli (1993a) for her analysis of the use of ellipsis as a method of maintaining continuity. My understanding of homology in Aboriginal thought and practice was developed in discussions with Alberto Furlan in his research on traditional and modern forms of song at Wadeye or Port Keats (see Furlan 2005). My own contribution has been to see that these two devices work in concert to produce accounts of the past that emphasize continuity. 10. On the first survey of the mission lease in 1876, Kempe was accompanied by Pastor G. Heidenreich, superintendent of the Finke River Mission from 1875 to 1894. Later Heidenreich would return south, and in 1878, after the mission was established, Pastors A. H. Kempe and W. F. Schwarz would be joined by Pastor L. G. Schulze. They all had departed by the end of 1891. 11. Other than where indicated in a note, the names used are real ones with the permission of the person or, when since deceased, a relative. 12. John Morton noted in a discussion with the author in Alice Springs in September 2000 that this locating of Aremala’s wife, Nelly Albolbana, close to Ntaria would involve a variant on the usual rendering of her family’s bat (ulpulperne) story. 13. Damper is Australian settler bush bread made from plain flour, baking soda, and water. It became a staple of sedentary Western Arrernte. 14. John Morton, discussion with the author in Alice Springs, September 2000. 15. R. M. Williams was a famous Australian frontiersman and lent his name to a range of products, particularly boots, that are well known and prized throughout Australia. Prior to World War II, he established a leather works in Adelaide visited by Western Arrernte tradesmen. See also chapter 2. 16. Following a death, relatives who resided with the deceased are often “too sorry” to remain in that place. For a time, they go live elsewhere, often with matrilateral relatives. The period of sorry camp once was about three years. Now the period is usually one year. 17. Compare Hill’s account of “mythic” and “historical consciousness”(Hill 1988, 6–7). “Mythic consciousness,” he writes, “gives priority to structure” and attributes efficacy not to human beings but only to the fantastic creations of myth, “liminal, neither here-nor-there beings.” “Historical consciousness,” on the other hand, endorses the ability of social actors to make “situational and more lasting adjustments.” 18. Peter Sutton has pointed out to me that both the Captain Cook and Noah’s ark stories are narratives about arrivals in boats. 19. Kolig (1980; see also 2000) and Sutton (1988) present two early and excellent treatments of the politics of myth. 20. This is not to say that Lohe’s (1977) is the only version of the Hermannsburg story. See note 2.

ch apter 2: k apor ilya, a big place 1. The very first Kaporilya Day in 1936 was held at Hermannsburg. Thereafter the celebration has been held at the site. 2. The scientific team that diagnosed the scurvy came from the University of Ad-

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elaide and was led by J. B. Cleland. It represented the Board for Anthropological Research and traveled on one of the first trains to arrive in Alice Springs on the newly laid line (see Lohe 1977, 47). 3. Commissioned by SBS Television, Australia’s multicultural channel, The Dream and the Dreaming was made by Cojo Productions Pty. Ltd., Sydney, NSW. In the film, the Aboriginal man at Kaporilya is Marcus Wheeler, an evangelist and lawman resident at Ntaria. Marcus is also the father of Joanna Wheeler (see chapter 1). 4. Merlan (1989) and Peterson (2000) provide accounts of comparable preparations for other forms of ceremony. 5. In recent times, baptism has become mainly a women’s rite at Ntaria. 6. Pastor Phillip Scherer confirmed this interpretation in a discussion we had in 1994 at the Lutheran Archives in Adelaide. Scherer had served as a pastor at Hermannsburg during the 1950s and produced a number of historical pamphlets and books on the mission. 7. The Western Arrernte, in conjunction with their Lutheran brokers, have had a long history of contesting Central Land Council governance. See also chapter 7. 8. It is also likely that Kantjira’s hair is a representation of women’s hair saturated with menses. 9. These movements are also described by Róheim (1945) and suggest a powerful representation of male potency. The men were decorated with white bird’s down, sometimes down from eagle chicks, which flew up from the body as it quivered in an embodied representation of vitality. 10. Albrecht expressed this most succinctly in a 1935 letter to Harold Wild of North Adelaide requesting that the organist participate in a fund-raiser in Adelaide. Albrecht wrote, “The rainfall in the interior during the last decade and more has gone back by over 30% and as the natives in the settled area cannot go hunting anymore in the old way but are confined to the reserve, it is impossible to keep them healthy without a supply of vegetables grown locally. This, however, can only be done with a sufficient amount of good water being made available.” F. Albrecht to H. Wild, 17 January 1935, Hermannsburg Water Scheme File, LCA, Adelaide. 11. During 1930 and 1932, Albrecht made trips west to contact Luritja and Pintupi people. His remarks on fertility rates were based on the observation of family sizes among indigenous desert groups who still lived a hunting-and-foraging life (see F. Albrecht 1931b, 217). Although Western Arrernte had always lived on better-watered land, Albrecht’s remarks are very plausible. 12. H. G. Connell to F. Albrecht, 14 September 1931; F. Albrecht to Deputy Administrator for Alice Springs, 1 December 1931, Hermannsburg Mission Water Scheme File, LCA, Adelaide. 13. W. Lange, “Statement Regarding the Divining of Water on the Mission Run at Hermannsburg,” 4 April 1932, Hermannsburg Mission Water Scheme File, LCA, Adelaide. 14. Arthur Latz’s Diary, file Latz, A. P. 600.00/1, LCA, Adelaide. 15. “Hermannsburg Mission Waterscheme,” duplicated typescript, June 1935, Hermannsburg Mission Water Scheme File, LCA, Adelaide. 16. The phrase actually belonged to Hermannsburg’s teacher H. Heinrich, who

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worked at Hermannsburg between 1917 and 1925. Not long after Strehlow’s death, Heinrich observed that “contact with civilisation have [sic] broken the cult of the tjurunga so that now if corroborrees are still held, they are not held with such fanatical faith as of yore, but only as a custom that is fast dying out” (Heinrich 1925, 53). 17. Stirling was director of the South Australian Museum, and Winnecke was a surveyor, experienced explorer, and active organizer of the expedition (see also S. Morton and Mulvaney 1996). 18. In mission records at Ntaria, Seth Pareroultja’s birth date is recorded as November 11, 1925. 19. Alfred S. Kenyon maintained a significant ethnological museum and wrote on Aborigines with Charles Barrett. See Barrett and Kenyon 1934. 20. U. Teague to F. Albrecht, 1933; A. S. Kenyon to F. Albrecht, April 1934; E. J. Horwood to F. Albrecht, 23 September 1934, Hermannsburg Water Scheme File, LCA, Adelaide. Mulga is the hardwood of the region. 21. This developing Lutheran view had its roots in Gottlieb von Herder’s nineteenth-century notion of God’s plenitude (see Darcy 1987, 7–8). 22. This idea is conveyed in a modern song written about Kaporilya. See appendix A. 23. What Albrecht had first identified as beri-beri was later diagnosed by Cleland as scurvy.

ch apter 3: the mea ning of pepe See note 10 to the introduction for an explanation of the spelling pepe. 1. Anna Kenny (2004) observes that among Western Arrernte today, connections to country are shored up by the claim that it harbors the spirits of immediate antecedents. In the context of land claims, people offer this as a reason for staying close to country. This seems to be a more prominent notion than the normative Christian one that souls go to heaven. However, it is not uncommon for women to claim that they see a new star in the sky following the death of a child (see also Austin-Broos 1996b). It should be emphasized that both these types of belief are postcontact constructions. 2. On underlying reproduction of pattern, see Magowan 2001 and Sansom 1980. A more sophisticated treatment along these lines is given by Peterson (1991 and esp. 2000). See also Rambo 1993 and Austin-Broos 2001b, 2003 for recent analyses of change and conversion. 3. I provide a detailed account of this politics in chapter 7. 4. Hermannsburg has had in toto three churches: the first Bethlehem Church constructed in 1880, a reconstructed Bethlehem Church built by Carl Strehlow in 1896, and, finally, a newer Bethlehem Church constructed by Hugo Auricht, Glen Auricht’s father, and opened in 1966. The latter two churches still stand (see Petrick 2007, 42–45). 5. It is an irony that Jacob’s God was not in fact the universal God of the Lutherans but rather a more specifically conceived God of the Hebrews. 6. Hartwig (1965, app. 11) gives rough figures on the Aboriginal population at Hermannsburg for the years 1877 to 1893, the year before Carl Strehlow arrived. These numbers reached about three hundred by the 1930s. See F. Albrecht 1931b; Henson 1992, 74.

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For details of the South Australian subsidies paid to Hermannsburg in the early years (1880–1893), see Hartwig 1965: 491–92, app. 6. Other places where government rations were distributed were Charlotte Waters, Stuart (Alice Springs), Illamurta, and Barrow Creek. In 1911, the commonwealth took responsibility for Central Australia and continued to provide a subsidy for rations to the mission (Lohe 1977, 30–34). 7. Carl Strehlow died at Horseshoe Bend on the Finke River south of Hermannsburg. Suffering from “dropsy, asthma and pleurisy,” he and his party had left the mission by horse-drawn carriage in a desperate attempt to obtain medical attention (Lohe 1977, 33). They departed from Hermannsburg on October 10, 1922. Strehlow passed away at Horseshoe Bend on October 20, 1922. Through T. G. H. Strehlow’s famous account, Journey to Horseshoe Bend (1978), his father’s experience has become a popular Australian legend. 8. For accounts of this period, see Hartwig 1965, 281–458, and Pleshet 2004, and for the personalities, see Bowman n.d. The footnotes to T. G. H. Strehlow’s genealogies of Central Australian Aboriginal people, held in the Strehlow Rsearch Centre (SRC) in Alice Springs, also hold a wealth of information about social interactions between early settlers and Aboriginal people. 9. One of the mission’s notable antagonists was Baldwin Spencer, who produced negative reports on Hermannsburg in 1894 and 1923. See Lohe 1977, 24, 34–35. 10. A number of other Lutheran families beyond the missioners have had more than one generation associated with the mission. Prominent names include Auricht, Latz, Pfitzner, and Roennfeldt. The more engaged among these families have maintained skin names or subsection terms conferred by Western Arrernte. 11. Notwithstanding the debate that revolves around this concept, it is useful for understanding the types of impact that the Hermannsburg mission had on Arrernte people and the ways in which Arrernte people in turn interacted with the mission. In addition to Collmann’s (1988) use in the context of indigenous Australia, see Peterson and Taylor 2003. The latter cite E. P. Thompson (1991, 339–40) and Scott (1976) as its advocates and Popkin (1979) as its prominent critic. In my own view, a domestic moral economy is a small-scale or household economy in which there are values at play that can countermand the market’s regimes of value. Often these are values concerned with kinship. At Hermannsburg, the fact that evangelists and indigenous pastors had higher status (and sometimes higher rewards) than pastoral workers is an example. Only a confined social milieu, in this case a rations-for-service one, can sustain this circumstance over time in the face of market activity. 12. I have discussed these issues at some length with Joyleen Abbot, Joyce Malbunka, and Sylvia Macnamara, who were girls growing up on the mission in the 1930s and 1940s. 13. It is important to note that I am not here attempting to give an account of Western Arrernte interpretations of Christian doctrine. Women were extremely diffident about such discussions. Rather, as anthropologist, I portray an Arrernte view of the mission as a “law” and emplaced social order. 14. This was the term that teacher H. Heinrich and others used to refer to their students. 15. C. Strehlow 1928. Though not designed for teaching children, an earlier Western Arrernte grammar was Kempe 1891. Subsequent to both, T. G. H. Strehlow also produced

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a grammar in 1944. For a study of Aboriginal literacy mainly in eastern Australia, see van Toorn 2006. 16. The genealogies of the Strehlows, father and son, and of other Lutheran scribes assume patrilineal descent as a norm of kin relatedness. Therefore people are almost always grouped with reference to a male individual or a set of siblings whose descendants are traced through males. 17. For Balgo, see Poirier 2005; for Belyuen, see Marett 2000, 2005; for Yuendemu, see Dussart 2000, 139–76. For Christian dreaming among Yolngu, see Magowan 2001; and among Murrinh-Patha, see Furlan 2005. 18. C. Strehlow 1922, 104. I have been unable to identify this man in the Hermannsburg Mission’s typed list of ‘Baptism’s of Natives at Hermannsburg Mission, 1887-1931.” Rebecka’s name was Akwa. She was baptized in 1888 at the age of sixteen. She was the wife of Ltalaltumarinja (meaning “from Ltalaltuma”) who took the name of Petrus and was baptized in the same year at the age of twenty-eight. They would later be identified as antecedents of the Malbunkas, Pmalbunka being the name of a major Western Arrernte totem or ancestral hero, the tyelpe, or native cat. Known to western biology as the western quoll, dasyurus geoffroii, the species is currently thought to be extinct (see Calaby 1996, 192; Gibson and Cole 1996, 314). Ltalaltuma is the major ritual site for the tyelpe in Western Arrernte country. 19. Abel was born and baptized in 1888. His father, Eratara, was baptized as Salomo, also in 1888, and his mother, Gangitja, was baptized as Salome in 1890. Abel and his descendants took the surname Ratara, also a term for totemic twins. Ntaria is a twins site. 20. Hardy, Megaw and Megaw (1992, 320) provide a brief biography of Oscar Namatjira. Also included is a small reproduction of his painting, The Lord Jesus on the Cross, fig. 1.16. 21. Tjalkabota was baptized Moses in 1890 at the age of twelve. His father, Tjita, was a prominent ceremonial boss at Labrapuntja on the Ellery Creek. He was taken for initiation by Jukuta, who himself was baptized as Josua in 1914. Jukuta became an antecedent of the Ebatarinja family. Possibly this initiation occurred after Tjalkabota’s baptism. Paul Albrecht records that his father took down Tjalkabota’s autobiography (see Tjalkabota 2002). He remarks, “Tjalkabota was born at Laprapuntja, a place some ten kilometres east of Hermannsburg, before the arrival of the first missionaries in 1877. Hence his recollections of the early interaction between the missionaries and the aboriginal people of the area, as well as his own conversion and later activity as an evangelist, are of great historical significance” (P. Albrecht 2002, 237). 22. See Heinrich 1925b, 53; Tjalkabota 2002, 274. 23. For an account of the 1928 event, see Cribbin 1984. Boggy Hole (Alitera) is a permanent water hole on the Finke River south of Ntaria where Constable William H. Willshire had a camp in the 1890s. Regarding Willshire, see also note 6 to the Introduction. 24. Arthur Latz’s Diary, file Latz, A.P. 600.00/1, LCA, Adelaide. 25. The term rhizomic, or rhizomatic, is taken by Rumsey (2001) from Deleuze and Guatarri (1977) to describe the dispersed but interconnected nature of Australian hunter-gatherer societies.

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ch apter 4: home a nd away; the dislocation of identit y 1. Palm Valley is part of the Finke Gorge National Park southeast of Ntaria. Aboriginal Land Commissioner (ALC) Justice Gray handed down his decision in The Palm Valley Land Claim No. 48 in August 1999. The proceedings had been protracted. Also see chapter 7. 2. When the Western Arrernte were granted back the mission lease as their own land under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976), it was divided into five “estates,” the legal entities being five land trusts. The estates or trusts are named after important sites in each area: Ntaria, Ltalaltuma, Rodna, Roulbmoulbma, and Uruna. 3. For nonanthropologists, “MoBrDa” should be read as “mother’s brother’s daughter.” Preceding kin terms, mother’s brother’s generally designates an antecedent or antecedents of the final designated relative. Different ways of classifying kin in different cultures make these descriptors preferable to terms such as grandmother, uncle, cousin, nephew, or niece. 4. I discuss the issue of ingkarte, or “boss,” status as opposed to the pmerekwerteye, or patrilinial custodians, later in the chapter. 5. Siblings marry different subsections in alternate generations. Therefore marriage partners can be drawn from different regional locales in alternating generations. Although moieties lack salience as sociocentric groups, they do provide each person with ilakekeye, “own mob,” and malyenweke, “those we marry.” 6. See Palm Valley Land Claim No. 48 by Justice Gray (1999), 121–23, Commonwealth of Australia (hereafter cited as CA). 7. While conception has had significance among the Western Arrernte, the status of “borning” place has very little. It is associated by Arrernte with Western Desert people. Some times Western Arrernte use the term borning rather than conception for fear that lhentere (white people) will not understand the latter concept. Joyce, however, distinguished between these two phenomena. Middleton Pond was a pastoral lease just west of Henbury in the vicinity of the Palmer River and to the east of the larger Tempe Downs lease. 8. Many anthropologists refer to this as an estate, and this jural term is common parlance in land claim procedure. Stanner (1965) used the term prior to land claim legislation. It seems that Radcliffe-Brown (1935) used it first (personal communication with Peter Sutton, July 10, 2007). 9. For a brief explanation of the subsection system, refer to the this book’s introduction, note 4. Most often, the personal totem was in fact the totem or story for a person’s conception site. 10. In addition to the oral accounts given to me by both Joyce and her brother, I have consulted the following sources on the Robinyas: Hermannsburg Mission Station Chronicle, 1888–1889; Heinrich 1925a; and T. G. H. Strehlow, Family Trees, 1:18 and 1:21, Strehlow Research Centre, Alice Springs. Enumeration of these family trees follows Strehlow’s system, under which, for example, the notation 1:18 here corresponds to genealogy 1, section 18. My estimation of a generational depth of about one hundred years is based on treating each generation as a twenty-five-year span. This is a conservative estimate.

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11. In T. G. H. Strehlow’s family trees, Robinya appears both on Family Tree 1:21 and on Family Tree 1:18. The former is the “great” family tree that includes a large proportion of antecedents for most Western Arrernte. However, it is this tree that may have involved Carl Strehlow inflating the number of Lutintja’s children. Strehlow’s comments to this effect are contained in note 42 of Family Tree 1:18. 12. If perchance Robinya’s father did come from the north, it may have been that he went to reside permanently in the south, where his conception site was and in proximity to his in-laws. Alternatively, he or Robinya could have been drawn south by the lure of Henbury station at some time prior to the consolidation of the Hermannsburg mission in the 1890s. 13. Although it is not appropriate to reproduce the maps here, I have tested this statement by plotting conception sites over five generations from various T. G. H. Strehlow genealogies. Plotting the sites of patrilineal relatives and their affines over time gives a characteristic pattern of clustered sites with a broader scattering in the region. Where the Robinyas are concerned, this scatter extends along the Finke River. 14. Strehlow describes Rauwiraka as “the last Western Arrernte man to be trained as a ngangkara (medicine man)” (T. Strehlow 1977, 2). He was a man of great knowledge and, in the way of some such men, had become a Christian too. 15. Anna Kenny indicated in a personal communication on December 17, 2007, that the term pmerekwerteye, as opposed to ingkarte, seems rare or even nonexistent in the early works of the Strehlows, both father and son. More research is required. Her research does suggest at least that, in Western Arrernte parlance presettlement, ingkarte, with the emphasis on knowledge of sites, was a more common term than pmerekwerteye, with the emphasis on “owning” land. 16. Joyce was in fact making a similar proposal regarding Pertame people and their movement up and down the Finke. For this reason, she was more inclined to identify her group with a topographical range than with a dialect-defined territory. 17. I am indebted to Peter Sutton for this formulation. 18. In his account, Ingold seems intent on making a distinction between human social practice as precultural or as encultured. He seems to equate his distinction between territory and tenure to this more general one. In my view, this position is not sustainable. Nonetheless, his argument is insightful on other grounds. 19. Radcliffe-Brown was the English anthropologist who founded the University of Sydney anthropology department and later became professor of anthropology at Oxford. His 1930s publications interpreted Aboriginal social organization in terms of patrilineal ritual estates and descent groups. 20. Critics include Austin-Broos (2004), Merlan (2003), and Miller (2002). Lattas (2006) has answered these critics with a considerable flourish. 21. In other work, Povinelli (1993a) acknowledges this change.

ch apter 5: liv ing w ith k in 1. Tjuwanpa Management Meeting Report, ATSIC 93–94/106509, Australian Archives, Northern Territory Branch (hereafter cited as AA, NT), Darwin.

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2. While Western Arrernte and other Central Australian peoples have experienced racism throughout the process of settlement, it is only in the past few decades that a public discourse of race or of “being black” has emerged as a regional identity (see also Cowlishaw 1987, 1999). 3. In this particular usage, family is a category term akin to relative rather than the name of a group. 4. I take this term to be a local usage. Although it does not appear in Breen 2000, it does appear in the word list produced by the Western Arrarnta (Arrernte) Literacy Centre at Ntaria (see Moketarinja and Roennfeldt 1998, 27) and in the IAD picture dictionary (see Roennfeldt et. al. 2005). Myers notes a similar Pintupi-Luritja term used for the “deaf” or “unheeding” nature of children (see Myers 1986, 107). There may be a connection, as “those who have not been before” will usually know less than those who have. There appears to be a similarity in usage between the Pintupi-Luritja walytja and the Western Arrernte rame rame. It is also likely, however, that the current rame rame has been influenced by a hundred years of contact with the despecifying family of Arrernte English usage. 5. For example, the nonreciprocal ngkwerenhenge, younger sibling speaking with and of older sister; and the reciprocal arrengenhenge, grandfather and/or son’s child speaking with and of each other. For a fuller account based more on Anmatyerr but relevant to Western Arrernte, see Green 1998, 45–54. 6. I am using descent here in a fashion suggested by Scheffler’s discussion of Fortes and Goodenough. That is, descent is a form of rule that places people in a “publicly recognised entity,” usually by reference to a particular antecedent (Scheffler 1986, 341). As a type of rule, descent entails filiation. I use the terms patrifiliation or matrifiliation to refer to any link between an antecedent male or female and a descendant. I use patrilineal to refer to a male link that also involves an inheritance of rights across generations. Matrifiliation can provide Arrernte with access to rights in an estate. However, it is unusual for those rights to be passed on in a matriline. 7. A patronymic is a name derived from a father, generally with an affix. I adopt this slightly unorthodox usage in order to underline that Western Arrernte families or descent groups have been shaped by the Lutherans assigning such names and using them to order and identify genealogies. The name is, in effect, the embodiment of the “patrilineal bias” and signifies groups that still give a male line preeminence. These groups are similar to Sutton’s “families of polity” (1998). Among the Western Arrernte, they can number well in excess of three hundred people (see J. Morton 1992b; Sutton 1998, 2003). For another exchange over descent and the composition of groups, see Keen’s arguments (1995, 1997), H. Morphy’s rebuttal (1997), and Keen’s reply (2000). 8. The corporate basis of these groups lies in the jural procedures of the nation-state as much as it does in ritual practice. Put another way, Western Arrernte senior custodians today have identities that incorporate aspects both of the traditional custodian and of the present-day resource boss as described by Anderson (1998). The groups become bounded in political contexts when people opt in or out of a group which has in fact a cognatic composition notwithstanding its patronymic. 9. On “out of estate” sites, see chapter 4. Morton writes that one senior man sum-

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marized the difference between owners and managers in the following terms: “that, in a family tree, the pmerekwerteye [owners] are the trunk and branches, while the kwertengerle [managers] are all the leaves. [He affirmed] the solidarity of his own group [adding] ‘We all climb that tree together’ ” (J. Morton 1992b, 72). This close integration of patrilineal and matrifilial relatives is less common in everyday talk. The designation manager is usually reserved for particular individuals understood as either ritual mentors or assistants to the owners of countries. In the case of mentors, the men may not even have matrifilial relations with the owner. In the land claim context specifically, Western Arrernte do identify themselves as “managers,” meaning matrifilial relatives of a landowning group. Moreover, during the Palm Valley land claim, various individuals placed emphasis on the fact that “managers” were as much involved in “ownership” of land as the owners or “custodians” (see also Dussart 2000, 95–97). 10. As I have mentioned in chapter 4, the Western Arrernte pmere has the same potent ambiguity that Myers (1986, 54–57) describes for the Pintupi’s ngurra, that is, the term can refer both to a camp and to country or place. 11. Although outstation heads are often male, they can be female, either the wife of a deceased male owner or else a senior woman in a sibling set. In Ntaria, women are commonly heads of camps, and the status of head and “hearth keeper” can be collapsed into one. 12. Ralph’s father’s sister’s daughter (FaSiDa) is resident with her husband on the estate. Her husband was a ritual assistant to one of Ralph’s father’s elder brothers. The man was also associated with the mission and reluctant to move south again onto country after his own successful land claim. Currently, however, this couple’s children are not seen as having a strong claim on the estate even though their mother is recognized as kwertengerle. It is remarked that unlike their mother and their mother’s mother (MoMo), these children spend no time there. This is a good example of a descent group with a cognatic aspect. Nonetheless, a patrilineal bias remains, embodied in the patronymic. 13. Elements of mother-in-law/son-in-law avoidance endure among the Arrernte, though brother/sister avoidance is barely sustained. 14. My estimation of Ralph’s network is based on observations of interactions sustained at one camp or another in the course of periods of a week. Being unable to follow Ralph continually, it is almost certainly an underestimation and could be a significant underestimation. 15. When women go on a bush tucker hunt, they ask permission to enter country that is not their own. However, these are recreational excursions rather than food collecting for sustenance. 16. Myers observes in a more traditional context that “occasions of resource abundance . . . become for Pintupi not moments of leisure but rather opportunities to intensify social life” (1986, 218). In a general way, Peterson (1985, 1991) has made similar observations pertaining to welfare where the initial availability of cash was experienced as abundance and the opportunity to engage with kin. The gradual redefinition of abundance as scarcity shows the market, as a regime of value, gaining over kin relatedness (see also Godelier cited in Myers 1986, 218; cf. Strathern 1985).

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ch apter 6: honey a nts a nd r elatedness 1. Mulga, irtetye in Western Arrernte, is a small tree with a root system that honey ants favor as an environment for their nests. It is a prominent part of one of a number of ecological zones in Central Australia (see Latz 1995). 2. Green’s main focus is the northern Anmatyerr, another of the Arrernte languages. Anmatyerr, Western Arrernte, and others share the –nhenge suffix. 3. Among Western Arrernte, secret sacred knowledge has come to be identified almost exclusively as “men’s business.” This perception does not necessarily reflect traditional or presettlement culture. 4. The desire to be able to give is more than Hiatt’s hunter-gatherer “ethic of generosity.” Such acts are not incidental to social relations but, rather, their actualizing moments (Hiatt 1965). On the other hand, demanding is not mere aggression as opposed to generosity. The demand sharing that Peterson describes is a joint constitution of people as relatives—divisible and partible being in play (see Peterson 1993). 5. I have explained the significance of Arrernte “strings” in chapter 5. 6. Sansom brings temporality to this practice of relatedness when he writes of the past as “a doctrine of person” (1988b). In order to augment themselves, people summon relatedness by attesting to a “consociate” history. This attestation in turn confers identity on them both. Sansom cites the circumstance of “ol’ Luke,” also known as “the Daly.” A fringe dweller in Darwin, ol’ Luke was a notable man from the Daly River region. Kids from that area, visiting Darwin, sought to retrieve ol’ Luke as their relative by attesting to their interlinked histories with him. 7. In the following extracts I have used some pseudonyms to protect the privacy of individuals. 8. This case was also related on the Lateline program of ABC TV broadcast in Australia on May 15, 2006. The program’s anchor, Tony Jones, was interviewing the Alice Springs crown prosecutor, Nanette Rogers, who was speaking out about a number of such cases. See www.abc.net/lateline/content/2006. 9. “Life as a standing fight” is a phrase from Hegel’s Logic, cited by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his study Deprovincializing Europe (2000, 61).

ch apter 7: factiona lism (or, the secr et life of a n outstation movement) 1. The Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre is located across the Finke River from Ntaria/Hermannsburg. It was established in 1983 as the outstation movement grew and was built by a lay Lutheran (Glen Auricht) and three Arrernte men (Rodney Malbunka, Greg Armstrong, and Kevin Coulthard) with the permission of Norman Ratara, on whose land it stood. 2. As these descriptions suggest, the labels outstation and Ntaria do not describe clearly differentiated categories of people. Many people in each faction sustained kin relations with people in the other. Elements of relatedness, regional association, and postinvasion history point to differences between some individuals in each faction. Yet,

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one would be hard put to produce descriptions that would make the groups mutually exclusive. 3. The land rights act was in fact formally passed on January 26, 1977. The titles for five land trusts were finally handed over to the Western Arrernte on June 2, 1982. 4. He was deemed a kwertengerle (manager) for the Ntaria land trust under the 1976 act. 5. The period of policy making originally termed self-determination was ushered in by the Labor federal government in 1972 as a radical reversal of “assimilation.” New policy was intended to allow Aborigines to “decide the pace and nature of their future development” (Sanders 1982, 4). To this end, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) was established and would be followed by the indigenous peak organization, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission (ATSIC), in 1989. The latter was disbanded by the Liberal coalition federal government in 2003, the year that marks the end of this policy period and political support for the growth of an administrative Indigenous Sector (see Rowse 2002, 220–229, 2005). 6. These two insults referred to male rite and tried to suggest that the man was an outsider to Western Arrernte life. 7. Lévi-Strauss 1978, 328–32. On traditional Aboriginal politics, see Edwards 1987, Meggitt 1964, Hiatt 1987, and Rumsey 2001. 8. There is extensive literature on this issue. See Hiatt 1965; Morton 1997a, 1997c; and Merlan 1997 for discussions that are especially pertinent. A broad range of views is canvassed in D. Smith and Finlayson 1997. 9. Among Arrernte who knew him and with whom I spoke, I have never heard Pastor Scherer referred to as “Phillip.” 10. The award would become effective only after December 1968. 11. Hermannsburg Outstations Field Report, 79/07045, 80/07008, DAA, AA, NT, 12. Hermannsburg Mission Superintendent’s Report to the Finke River Mission Board (hereafter cited as HMSR), September 1969, LCA, Adelaide. 13. HMSR, August 1970, LCA, Adelaide. 14. HMSR, June 1970, May 1971, November 1971, LCA, Adelaide. 15. HMSR, March 1972, August 1972, LCA, Adelaide. 16. HMSR, August 1972, November 1973, LCA, Adelaide. 17. Report by Pfitzner, Stoll, Ziersch, and Fargher, HMSR, June 1974, LCA, Adelaide. 18. HMSR, October 1970, February 1971, LCA, Adelaide. 19. Report by Pfitzner et al. 20. My point is that although anthropologists would find these conclusions hard to accept, they were made in good faith. In their findings, the Lutheran researchers may have projected European and Christian assumptions onto the men with whom they talked. Alternatively, in their efforts to translate, Arrernte and Luritja men may have assimilated their observations to mission ideals. Or, finally, sedentary life and the impact of European institutions may have truly changed their culture. See my arguments in chapter 4. 21. R. Ziersch, Report to the Field Superintendent, HMSR, November 1975, LCA, Adelaide. All three men mentioned are now deceased. Traugott Malbunka was an ordained Lutheran pastor, as Nahassan Ungwanaka would become. Nahassan’s father, William Ungwanaka, was a respected elder at the mission and also head gardener for many years. 22. Ibid. Also see Report by Pfitzner et al.

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23. Report by Pfitzner et al. 24. Erwin Chlanda, “Hermannsburg Schools Row,” Centralian Advocate, October 8, 1983, 3. Also cited in P. Albrecht 2002, 117. 25. Albrecht indicates that the mission practice had been to withhold child endowment payments if children were not sent to school (P. Albrecht 2002, 102). 26. See Aboriginal Land Rights Commission, Notes of Discussions at Yuendumu, May 1, 1973, 171–76, CA. 27. Albrecht’s submission in 1997 to John Reeves QC regarding the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976) suggests that even five land trusts did not satisfy him. He makes a spirited case for smaller, particular “countries” of the type T. G. H. Strehlow illustrated in 1965. Possibly, in Albrecht’s view, this “traditional” order was closer than the land trusts to a private-property one. See Review of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 97/0045–4 (1976), CA. 28. I do not propose this as a comprehensive list and cannot discriminate between those actually present at Kwatjinmarra and those who were informed and sympathetic to the events. I have collected names from Nahassan and Rahel Ungwanaka, Epana Emitja, and Glen Auricht. 29. HMSR, April 1976, LCA, Adelaide. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. This term was used by Antonio Gramsci, who adopted it from social philosopher George Sorel. It refers to an alliance between various forces. Such a historical bloc provides the support for a social order (see Gramsci 1971). 33. This was Tjitjinana (Phillipus) who was also FaFa to Joyce. 34. HMSR, November 1982, LCA, Adelaide. 35. HMSR, November 1969, June 1971, LCA, Adelaide. 36. Gus Williams’s name does not appear either on FRM’s 1976 submission to the federal parliament regarding the Land Rights Act or on the 1977 list of men seeking assistance for the mapping of country for the Schedule 1 inclusion in the act. See HMSR, August 1977, LCA, Adelaide. 37. HMSR, October 1980, January 1981, April 1980, May 1983, LCA, Adelaide. 38. HMSR, July 1983, LCA, Adelaide. 39. Personal communication from Glen Auricht, March 1994. 40. Chlanda, “Hermannsburg Schools Row,” 1, 3, 6. 41. Initial and amended applications for the Palm Valley Claim were submitted by the CLC in 1980 and 1985. The following comments on the claim are based entirely on the report Palm Valley Land Claim No. 48 by Justice Gray (1999), CA. 42. Ibid., 119. 43. Gary Stoll reported a visit by H. C. Coombs in 1974. He wrote that “we had a visit from Dr. Coombs and Mr. Ian Mitchell, the latter an Assistant Secretary to the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs. We spent two days explaining our findings, arranging meetings between them and the various family heads and visits to a number of outstations. Both men were very favourably impressed and it would seem, were instrumental in recommending to the Minister that funds be made available to these groups.” The recommended sum was over $200,000. See HMSR, November 1974, LCA, Adelaide.

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44. Bill Muddle and Richard Preece, in discussion with the author, Papunya Regional Council, Alice Springs, September 1999. 45. Coombs had a doctorate from the London School of Economics. He had also been a governor of both the Commonwealth and Federal Reserve banks. It seems that in the early 1970s, he was skeptical regarding outstations but became convinced as time moved on (John von Sturmer, discussion with the author in Sydney, June 1991). Notwithstanding his active role, Gary Stoll also remarked in the 1990s that from the standpoint of resources, decentralization had bothered him.

ch apter 8: when im agina r ies collide 1. See also see my remarks on Charles Taylor’s work in the introduction to this volume. 2. An account of these factors seen mainly through lhentere eyes is provided in chapter 7. 3. These transactions including the shop truck are recorded in the film Malbunka Country that shows the return of a Malbunka group to Gilbert Spring. The film was made in 1975, written by Curtis Levy and John von Sturmer, and produced by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Affairs film unit. The narrator for the film was Gus Williams from Ntaria. The film is available in video form from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra. 4. Glen Auricht, to whom I am deeply indebted for his knowledge and insightful comments over many years, tells me that Old Station (Pmokaputa) was in fact the first camping site. This seems right because it was already established as an outstation for the Henbury lease and had a sunken well. Moreover, it was Jack Coulthard’s “borning” place (as will be discussed) and one that his son clearly returns to. Nonetheless, both Denis Ebitarinja and Kevin Coulthard began their stories at Kwatjinmarra. I have simply recorded their accounts. 5. Grapes, like oranges, mandarins, and watermelon, have a special attraction among the Western Arrernte for their juice. People commonly refer to Kaporilya and the 1920s drought when they explain this preference. 6. Other important painter families were the Namatjiras and the Pareroultjas, also closely related to each other. All three families came initially from the western section of the Western Macdonnells. 7. I also emphasized my own skin relation to Denis’s wife. 8. Urambinji is on the upper Palmer River between Tempe Downs and Areyonga and would have been located within the Bowson Hole station lease when Jack Coulthard was a young man. Orange Creek is a small holding on the Hugh River northeast of Henbury station and close to Stuart Well on the Stuart Highway. 9. Bryan Bowman provides a description of various methods used by Aboriginal workers to kill cattle. See Bowman n.d., 25–26. 10. See chapters 4 and 5 for discussion of these regional relations as described by women in terms of tyene (intimate, relative, or friend). 11. Both Denis Ebitarinja and Mattheus Malbunka have passed away since we had these conversations.

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12. Ralph’s father, Colin, and mother, Joyce, were stationed at Neutral Junction as Lutheran pastor and evangelist among the Kaytetye. 13. This may have been H. C. Coombs’s visit in 1974 or a subsequent one. 14. Report from Colin Jericho for the quarter ended December 31, 1978, File 78/ 07018, DAA, AA, NT. 15. Report by Colin Jericho, Mission Manager, to Senior Staff Conference, HMSR, June 23, 1978, LCA, Adelaide. 16. Report from Colin Jericho for the quarter ended December 31, 1979, File 79/ 07045, DAA, AA, NT. 17. Glen Auricht to Roger Styles, 17 November 1986, File 85/05011, DAA, AA, NT. 18. CDEP Supervisor’s Logs, 1991–1993, TORC, Ntaria. “Tucker money” was a bare minimum payment for food when people’s activities did not justify them being registered for CDEP. In the mid-1990s, a CDEP fortnightly wage was $320 after tax. Recipients were expected to contribute monies for “power and water” and “building and maintenance” on their outstations as well as a minor amount to a fund entitled “savings.” After deductions they received around $230. Outstation heads who were nominal supervisors of their resident relatives received additional compensation of $50. Tucker money amounted to $90 a fortnight. Alan Keeling, discussion with the author at Tjuwanpa, April 1994. 19. CDEP Supervisor’s Logs, 1991–1993, TORC, Ntaria. 20. See Austin-Broos 2001a for a more detailed account of the training activities at TORC. 21. Bill Muddle, Field Report re. Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre, March 11, 1999, Papunya Regional Council. 22. Ibid.

ch apter 9: a very r emote emergency 1. See, for instance Pearson 2000 and Sutton 2003. Where sexual abuse is concerned, the most notable previous public statements had come from Mick Dodson. See Dodson 2002, a speech delivered to the National Indigenous Men’s Issues Conference in Coolangatta on October 25, 2002. Dodson also addressed the National Press Club in Canberra on June 11, 2003. On that occasion, Dodson said, “Violence is undermining our life’s very essence. It is destroying us, and there are very few Aboriginal families that are not struggling with the debilitating effects of trauma, despair and damage resulting from violence. I am talking about violence between Aboriginal people and against Aboriginal people, about domestic violence between partners, sexual violence against men, women and children by individuals and groups, violence by groups against other groups. Self-harm and suicide, and all forms of psychological and what I call historical violence” (Dodson 2003). Earlier reports including Lyon 1990, Bolger 1991, and Brady 1992 had focused on substance abuse and violence against women. 2. See “Australian Report Investigates,” Marie Claire, October 2007, 70–76. 3. These details are taken from a ministerial press release available at http://www/ facsia.gov.au/internet/minister3.nsf/content/cdep_23jul07.htm. 4. See Noel Pearson, “A Structure for Empowerment,” Australian, June 16–17, 2007, Inquirer section, 28.

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5. “Operation Bootstrap” was the name given to a well-known development program for Puerto Rico, executed with United States guidance during the mid-twentieth century. Heralded initially as an economic miracle, the initiative could not overcome enduring very high unemployment. 6. A Tjuwanpa attempt to incorporate outstations so that they would apply for grants directly to government had limited success. For the rest, outstations became dependent on the decisions of TORC’s management committee. 7. The national daily owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited. 8. See “Crusade to Save Aboriginal Kids,” Australian, June 22, 2007, 1. 9. This critique includes Dodson (2003), J. Taylor (2003), Gregory (2005), and Austin-Broos (2001a, 2005). 10. “Putting People First,” Australian, September 26, 2005, Opinion section, 9. 11. “Time for a Solution,” Australian, February 2–4, 2006, Opinion section, 16. 12. Hughes relates that the terminology of “curators” of “living museums” comes from the retired parliamentarian Peter Howson (see Hughes 2005, 17 n. 3). 13. The fact that this statement overlooks the impact of invasion and land usurpation and locates the beginning of unequal treatment in missions makes it almost ludicrous and, in socioeconomic terms, obscurantist. 14. As stated earlier, my own view is that very high rates of lifelong unemployment will bring social suffering in most communities. In this, as Hughes suggests, remote indigenous Australians are no exception. However, it does not mean that all these situations are just the same; quite the contrary. 15. One of those pictured was in fact a young Noel Pearson. See Christopher Pearson, “Slum Total of a Failed Vision,” Australian, March 5–6, 2005, Inquirer section,18. 16. Ibid. 17. “Remote area exemptions” involve suspending the cutoff points for benefits so that many indigenous people are in fact involved with lifelong welfare. Jon Altman’s comment is cited in Gary Johns, “What Is to Become of Aborigines Forced to Move,” Australian, October 11, 2006, 16. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.

conclusion 1. In my view, the studies that have addressed the process of hegemony best, regardless of whether they use the term, are Morris 1989 and Cowlishaw 1999. The crucial component in these studies is an interest in the relation between meaning and power. 2. The term social current is Durkheim’s. He used it to describe forms of collective consciousness that were not yet clearly articulated. See Durkheim [1938] 1966. 3. This does not mean that experience is “relative” in the sense of being symbolically arbitrary. Quite to the contrary, experience is continuous, comparable and subject to objective description. 4. For Helmut Pareroultja’s comment, see chapter 1. 5. I hasten to say that among the Western Arrernte, there is no evidence on record that conception was ever the major claim to sites. T. G. H. Strehlow’s genealogies of Ar-

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rernte and Luritja people are unpublished documents held at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. The documents can be accessed only by the families they concern or by a person who receives permission from a family. Formal application must be made to the board of the SRC. 6. See, for instance, Eames 1983, Bell 1988, Rowse 1992, 1998b.

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———. 1998. Native Title and the Descent of Rights. Perth: National Native Title Tribunal. ———. 2001. “The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia since the 1970s.” Anthropological Forum 11:125–73. ———. 2003. Native Title in Australia: An Ethnographic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. “Rage, Reason and the Honourable Cause: A Reply to Cowlishaw.” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2:35–43. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, John. 2003. “Indigenous Economic Futures in the Northern Territory: The Demographic and Socioeconomic Background.” CAEPR Discussion Paper No. 246, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra. Taylor, John. 2005. “The Indigenous Labour Market and Regional Industry.” In Austin-Broos and Macdonald 2005, 109–20. Taylor, John, and Martin Bell. 2004. “Continuity and Change in Indigenous Population.” In Population Mobility and Indigenous People in Australasia and North America, edited by John Taylor and Martin Bell, 13–43. London: Routledge. Thompson, Edward P. 1971. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past and Present 50:76–136. ———. 1991. “The Moral Economy Revisited.” In Customs in Common, 259–351. London: Merlin Press. Thorley, Peter. 2001. “Uncertain Supplies: Water Availability and Regional Archaeological Structure in the Palmer River Catchment, Central Australia.” Oceania Archaeology 36:1–14. Tindale, Norman. 1972. “The Pitjandjara.” In Hunters and Gatherers Today, edited by M. Bicchieri, 217–68. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Tjalkabota, Moses. 2002. “Appendix 2: Moses Tjalkabota,” translated by Paul Albrecht and Gary Stoll. In From Mission to Church, 1877–2002, edited by Paul Albrecht, 237–300. Adelaide: Finke River Mission. Trigger, David. 1986. “Blackfellas and Whitefellas: The Concepts of Domain and Social Closure in the Analysis of Race of Relations.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 7 (1): 1–20. Turner, Terence. 1988. “Ethno-Ethnohistory: Myth and History in Native South American Representations of Contact in Western Society.” In J. Hill 1988b, 235–81. Turner, Victor. 1968. The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. London: Oxford University Press. van Toorn, Penny. 2006. Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Veblen, Thorstein. [1924] 1970. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Allen and Unwin. Vincent, Joan, ed. 2002. The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory and Critique. Oxford: Blackwell. Wagner, Roy. 1991. “The Fractal Person.” In Big Men and Great Men, edited by M. Godelier and M. Strathern, 159–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

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G index

Abbot, Barry, 220 Abbot, Gordon, 217 Abbott, Joyleen, 34–38, 48, 228–29 Aboriginal Land Commissioner, 23, 197 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976), 108, 124, 126, 179, 189–91 Aboriginal politics, 84–85, 107, 149, 181 Aboriginal workers: apprenticeships, 88; CDEP, 198–99, 230–31; at FRM, 66–67, 92, 183; land claims, 108; pastoral, 63, 64, 74, 87; Wave Hill walkout, 184; work (term), 118 Adelaide (SA), 15 Africa, 34, 73 aggregation and dispersal, 113 Albrecht, Friedrich: Aboriginal workers, 92; conversion, 93; genealogies, 125; Kaporilya, 62–68, 69–70; as pastor (1926–62), 16, 56, 87–89 Albrecht, Pastor Paul, 80–81, 185, 187–91, 248 alcohol, 83, 185–86, 210, 241, 249 Alice Springs, 14, 15, 16, 18, 124 Alitera (Boggy Hole), 35, 99, 260–61 Alkngarrintja, 211, 222–23, 224–27 allocative power, 143–44, 148–51 Altman, Jon, 244, 254, 255 Anbarra, 160 ancestorlike, 37 ancestors, efficacy of, 46 ancestors, traveling, 116–17, 207 ancestral seed, 112 ancestral subsections, 116 Angas Downs, 39–41, 140 animal species, 46 Anmatyerre, 115

anthropology and history, 11–13, 19, 20–21, 126, 152, 247–48, 258, 269–70 Aranda Traditions (T. G. H. Strehlow), 122 Aremala (guide), 35–36 Arltunga, 87–88 Armstrong, Manasse, 93, 99–100, 212 army base at Alice Springs, 16 Arrernte, the: Central Arrernte, 19, 29; Eastern Arrernte, 61; Southern Arrernte (Pertame), 2, 14–16, 19, 29, 31, 35, 38, 48, 83, 99, 105, 108, 117, 158, 191–93, 210, 220; Western Arrernte, 2–4, 6, 13–18, 19, 31, 83, 99, 202, 210; in Western scholarship, 17, 19–21 Arrkapa (Arkankapata), 214–18, 229–30 Asad, Talal, 269 ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission), 17, 18, 199, 202, 232, 234, 235, 244 August (evangelist), 97 Auricht, Glen, 75–76, 78, 191, 195, 231, 234, 243, 271–72 Austin-Broos, Diane, 43, 82, 86, 93, 133, 148, 172, 199, 200, 202, 209, 240, 244, 250, 260, 269 Australian, The, 251–52 Australian Labor Party, 239 avoidance practice, 139, 156, 159 Babel, 46 Babylon, 46 Balgo, 96 Barthes, Roland, 48–49 Barunga Festival, 173 Batterbee, Rex, 65

317

318

index

beats, 107–8, 111, 140, 141, 219 Belyuen, 96 Berndt, Catherine, 156 Berndt, Ronald, 20, 118, 156 Berndt, Ronald and Catherine, 248 Bethany (Barossa Valley), 32 Bethlehem, 37 Bible, 20; Genesis 28:10–22, 80; Gospels, 71– 72. See also pepe Body of Australia, The (painting), 207–8 Boggy Hole. See Alitera (Boggy Hole) borning beliefs, 118 bosses, bossism, 93, 105, 108, 117, 131, 143– 44, 148–51, 175, 199 boundaries, Arrernte and European, 45, 122– 23, 124–25, 157–58 Bourdieu, Pierre, 73, 89, 135 Bourke (NSW), 174 Bowman, Bryan, 87, 125, 217 Braedon brothers, 87 brumbies, 53–54 Buck, Bob, 87, 107 bush-tucker, 63 camel trains, 218 camps and camping rights, 98–100, 124, 132, 137–38, 144, 187 Cape York Institute (CYI), 240 cash and commodities, 132–33, 142, 147, 203, 210 cash economy, 182–85 CDEP (Community Development Employment Project): individualism and, 151; Ntaria town council, 182, 198–201, 202, 213; outstation supervisors for, 144, 148; replaces Special Works Projects, 185, 245; reports on, 209, 234–35; resource centralization, 189, 244; as source of income, 144–45; “Staffbooks” (1991–93), 232–33; TORC, 78, 131, 180, 182, 198–201, 213, 232–33; transition to Job Network and STEP, 240 Central Australian Tourist Association, 194 Central Land Council (CLC), 17, 39, 42, 45, 80, 126, 127; Arrernte land trusts, 193; conflict with FRM, 190–91; hand back to Western Arrernte, 189–91; Palm Valley land claim, 197; white politics, 181–82 Centre for Independent Studies, 252 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 74 change, 2–4, 17–18; as continuity, 42; inter-

pretation of, 11, 13; as ontological shift (see under ontology); rationalism of modernities, 77–78 Charlotte Waters, 37 child allowance, 184 childbearing, 162–63 Christianity, 21–22, 46–47, 49; Christian creationism, 128–29, 267; as water cult, 74–75 Christian vernacular, 76, 77, 90–98; advent of new things, 91; Christian cosmology, 95–97; knowledge in song and “pictures,” 97–98; schooling and new naming practices, 93–95; working for the missionaries, 92–93 citizenship rights, 78, 184, 262 civil rights, 177 classroom conflict, 162 class system, marriage class system. See subsections Cleland, J. B., 63 Clendinnen, Inga, 12–13, 270 cognatic kin, 134, 136 colonialism, semantics of, 183 Comaroff, Jean and John, 34, 73 Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (CCAC), 184 Commonwealth Electoral Act, 184 conception, 109, 267–68; Christian creationism, 128–29; conception Dreaming, 69–70, 267–68; conception sites, 109–11; regional relations, 114–17 confirmation, 162 Coniston Massacre, 99 Connell, H. G., 64 consolidation and diversification, 108–9, 115– 17, 119–21; routes to diversification, 122 continuity, 4, 10, 11–12, 39, 42, 73–74, 95, 269; rationalism of modernities, 77–78 conversion, 3, 16, 28–29, 62, 69, 73, 77–78, 93, 264, 268; heathen and baptismal names, 95; views of, 100–101 Cook, Captain James, 45, 47 Coombs, H. C., 190–91, 202–3, 252, 253 Coulthard, Bob and Bill, 217 Coulthard, Jack, 192, 214, 217 Coulthard, Kevin, 218–21, 265 country (Arrernte country), 6, 11, 30, 45, 46– 47, 108, 114, 127, 266; traditional claims over, 200–201; words for, 129. See also estates

index

Cowlishaw, Gillian, 12, 73, 174–75, 269 custodians, custodianship, 116, 117, 127; Arrernte land trusts, 179–80, 189, 193–96 Dalhousie Springs, 27 death and funerals, 170–73 deaths in custody, 163 Deep Well (pastoral station), 87, 97, 194 deinstitutionalization, 202 demand sharing, 143–44, 145–47, 147–51, 157; refusal, 163 demeanor, 80–81 Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA), 17, 185, 187, 190–93, 195, 202, 209, 229–32 Department of Community Development (NT), 194 Department of Education (NT), 196 Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR), 235, 240 Department of Social Security (DSS), 184 depopulation, 68 desacralization/resacralization, 51, 69–70, 193 descent, descent group, 113–17, 136, 141, 188 Dieri, 61 disease/epidemics, 8, 62, 63, 69, 75, 216 dispersal, 46 diversification. See consolidation and diversification Dream and the Dreaming, The (film), 52 Dreaming, 57–58, 69–70, 75, 105, 113, 180; relation to dreams, 96 dreams, 82–83, 95–97, 259 drought (1926–30), 8, 16, 51–52, 62–64, 93, 261 Durkheim, Émile, 19–20, 247 Eames, Geoff, 190 Ebitarinja family, 192, 214–18 economy, 255, 266, 267–68 Ehrenberg Range, 87 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, The (Durkheim), 20 Elias Jack, 194 Elkin, A. P., 17, 247–48 Ellery Creek, 13, 36, 37, 114–15, 154–55, 191–92, 202 ellipsis, 10, 31, 45, 48 Enalanga, Simon, 192 enfranchisement, 184 enslavement, 46

319

Entata, Kenneth, and family, 215, 217 Ernabella, 173 estates, 114; Arrernte land trusts, 105–6, 179, 190, 193–96; blocks, 124–25; bounded ritual estates, 118; “out of estate” interests, 106, 111, 127, 136; patrilineal estates, 109; range and estate, 119. See also country (Arrernte country) ethnography and history, 11–13, 19, 20–21 etiquette, etiquette of relatedness, 155, 156– 59, 163, 175 European collectibles, 68–72 evangelism, 74, 81, 87–88, 95, 97, 99–100, 110 explorers, 15 factions, factionalism, 95, 150, 179–82, 196– 201, 233, 244 Family Responsibilities Commission, 239 Farmer, Paul, 9 feminization, 39 Ferguson, James, 10 festivals, 173 filiation, 134, 135–36, 137, 141, 156 Finke River Mission (FRM), 2, 5, 8, 15, 16–18, 19, 22, 28, 38; Albrecht’s industries, 93, 183; Alice Springs base, 56, 124, 177; Bethlehem church, 37, 80; built environment, 91; cattle camps, 211–12; closure of Lutheran school, 79–80; conflict with CLC, 190–91; decentralization project, 78–79, 185–89, 243; hand back to Western Arrernte, 189–93; Kaporilya, 51–52, 53; land councils, 190–91; as pastoral lease, 63, 65, 86, 87–89, 194; route to, 32–33; Scherer’s diary, 182–84; village council, 186–87; withdrawal from Ntaria, 41, 101, 130, 158, 177, 186, 194 Finke River system, 6, 13, 14, 27, 36, 37, 60, 67, 207, 208, 261 four-section system, 117 Frazer, James, 19–20 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 247 gender relations, 161 genealogies, 109–11, 113, 125–26, 129, 136, 152, 156, 207; as “enchainment,” 164 genesis, theories of, 20 gestation, 112 Gidjingali, 120 Gilbert Springs, 211 Giles, Ernest, 27

320

index

Gillen, Frank, 19–20 Glen Helen (Jalpalpa), 27, 29, 39–41, 212 Gosse, William Christie, 27 grandmothers as carers, 81–85, 107, 130–31, 147, 154 Gray, Justice, 23, 197 Great Depression (1930s), 64 Green, Jennifer, 158–59 Gregory, Bob, 240, 254–55, 256 guides, 35, 99 Haasts Bluff, 83, 182, 212 Hamilton, Annette, 118–19, 121, 125–26, 160, 162, 207 hand signals, 157 Harts Range, 173 Hartwig, Mervyn, 15 hegemony, 74, 125, 126, 265 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 266, 267 Heinrich, Adolf, 97 Henbury (pastoral station), 29, 34, 35–36, 37, 87, 92, 108, 113, 212, 217, 218–20 Hermannsburg (Germany), 15, 27 Hermannsburg Alliance, 191–93, 196, 234 Hermannsburg art and craft, 30, 49, 70, 88–89, 92, 140, 216–17 Hermannsburg Lutheran Choir, 97 Hermannsburg Mission. See Finke River Mission (FRM) Hermannsburg school, 187, 188–89, 196 Heysen, Hans, 65 Hiatt, Lester, 47, 120, 247 historical events, 48 historical redemption, 193 historical studies, 12–13 homelands. See outstations homology, 10, 31, 37, 43–44, 46, 48, 72, 74, 132, 212–13, 264 honey ant hunting (yerrampe), 154–55 Horn Scientific Expedition, 19, 28, 68, 69 horsemanship, 53–54 Horton, Robin, 73, 77, 101 Horwood, E. J., 70 Howitt, A. W., 56, 61 Hughes, Helen and Jenness Warin, 252–53, 254, 255 Hugh River, 6, 13, 36, 207 hunger and malnutrition, 83–85, 133, 147 hunter-gatherers, hunting and gathering, 3, 5, 10, 85, 108 “hybrid economy” model, 255

Ilkarrilalama, 211 Illamurta, 140 imaginaries, imagination, 4, 10, 12, 15, 30, 74, 151, 264; collision of, 209, 227–35; social imagineries, 11, 52, 78, 87, 205–6, 243, 265–66; violence and, 174; Western Arrernte, 206–8, 214–27, 264 income sources, 144–45, 147–48 increase rites, 113 India, 164 individualism, 147, 151, 206 Ingold, Tim, 119–21 inherent being, 159–61, 165. See also relational being initiation rites, 97, 112, 113, 140, 162, 180, 248 Inkamala, Howard, 192 Inkamala, Mildred, 265 Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 189 internal colonialism, 238 invasion, 1–4, 9, 29–30, 62, 193; as myth and history, 47–49; as travel stories, 31–32 Ipolera, 211 Irbmankara (Running Waters), 34, 35, 216, 219 Isaacs, Jennifer, 30, 49 Jalpalpa (Glen Helen), 27, 29, 39–41, 212 James Range, 13 Jericho, Colin, 229 Jesus’s track, 40–41 Jikala, 105–6, 108, 109, 111, 127, 128 Job Network, 240 Johns, Gary, 255–56 Jones, Philip, 17, 68–70 Kaporilya, 27, 35, 230; as a colonial site, 62– 68; custodians, 75–76; features, 54–55; history and, 72–75; Kaporilya Day, 51, 53–56, 75, 173; Kaporilya Song, 271–72; pipeline from, 51–52, 56, 64–68, 93; rain site, 51, 52, 55, 56–62; ritual politics of, 68–72 Kaytetye, 34, 108 Keen, Ian, 11, 49, 72–73, 152, 269 kele (engagement, containing, and bounding), 157, 159 Kempe, Hermann, 28, 32, 61, 62, 80 Kenyon, Commissioner A. S., 70 kin relatedness, relatedness, 5, 6–7, 9, 10, 18, 35, 46, 56, 92–93, 95; context today, 142– 51, 153; fields of kin (see filiation); as a

index

321

given of life, 131–32; issue of descent, 133–37; kin (term), 133; kinship versus economy, 268; lhentere, 130–31; testing of, 146 Kleinman, Arthur, 8 knowledge and traditional ownership, 127 knowledge (Christian) in song and “pictures,” 97–98 knowledge systems, 13, 128; diversification and, 114–15, 121–22; hierarchical nature of, 122; reproduction of, 121–22 Kolig, Eric, 41, 46 Krichauff Range, 51, 75 Kukatja–Luritja. See under Luritja kunye (“sorry” or “pity”), 219 Kwalba (guide), 35–36 Kwatjinmarra, 92, 191–93, 210, 214–18, 230

Ljaba, 27, 115 Ljiltjera, 209, 210, 222, 230 local groups, 137–42, 143, 148 Ltalaltuma land trust, 75, 137, 193–94 Luritja, 15, 16, 19, 29, 64, 93, 115, 187; Kukatja–Luritja, 2, 19, 29, 42, 108, 191– 93, 210; southern Luritja, 210 Lutheran Church of Australia, 65, 71, 202; account of Hermannsburg mission, 31, 32–34, 49; Kaporilya Day service, 55–56; liturgy, 112; Lutheran missionaries, 3, 4, 8, 15–16, 17, 27–28, 31, 45, 78, 262; patriarchy, 89–90; relations with federal government, 88 Lutheran Herald, 92 Lutintja, 110 Lyiltjirra, 188

Labrapuntja, 92, 212, 230 Lajamanu, 173 Lake Amadeus land claim, 42 Lalkara, Lalkara Yard, 105, 108, 111, 127–28 land rights, 17–18, 70, 187, 211, 241; economic development and, 245, 252; land claims, 21, 109, 128–29, 141, 180; legislation, 4; politics and Hermannsburg Alliance, 189–93; regional land council meetings, 173 Land Rights Commission, 191 land trusts, Arrernte. See under estates Lang, Andrew, 19 Lange, William, 64 languages, 16, 18, 22, 44–45, 46, 88, 105, 108; dialect variation, 118; kin terms, 158–59 Larumba, 14, 140, 173, 200 Latz, Arthur, 65–66, 67, 92, 99 law: Arrernte, 192; legislation on federal intervention, 239; nation-state, 128, 129, 141; pepe as God’s Law (see pepe); two laws, 42, 71, 86, 101; tyaye (track, path), 82 Layton, Robert, 120 leases, 240 Leonhardi, Baron Moritz von, 19 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 20, 41 lhentere (white fellas), 130–31 lhere pirnte, 13, 108, 141 Liberal Party of Australia, 239 literacy, ritual use of, 89–90 Little Children Are Sacred (report), 238, 242– 43, 246, 250, 256–58

Macdonald, Gaynor, 143 Maddock, Ken, 47 Magdalene, old (Titus’s sister), 36–37 Makarinja (Strehlow informant), 115, 116 Malbunka, Joyce (Robinya), 22, 35, 56, 66, 81–85, 101, 217, 245, 260–61, 265; beat, 107–8, 111, 140; demand sharing, 145– 47; inherent being, 161; Joyce’s camp, 138–40, 144; land claim, 105–8, 126–28; lhentere, 130–31; relatedness, 131–32; Robinya family genealogy, 110 Malbunka, Mattheus, 222–24 Malbunka, Ralph, 138–40, 144, 173, 222–24 Malbunka family, 139, 144, 192, 224–27 malyenweke, 106 managers, 105–6, 116, 189 Manangananga (cave), 69–70, 87, 193 man-land relations, 118, 119, 122, 125–26, 128, 129, 270 marginalization, 4, 5, 8–9, 18, 142, 147, 153, 155, 177, 209, 263; around the world, 9 market society, 4–7, 17–18, 74, 78, 101, 144, 181, 203, 208, 209; as social imaginary, 268 Marlene (Joanna’s aunt), 40–41 Marriott, McKim, 164, 165 Marx and Engels, 267 materiality of power, 74 maternity payments, 184 matrifilial associations, 109, 135 matrilineal, matrilines, 43 Matuntara, 29 McDonnell, John, 254

322

index

McGrath, Ann, 124 Melanesia, 164 men: as “gestators,” 112; male authority, 85; male corporatism, 119, 126; male procreative power, 60–61, 72, 75; “men’s business,” 161 Merlan, Francesca, 114 Middleton Pond (pastoral station), 107, 110 migrations, 29, 137, 180–81, 197 mining leases, 88, 187, 190, 194–95 Mission Station Chronicle, 92 moieties. See subsections Moketarinja, Richard, 192 money, 143, 144–49, 200, 233–34, 262, 268 Morony, Ron, 185 Morphy, Howard, 269 Morton, John, 47, 136, 270 motorized transport, 142, 186, 213–14 Mount Leibig, 87 Mowaljarlai, David, 208 Mudbura, 124 Mulkatana, Raatz, 192 Munn, Nancy, 270 Murrinh-Patha, 96 Myers, Fred, 11–12, 100, 119, 127, 152, 156, 160, 164, 269, 270 myth, mythology, 14, 30; Adam and Eve, 15, 44–45, 46; as alibis, 48–49; Captain Cook myths, 45, 47; Dreaming, 37–38, 39, 43– 44, 46, 48, 211; Lot’s wife, 47; Noah’s ark, 41, 44–45, 46; properties of, 47–49 Nahasson Ungwanaka (Pastor), 188, 261 Namatjira, Albert, and family, 17, 39, 42, 70, 71, 146 Namatjira, Oscar, 97 Namatjira’s goat camp, 212 Nampitjinpa, Kayi Kayi, 208 Native Tribes of Central Australia, The (Spencer and Gillen), 19, 247 nativism, 191 neoliberalism, 206, 241–42, 250–56 networks, 134, 136, 137–44, 146–47 Ngalkena, Nugget, 192 ngkwaltye (small change, scraps, a bit), 121– 22, 142–51, 163, 170, 265, 268 Nguamina, 27 Njenkuguna, 36 Nkapartjia, 29 “normalizing,” 240–41 Northern Australian Workers Union, 184

Northern Territory Museum, 161 Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill (2007), 239 Northern Territory welfare officers, 83–85 Ntakatna, 58–59 Ntaria, 14, 18, 22, 34, 36, 53, 210; clinic, 239; custodians, custodianship, 45, 51, 76; government school, 79–80, 196; Ntaria land trust, 105–6, 179–80, 193–94, 194– 96; post–mission settlement, 38; rathepe (twins) site, 69–70, 113; as resource hub, 133; transition from mission to outstation system, 177, 179, 224–27 Ntaria Housing Society, 186–87 Ntaria town council, 188, 191; allocative power, 144; CDEP, 182, 198–201, 202, 213; chair, 76, 95; creation of, 186–87, 194; factions, factionalism, 76, 179–82, 199–201; “no work, no pay” rule, 200; resource centralization, 201–2; schooling, 79–80; TORC, 235. See also Williams, Gus Ntjalka Ntjalka (evangelist), 87, 110, 194 objectification, modes of, 41, 46, 47, 59; objectification of economy, 205–6, 209, 268 Old Station (Pmokaputa), 27, 92, 188, 191–93, 209, 212, 214, 218–21, 230 ontic order, 207–8 ontogeny, 20, 47, 61 ontology, 20, 47, 61, 161; of conception, 112; ontological shift, 2, 5–7, 78, 151, 246, 266–67, 270 (see also change); social ontology, 270 “orbiting,” 240 outstations, 6, 14, 22–23; Arrernte hopes for life on, 208–9; Arrernte land trusts, 193– 94; economy, 203; factions, factionalism, 201–4; funding, 83; homelands movement, 4, 8, 9, 17–18, 158, 174–75, 177, 209; housing, 106–7, 200, 243–44; Kaporilya, 51; leaders, 143–44, 147–51; map (ca. 1996), 211; mobility, 8; schools, 79–80; shadow economy, 185; supervisors, 144, 199; TORC, 149 Owen Spring (pastoral station), 27, 36, 37, 217 painting, 30 palimpsest, 73–74 Palmer River, 140, 207

index

Palm Valley, 36, 37–38, 40–41; land claim, 23, 105–8, 126–28, 180, 196–98 Palm Valley National Park, 193, 194 Papunya, 14, 87 Papunya Regional Council, 202, 234 parallelism, 43–44, 46, 56–58 Pareroultja, Helmut, 42–47, 48, 56, 266 Pareroultja, Pai’arula (Kristian), 42 Pareroultja, Seth, 69, 70 Pareroultja family, 192 Parkes brothers, 87 pastoralism, pastoral settlement, 2–3, 8, 15–16, 28, 29, 30, 45, 73, 220; Aboriginal workers, 63, 64, 74; Cattle Station Industry Award, 184; ideas about country, 125; interrelations, 87; power of, 267 paternity, 112 pathology, social pathology, 153, 174, 177, 249–50 patrifilial associations, 38, 43, 107, 109, 113, 116, 139 patrilineal, patrilines, 76, 109, 110, 113–15, 116, 118–19, 121, 125–26, 188; landholding groups, 135–37 patronymic families, 136, 141, 149, 150 patronymics, 95, 137 Pearson, Christopher, 253–54 Pearson, Noel, 240, 241–42, 250–51 pepe, 11, 81, 83, 93, 96, 264; as God’s Law, 78, 84, 85–86; iconography, 90–100; as a local order, 87–90, 193 Peterson, Nicolas, 6, 143 Pfitzner, Pastor John, 187, 191 phenomenology of the subject, 5, 13, 258, 267–68, 269 pictures, 97–98 Pine Gap, 16 Pink, Olive, 120 Pintupi, 12, 16, 30, 64, 100, 119, 127, 152, 160, 191–93 Pitjantjatjara, 108, 113, 118, 120 place as mnemonic, 41, 75, 90 place as personal name, 137 plausibility structure, 87 Pmokaputa. See Old Station (Pmokaputa) Pmutjuka, 115 poetics, 10, 34, 37 police/troopers: police trackers, 124; state intervention, 238–39, 242; troopers/ mounted police, 8, 35, 124 political logics, 10

323

Port Augusta, 14 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 11, 39, 146, 152, 247–48 “power tickets,” 146 Puka, 37–38 Raberaba, Conrad, 67 race relations, 131 Racial Discrimination Act 1975, 241 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 156 rail line to Alice Springs, 8, 16, 64, 67, 88 “Rain Song of Kaporilya,” 59–60 Ratara, Abel, 99–100, 193–94 Ratara, Eratara, 194 Ratara, Norman, 75–76, 179–80, 181, 193–94, 195, 201, 234; Palm Valley land claim, 197–98 rations for service, 3, 17, 29, 40, 85, 86, 93, 183, 184, 213 Rauwiraka, Nathaneal, 57, 114–15, 116, 121–22 redemptionism, 205 Red Sandhill (Ilbal’ Alkngarrintja), 211, 214– 15, 220–22, 230 referendum (1967), 4 regional identity, 107, 109, 111, 114–17 reincarnation, 114 relational being, 156, 159, 161–64, 165. See also inherent being relocation, 117 Rembarrnga, 73 remoteness, 18 Renkeraka, Titus, and descendants, 69, 76, 87, 95, 99–100, 179–80; Palm Valley land claim, 197–98 resource centralization, 181–82, 189, 199, 201–2, 244 resource implications, 199 resource politics, 133, 141, 143–44, 149–51 resource royalties, 194–95 Reuben (Kaporilya pipeline worker), 66 Reynolds, Henry, 13 rhizomic system, 101, 181, 208 ritual cognoscente (ingkarte), 116, 117, 127, 136, 217 ritual descent, 141 ritual knowledge, 6, 113, 143, 201, 214; cultural revival, 191–93, 202, 217 ritual performance, 118 R. M. Williams, 93 Robinya, Lucas, 217 Robinya family genealogy, 110

324

index

Rodna land trust, 193–94 Róheim, Géza, 20, 47, 56–57, 61, 75, 247, 259, 261, 270 Roth, Walter, 56 Roulbmoulbma land trust, 115, 191–94, 196, 216, 218 Rubuntja, Dawson, 192 Rumsey, Alan, 41, 208 Sahlins, Marshall, 12, 206, 268 Sandall, Roger, 254 Sanders, Will, 245, 263 Scherer, Phillip, 182–84 Schneider, David, 152 schooling, 79–80, 188–89 Schwarz, W. F., 32 sedentary life, 3, 5, 10, 16, 52, 112–13, 142 self-determination policy, 17–18, 73, 180 self-identifying terms, 13 settlement, settlers, settler history, 16, 45; impact of, 8, 62, 63, 68, 72, 109, 122–26 sex, 247–50 shade, 91 shamans, 58 “shifting,” 210–14, 233, 264; perambulation as a way to know, 6, 10 silence, 164 skins, skin names. See under subsections Smith, Adam, 206 social death, 175 social inheritance, 117 sociality of children and infants, 159–61, 162 social ontology, 270 social security benefits, 184 social suffering, 8–10, 12, 22, 103, 242, 244– 45, 256; headache, 86, 170, 175; produced by structural violence, 174–75 Solomon Islands, Regional Assistance Mission to the (RAMSI), 238 song language, 122 song lines, 29, 43–44 songs, 20, 48, 49, 52, 89, 97–98 spatial terms (“close” and “distant”), 140 Special Works Projects, 185 Spencer, Baldwin, 19–20, 28, 69 Spencer and Gillen, 56, 61, 141, 208, 247, 249 Stanner, W. E. H., 47, 118, 119, 190, 205, 247–48, 252 Star of Bethlehem, 37 state, bureaucratic, 144, 181, 187, 205, 209, 232–33

state administration, 151 state grants, 9, 16, 78, 88, 144, 149, 150, 180, 195; project grants, 198–201 state history, 49, 63, 263–64 state intervention (2007), 9, 23–24, 238–41 state paternalism, 240–41 state policy shifts, 3–4, 6, 7–10, 17–18, 73, 80, 147, 175 state wards, 183–84, 188–89, 209, 213 state welfare. See welfare state status of men and women, 89–90, 91, 101, 113, 121 status through inheritance, 143 STEP (Structured Training and Employment Project), 240 Stewart, Rupert Max, 192 Stirling, Edward, 69 Stolen Generations, 250 Stoll, Gary, 75–76, 185–86, 187, 191, 192–93, 194, 215 story line, 137 Strathern, Marilyn, 164, 165 Strehlow, Carl: death, 87; genealogies, 109– 11, 156; Kaporilya, 56, 57, 58–59, 61; as pastor (1894–1922), 15, 28, 68–69, 88, 93; texts, 19–21, 96–97; tyene (an intimate), 141; Western Arrernte primer, 94–95 Strehlow Research Centre, 161 Strehlow, T. G. H., 30, 49, 74, 120, 121, 247, 259–60; career, 20–21; conception beliefs, 112, 267–68; genealogies, 109–11, 113, 156; influence, 186; influences on, 126; Kaporilya, 56–62; knowledge systems, 121–22; marriage rule, 207; nyinanga (nyenhenge) descent groups, 122, 188; ritual performance, 113–17; totemic geography, 20, 29, 269–70; totemic ritual, 41; tywerrenge (sacred artifact), 68, 69; Western Arrernte estates, 122–24 “strings” of relatedness, 134–35, 141, 164–65, 208–9. See also filiation structural violence, 9–10, 11, 74 Stuart, John McDouall, 15 Stuart (telegraph station), 15, 87–88 subject, the Arrernte subject, 90–91, 164–66, 175, 209 subject-into-object transformations, 59 subsections, 14–15, 86, 109, 110, 113–17, 127– 28, 137; marriage rule, 156, 207; mother’s side knowledge, 117; skins, skin names, 134–35, 140, 197; subsection pairs, 117

index

Sutton, Peter, 9, 155, 173–74 Swan family, 220 Tapani, Bruno, 192 Taylor, Charles, 7, 11, 205–6, 209, 263, 266, 268 Taylor, John, 240, 254 Teague, Una and Violet, 64–65, 70 telegraph line and station, 15, 16, 62, 87–88 Tempe Downs (pastoral station), 29, 38, 124, 140, 200, 217, 218 territory and tenure, 119–21 Thata, 115 “time–space” compression, 213–14 Tindale, Norman, 118 Tjakaljeri, Tiger, 219 Tjalkabota, Moses, 16, 57, 61, 86–87, 91, 95, 97–98, 110, 194 Tjita (Tjalkabota’s father), 86, 170 Tjitjinana (also Philllipus, and son of Robinya), 87, 110, 129 Tjuwanpa artists’ camp, 212 Tjuwanpa Outstation Resource Centre (TORC), 18, 39, 53, 84, 144, 151, 172, 182, 222; brief, 243–44; CDEP, 78, 131, 180, 182, 198–201, 213, 232–33; chair of management committee, 149; establishment of, 195, 231; factions, factionalism, 179–82, 199–201; housing, 200, 243–44; Ntaria town council, 235; reports on, 234–35; resource centralization, 201–2; staffing, 262; STEP, 240 Tnawurta, 230 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 20, 247 totemic geography, 20, 29, 269–70 totemic ritual, 41 totemic species (“friends”), 141 totemism, 20 Totemism and Exogamy (Frazer), 20 totems, conception, 115 totems, personal, 109 Traill, Jessie, 64–65 training allowance, 184–85 training wages, 17–18 transcendental, transcendentalism, 67, 74, 99, 101, 161, 165, 175 Traugott Malbunka (Pastor), 188 Turner, Terence, 47 tyarrekngeme (drawing descendants on country), 137 tyene (an intimate), 140–41, 162

325

Tyurretye (Western Macdonnell Range), 6, 13, 36, 108, 117 tywerrenge (sacred artifact), 55, 68–69, 70–72, 91, 97–98, 115, 121–22, 127, 161, 208; use of term, 86 Undandita, 39–41, 212 Ungwanaka, Rahel, 220–22 Ungwanaka, William, 93 Ungwanaka family, 35, 188, 214–17, 220, 261 uranium mining, 190 Urbitja, Luther, 192, 217, 219 Uruna (Waterhouse Range) land trust, 34, 99, 193–94, 196 Utnadata, 110 value, regimes of, 5, 6, 15–16, 52, 155, 253, 266 verstehen, 13, 129 violence, 7–10, 268–69; everyday violence, 155–56, 166–70, 180, 181; imagination and, 174; by men against women, 174; political violence, 174–75; structural violence, 4, 128, 173–75, 203–4, 263–64; visiting kin, 109–11, 124, 141–42 von Sturmer, Dr. John, 187, 189, 193 Wadeye, 96 Wagner, Roy, 164, 165, 208 Wallace Rockhole, 35, 228–29 Wards Employment Ordinance, 184 wards of the state. See state wards Warlpiri, 30, 95, 99, 113 Waterhouse Range. See Uruna (Waterhouse Range) land trust water reserves, 211–12 Wave Hill, 124, 184 Weber, Max, 13, 129, 205, 206, 258, 262 welfare state, 4, 17–18, 83, 142, 151, 184–85, 203, 213 West, the: Western imaginary, 205–6; Western technology, 2, 16, 67, 71, 74, 85, 203, 212, 213–14, 216, 223, 267; workforce classifications, 7 Western Macdonnell Range. See Tyurretye (Western Macdonnell Range) Wheeler, Ephraim, 192 Wheeler, Joanna, 39–41, 48 white politics, 181–82 Whitlam Government, 73, 184, 187

326 Williams, Gus Ntjalka, 76, 79–80, 179–81, 201; background, 194–96; chair, Ntaria town council, 76, 95; Joyce Malbunka, 84–85; Palm Valley land claim, 197–98 Willshire, Constable W. H., 35, 99, 124, 260 Windschuttle, Keith, 13 Winnecke, Charles, 69 Woodward, Justice Edward, 187 world (term), 269 World War I (1914–18), 88

index

Yama, Adam, 192 Yankee Elizer, 192, 217, 219 Yolngu, 72–73, 96, 152 Yuendumu, 96 Yuendumu Sports, 173 Ziersch, Rex, 187, 188, 215