Yasmine Musharbash - Yuendumu Everyday - Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia PDF
Yasmine Musharbash - Yuendumu Everyday - Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia PDF
Yasmine Musharbash - Yuendumu Everyday - Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia PDF
To my mothers —
Heidi, Kay, Linda, Lucy, Maggie, Ruth and Salwa
Yuendumu Everyday
Contemporary life in remote Aboriginal Australia
Yasmine Musharbash
First published in 2008
by Aboriginal Studies Press
Illustrations vi
Acknowledgments vii
Note on spelling and orthography x
Figures
1. Central Australia xii
2. Spatial Camp divisions at Yuendumu 23
3. Yuendumu settlement 24
4. The spatial terminology of camps 29
5. The spatiality of gendered camps 33
6. Iconography for ngurra 36
7. Iconography for camp 36
8. The jilimi — spatial layout 53
9. Genealogy of Polly, Joy, Celeste and Nora 58
10. Nights/people in the jilimi 63
11. Genealogy of core residents 65
12. Sleeping arrangements, 29 November 1998 85
13. Sleeping arrangements, 1 December 1998 87
14. Sleeping arrangements, 3 May–7 May 1999 92
15. Flour distribution during mortuary rituals 120
16. ‘Hithering and thithering’ 130
17. Tamsin’s genealogy 140
Tables
1. Average numbers of adults and children sleeping in the 62
jilimi
2. Types of residents 64
3. My positioning in the jilimi 90
4. Sleeping companions 102
5. Sleeping positions 106
vi
Acknowledgments
vii
Acknowledgments
viii
Acknowledgments
ix
Note on spelling and orthography
x
Yuendumu Everyday
xii
chapter 1
The starry night sky above us, we had arranged piles of blankets and
pillows so that we could lounge comfortably on top of our mattresses,
a fire crackling cheerfully on the side, and a television set on a long
extension cord in front of us. We were watching Who Wants To Be A
Millionaire, a game show popular in Yuendumu. Tamsin, a seventeen-
year-old Warlpiri girl, came to join our row of bedding, nestling down
between her mother Celeste and myself. ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’
the game master asked on the television. ‘Me’, ‘me’, ‘me’, the residents of
the camp shouted in reply, Tamsin loudest of them all. ‘What would you
do with a million dollars?’ I asked her.
Tamsin: I would build a house.
Yasmine: Where?
Tamsin: In Yuendumu.
Yasmine: And what will it look like?
Tamsin: It’s really, really big, with lots of rooms, and every
room has furniture in it. Sofas, and beds, new
blankets, and tables and chairs. And every room has a
stereo in it, and a television, and a video player and a
playstation.
Yasmine: And who will live in that house?
Tamsin: Me.
Yasmine: And who else?
Tamsin: Nobody else. Just me!
Yasmine: Won’t you be lonely?
Tamsin: No, I’ll have peace and quiet. And I’ll keep the door
locked. I won’t let anybody in.
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Yuendumu Everyday
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Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
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Yuendumu Everyday
While Bachelard shows how the house has great metaphoric potency,
I find that the essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1993, first published
in 1951) by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger best explains
why this should be so. He identifies the ways these three practices are
related to each other. In order to dwell, one has to build; and the way
one builds mirrors the way one thinks: which in turn is inspired by the
way one dwells, creating a processual cycle. This goes beyond Bachelard,
who asks: ‘if the house is the first universe for its young children, the first
cosmos, how does its space shape all subsequent knowledge of other space,
of any larger cosmos?’ (Bachelard 1994: viii).2 In Heidegger’s idea there
is no unidirectionality; instead he demonstrates how the three practices
are interdependent and how, as a series, they encapsulate ideology; and
by that I mean nothing more or less than a socio-culturally specific way
of looking at the world and being in the world. The ideology, or the
multidirectional connectivity between the physical structures in which
people live (building), their social practices (exemplified through their
practices of dwelling) and their world views (thinking), can be expressed
– and here Bachelard again is useful – in metaphors of great potency. In
the Western context, this ideology can be symbolised by a stereotypical
house:
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Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
concentric circles which may serve to represent the entire range of meanings
listed above, or any context-specific ones; and
5
Yuendumu Everyday
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Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
desire; but it can also stand for the expectations which the Australian
state has of Warlpiri people.
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Yuendumu Everyday
8
Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
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Yuendumu Everyday
10
Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
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Yuendumu Everyday
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Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
with some people and fought with others. All of these descriptions are
presented by me as author. As the nature of my own personal relationship
to each of these women is particular and unique, I here provide sketches
in narrative form about the personal ways in which I related to them,
recapitulating interactions between these women and myself as they took
place around the time we all lived together in the jilimi. These vignettes
represent my own portraits of the four women as I experienced them,
and hopefully will convey to the reader the nature of our relationships,
which, I am sure, has impacted on how I represent them in the case
studies throughout this book.
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Yuendumu Everyday
it all over the bathroom and stood in the middle of it, her hands on her
hips, looking expectant. After a couple of minutes, her face dropped and
she murmured, ‘Maybe it only works for Whitefellas.’
In the end, Joy and I did not get along, and I, like all the other white
women before me, ‘left’ her. I always felt I disappointed and hurt her
gravely. Her biggest dream was having her own house, Kardiya-style,
and she knew that on her own she could not create and maintain a
suburban dream house in the middle of Yuendumu. Her hope was that
my presence, the presence of a Kardiya in her house, would achieve that.
We fought a lot, and when she finally got her own house, I decided to
stay in the jilimi and did not move in with her. I always felt that for her
I was a disappointment in the same way the Pine-O-Clean was. In ads
on TV she had seen what it could achieve: clean gleaming bathrooms
with tiles in which your face would be reflected. The Pine-O-Clean did
not fulfil its promise, that bathroom never sparkled, and I did not move
in with her; and thus, although she was so close to achieving her dream
of living in a Kardiya-style house, it was always my fault that it did not
eventuate.
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Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
Celeste made sure I had a break once in a while. This is not to say
that she didn’t have her own agenda. She was working around the jilimi
all day long, looking after children and old people there, preparing food
and organising firewood and sleeping arrangements, and it was when
she insisted I needed a break that she could have one, too. And in the
mornings we managed to stay in bed longer because of each other. I kept
thinking, ‘As long as Celeste is not up, I won’t need to get up either’. So
I spent contented extra minutes in my swag listening to the clatter in
the jilimi, pretending to be still asleep, once in a while peeping out from
underneath my blankets to make sure Celeste was still asleep underneath
hers. One morning as I emerged for a quick glance, she did the same at
the same moment. Having caught each other at it, we laughed and she
said, ‘Oh, now we have to get up after all’.
One of my favourite memories of Celeste is of a very, very hot
summer afternoon when we borrowed a fan and went into her room to
have a siesta. There we are lying on the blankets with the fan keeping us
moderately cool. Celeste’s steady breathing next to me is as always the
most soothing sound. I keep drifting in and out of sleep, once in a while
opening my eyes for a glance to the outside. Through the half-open door
I can see the roof of the verandah, the wall dividing the verandah from
the yard and in between them a strip of blue, blue sky. Occasionally
there is a cloud in it, sometimes two; sometimes there is none.
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Yuendumu Everyday
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Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
lying in the yard and starts to dance with it around the rubbish fire.
She dances, first the way Warlpiri women dance in ceremonies, with
quivering, slightly bent legs and abrupt movements. Then she starts
mimicking the movements of the young girls at disco nights: circling
her hips, faster and faster. Her dance becomes more and more lewd.
Everybody claps and sings and laughs. At night, when my sisters and
I are lying in our swags next to each other, we are still laughing. ‘That
Polly, she’s clown woman, that one.’
Some months later. I am in the Big Shop and have just heard the bad
news. One of Polly’s nieces has passed away. As I leave the shop, I can
hear wailing coming from all directions. I hurry to the jilimi and start
hugging and wailing with the women who are sitting lined up on the
verandah. As I turn around I see Polly. She is sitting alone, crouched
in the cold ashes of last night’s fire. She has already shaved off her hair,
and her head and body are covered in grey ash. The only visible parts of
her warm, brown skin are the tracks on her cheeks made by the flood of
tears. Her wail pierces the afternoon air.
One day in summer, as I hang up my laundry on the barbed wire in
the yard strung between poles as a clothes line, Polly comes over. There
are wet blankets on either side of us and it is like standing in a tunnel.
Polly is not lively, demanding, noisy or intimate, like most of the other
women. She is quieter, and she mainly watches, mostly from a distance
that she herself determines. Sometimes she looks like a young girl and
sometimes she looks as old as she must be. She has had two husbands
and eight children of whom four have passed away. She has twenty-
two grandchildren and nineteen great-grandchildren. In the tunnel of
blankets, she comes towards me, touches my head, says ‘My daughter’,
and then she is gone.
Yuendumu
Having introduced the key themes and the main protagonists of this
book, what remains is to set the scene by introducing the settlement of
Yuendumu.11 Located in central Australia, Yuendumu is situated about
300 kilometres north-west of the town of Alice Springs, in the south-
eastern corner of the Tanami Desert that stretches from the Northern
Territory towards Western Australia. Before sedentisation, Warlpiri
people lived throughout the Tanami Desert, in an area roughly extending
500 kilometres to the north-west, about 250 kilometres to the north and
17
Yuendumu Everyday
18
Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
19
Yuendumu Everyday
follow this local terminology throughout the book, and employ the terms
‘Kardiya’ and ‘non-Indigenous people’ to refer to local non-Aboriginal
people and the terms ‘Yapa’ or ‘Warlpiri people’ for local Aboriginal
people.) In the main, Kardiya are living and working in Yuendumu as
service providers. Except for Yuendumu Council, which always has a Yapa
president (but a Kardiya town clerk), all organisations and institutions at
Yuendumu are managed by Kardiya staff (see Appendix for descriptions
of these organisations and institutions).
During the early days, Yuendumu had at its centre a gardened area
adjacent to the houses of the Missionary and the Superintendent.
Known as the Park, this area became flanked by an increasing number of
Kardiya staff residences and buildings for Yuendumu’s growing number
of institutions (the school, the store, the soup kitchen, the clinic, and
so forth). The residential arrangements for Yapa were located at some
distance from the Park. Hinkson quotes two Yuendumu men describing
early developments of settlement at Yuendumu:
… in those days, the houses were just a few and only kardiya were
living in the houses. But us, we used to live out in the camps
or humpies. We never used to sleep close to the houses or the
settlement at that time. We used to be a couple of miles, or at
least a fair way from the settlement and the houses. For water,
the women used to come and collect water with buckets and billy
cans, in the evenings and in the mornings. […]
… kardiya doesn’t want yapa to come in close up because
they might steal something. And yapa doesn’t want to come in
(Japanangka and Japangardi quoted in Hinkson 1999: 18).
Stories I was told confirm that in the early days there was a mutually
maintained separation between Warlpiri people living at a significant
distance from the centre of the settlement and non-Indigenous staff
living in houses and working in buildings located around the Park.
During these times, Yapa used to live in traditional shelters built out of
bush materials, sometimes augmented by corrugated iron and sackcloth
(so-called humpies). Above and beyond the spatial ordering of Kardiya
living in centrally located houses and Yapa living in camps and humpies
surrounding the settlement, the locations of Yapa living quarters followed
the cardinal directions from which people had originally come ‘in’ to the
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Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
settlement. Munn describes this spatial ordering in the mid to late 1950s
thus (see also Meggitt 1962: 55):
Mt. Doreen, Mt. Allan (and Coniston), and Vaughan Springs
are areas that represent for the Warlpiri general regions in which
different sections of the Yuendumu community based themselves
in the recent past [...]. The camps of each segment are oriented
accordingly: Mt. Doreen Ngalia camp to the west or north-west,
and members of the northern community of Waneiga Warlpiri
camp with them; the Mt. Allan Ngalia (also linked with Cockatoo
Creek near Coniston) camp on the east or south-east of the other
camps; the Vaughan Springs (and Mt. Singleton) people camp in
the south-easterly clusters (Munn 1973: 11).
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Yuendumu Everyday
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Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
Road leads down two kilometres of partially sealed road, now flanked
by small African mahogany trees planted by local CDEP workers, past
the Police Station, and some occasional humpies, into Yuendumu’s
East Camp, and continues towards the Park. There the corrugated tin
ruins of the old soup kitchen still stand, but are surrounded by an ever-
growing number of newer buildings: the Old People’s program, the
new Council building, the new clinic (see Figure 3). On weekdays this
area is bustling. People walk along the four streets flanking the Park, on
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Yuendumu Everyday
24
Everyday life in a remote Aboriginal settlement
their way to one organisation or another, to the shop, or the post office.
Government and Yapa Toyotas drive around, picking up and dropping
off people. Beyond the Park, in the Camps, the red Tanami sand is more
prominent, a reminder that Yuendumu is indeed a desert settlement.
Around the Yapa houses there are the obligatory packs of camp dogs,
people sitting in groups in the shade or around their fires, and little kids
running around playing. Music, both Yapa and Western, echoes from
many of the houses, as well as from cars driving past. If it is windy, a
small whirlwind might sweep through, carrying with it more red sand,
empty chips packets, and perhaps someone’s laundry. Kardiya houses
are quieter and have higher fences, and some have gardens, religiously
watered by their owners in an attempt at defying the desert.
All in all, Yuendumu is very much a typical central Australian remote
Aboriginal settlement. It is bigger than most — some say it is the biggest
in central Australia. And, of course, having started as a government
ration station rather than a mission has its own implications, as does
the fact that it accommodates a Baptist mission rather than some other
denomination. A crucial difference between Yuendumu and most
other settlements is that most of its organisations and institutions are
independent of the council, meaning that many are more dynamic than
their counterparts elsewhere, and also that Yuendumu has a much higher
Kardiya population than most other settlements (both in total numbers
and in proportion to the Yapa population). In the camps however, these
differences are hardly noticeable. Accordingly, much of what is presented
in this book did take place at Yuendumu, but could have happened in
any one of many other remote communities.
25
chapter 2
26
Camps, houses and ngurra
27
Yuendumu Everyday
28
Camps, houses and ngurra
Yunta
In its most restricted sense, the term yunta is used to denote a windbreak
(see also Keys 1999: 44–6; 165–71). A windbreak is constructed out of
leafy branches, either piled on top of each other to create a low, thick
wall, or (especially when also used during the day for shade or when
29
Yuendumu Everyday
particularly windy) dug into the earth so they stand upright and are
interwoven with further horizontal branches. The windbreak is oriented
to the east of the sleepers’ heads, stretching from north to south. That
is, if at all spatially possible, people sleep with their head to the east and
their feet to the west. Often this arrangement shelters people from the
prevailing winds, and it keeps sleepers’ heads in the shade at sunrise; yet
environmental factors alone seem inadequate to explain the practice.
While Warlpiri people were not forthcoming with explanations as to
why it was so, all were adamant that this is the ideal way to sleep.3
In a more expansive sense, the term ‘yunta’ also means ‘open living
and sleeping area protected from wind by erected barrier on appropriate
side’. A yunta is the spatial manifestation of a row of sleepers, and in this
book the term is used to refer to the combination of a windbreak, the
places for people to sleep sheltered by it, the people sleeping in it, and,
if present, fires. In the past, the sleeping places were indicated through
moulds in the sand, one for each person, and in winter people kept warm
through huddling together and being close to the fires. A camp may be
made up of a single yunta, or a number of them. A camp, however, is
not only made up of yunta, but also incorporates some of the space
surrounding the yunta.
Yarlu
The space surrounding one or a number of clustered yunta is called yarlu,
which according to the Warlpiri dictionary means ‘place with nothing
on it or over it’. It is thus similar to a yard or a garden in a suburban-
style Western house, open space between the public (the street) and the
private (the interior of the house). One crucial difference between a yard
or garden and yarlu is that the former do not shift their positions (or
existence), whereas a yarlu is only there when the yunta and the people
sleeping in it are present, meaning it appears with the creation of yunta
and it disappears as meaningful and named space when a specific camp is
deserted. It is this yarlu space, or rather the boundaries around it, which
clarify the distinction between yunta and camp. A single yunta with a
bounded yarlu space is a camp; more often however, a camp is made up
of a conglomerate of yunta surrounded by one yarlu space.
In pre-contact times yarlu space was often marked by a low mound
of earth around the yunta where people had scraped the ground free of
spinifex grass and similar plant matter. While there is no other visible
30
Camps, houses and ngurra
boundary marking the extent of yarlu space, people are nonetheless aware
of it. It is this often invisible boundary that constitutes the threshold
between public space outside the camp and private space inside it. In
the absence of walls, doors, doorbells, porches, halls and other similar
physical markers of the threshold between public and private, social
rules of behaviour structure its crossing.4 One never walks straight to the
location of an actual yunta but waits at the outer boundary of the yarlu,
at an appropriate distance, anything between 5 and 30 metres away from
the closest yunta, to be noticed and then invited ‘in’.
Yalka
Within the yunta, there is a further delineation of space between the
windbreak and the heads of the sleepers, called yalka (translated as ‘close
to windbreak’ in the Warlpiri dictionary). Although yalka is a long strip
of space between the sleepers’ heads and the windbreak, this space is
divided up into individual personal spaces. Thus each sleeper in a row
has his or her own yalka space, positioned just above his or her own
head. These spaces are not physically separated from each other, but there
are strong invisible boundaries separating individual portions of yalka.
Within the space of a camp, the yalka space ‘belonging’ to a particular
person is their most private space, to keep their personal belongings.
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Yuendumu Everyday
night when it is dark, one does not quite know what is out there, both
in terms of animals and people, and in regards to the potential presence
of ‘spooky’ beings. Accordingly, the kulkurru position quite simply
feels safer, and therefore it is the most socially senior people within a
yunta who take up the yitipi positions on the outside — sheltering and
protecting the sleepers inside. However, other factors contribute to this
choice, such as personal disposition, generational status, one’s relations
to others in the same yunta, and so forth.
The number of yunta on any given night in a particular camp depends
on how many people are present and the nature of relations between them.
The minimum is one yunta, with an open-ended maximum, depending
on occasion and location. Generally, even if relations are amicable, yunta
considered ‘too long’ will be broken up. This may happen by placing
a number of fires in between sleepers, effectively creating more yitipi
positions and thereby more yunta. Alternatively, a potential long row
may be broken up into a number of separate yunta arranged parallel to
each other, depending on the physical features of the terrain, e.g. when
camping in a creek bed.
Gendered camps
Camps are further differentiated by the gender and the marital status
of their residents. Married people sleep in yupukarra, married people’s
camps; unmarried people sleep in camps distinguished by gender, women
in jilimi, women’s camps, and men in jangkayi, men’s camps. Children
sleep in either yupukarra or jilimi, never in jangkayi (for detailed ethno-
architectural discussion of the three types of camps, see Keys 1999,
2000).
In the olden days, when a large number of people camped together
and all three types of camps where present, their order was prescribed
in the following way. The married people’s camps, the yupukarra, were
situated in the middle, separated into individual yunta. Located to the
west of them was the single women’s camp, the jilimi. Note that a polite
way of referring to women is ‘karlarra-wardingki’, ‘those belonging to
the west’, and the spatial association between the cardinal direction
west and women, and the east and men, features in much of Warlpiri
thought as well as ritual organisation. Accordingly, the single men’s
camp, the jangkayi, used to be to the east of the married people’s camps.
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Camps, houses and ngurra
If within the same area, the jilimi and the jangkayi should be located as
far from each other as possible (Keys 2000: 126; Meggitt 1962: 76). The
iconographic depiction of an aggregation of all three types of camps in
one place would look something like the drawing in Figure 5.
Ngurra
In Heidegger’s series of building–dwelling–thinking, the three practices
relate in a processual cycle. In order to dwell, one has to build; and the
way one builds mirrors the way one thinks, which in turn is inspired
by the way one dwells. So far, I have focused on aspects of the first
two practices, building and dwelling: we may take the camp to represent
the actual structure of Warlpiri dwellings (building) as well as the
physical manifestations of practices of dwelling. Camp is the Aboriginal
English translation of the term ngurra, which, however, holds meanings
surpassing those captured by the term camp. If camp stand for the aspects
of building and dwelling of Heidegger’s series, then ngurra stands for the
aspect of thinking, encapsulating the values underlying the world views
arising out of (and feeding back into) such structures and practices.
Ngurra radiates multiple levels of meaning which afford an incipient
understanding of how ngurra is a core concept in Warlpiri language and
cosmology, and why an analysis of the interconnection between Warlpiri
residential patterns and sociality needs to be conceptually anchored
around this term.
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34
Camps, houses and ngurra
35
Yuendumu Everyday
contexts and carry different connotations (see also Anderson and Dussart
1988; Munn 1966, 1970, 1973; Peterson 1981).
Yapa employ a set of concentric circles (see Figure 6) in the ritual
context, in which it constitutes part of body designs, ground paintings,
and decoration on ritual paraphernalia, and which incorporates the full
range of meanings of the term ‘ngurra’.5
Iconography using one horizontal and a number of vertical lines (see
Figure 7), depicting actual camps is commonly used in sand stories,
where during everyday conversation the design is drawn into the sand
to depict a specific camp in which particular people have slept, with the
horizontal line depicting the windbreak and each vertical line standing
for a person (see also Munn 1963, Watson 1997). In sand stories, the
design is oriented in the same way that the camp spoken about is, or was,
oriented in real space.6
36
Camps, houses and ngurra
the front lawn (often also a fence and a porch) and accessed through the
front door. The inside is expressive of a spatial order in which separate
rooms are reserved for specific functions: a lounge room to relax and
welcome guests into, a kitchen to cook in, a dining room to eat in,
bathrooms for bodily functions, and bedrooms for sleeping. Bedrooms
are the most private space within the house; all other rooms are shared,
these are not (with the exception of the master bedroom which is shared
by the parents). Bedrooms are not only for sleeping, though; they contain
each respective person’s private possessions, and this is also where these
persons spend time on their own (apart from sleeping: presumably to
read, to think, to have phone conversations they do not want overheard,
to daydream, to play, to cry, and so forth).
Contemporary Western-style living revolves around separate rooms
for different people with the ideal of one bedroom per person living in the
house and some shared rooms for all, separated from the world outside.
Houses both symbolise and enable privacy rather than intimacy. Houses
are built of heavy materials (corrugated iron, concrete, bricks, wood)
and do not move; they are permanent, at least over significant periods of
time. Thus fixed in place, houses in turn fix people in place — they foster
stability rather than mobility. In terms of materials needed for building,
skills involved in building, as well as in terms of maintenance, houses are
costly. Houses in this sense foster and express future-orientation rather
than immediacy: generally, one needs to accumulate in order to afford to
dwell in a house, either to pay rent, or, preferably, to pay off a mortgage
with the ultimate goal of owning one’s own house. Similarly, one must
budget for household items, furnishings and maintenance.
The values of mobility, immediacy, and intimacy which underpin the
Warlpiri series of building–dwelling–thinking thus find their opposites
in the values symbolised by the house as metaphor and enabled through
the house as actual physical structure. The government project of
sedentisation, of institutionalising in settlements people who previously
roamed freely through their country, aimed to negate and overcome this
inherent clash of values, using the house as a ‘civilising tool’.
Following the Second World War, during the so-called era of
Assimilation, ‘transitional housing’ was introduced in central Australian
Aboriginal settlements. This entailed a vision of Western-style houses
as a ‘medium of uplift’, and the idea was to move Aboriginal families
through a series of domestic structures with increasing complexity. A
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Yuendumu Everyday
‘first stage’ house usually consisted of one room and a veranda, a ‘stage
two’ house included additional rooms and a kitchen, and a ‘stage three’
house had added bathroom facilities, being equivalent to Housing
Commission standard. A damning critique of transitional housing
can be found in Heppell (1979b). Firstly, he says, living in ‘staged’
houses held little appeal, as they were not at all suited to the local
climatic conditions. Made of concrete and corrugated iron, they were
hotter in summer and colder in winter than humpies constructed of a
combination of bush materials, corrugated iron and canvas, the other
type of domestic structure available to Aboriginal people at the time.
Another reason why transitional housing as a project failed was due to
the fact that no instructions about how to use the houses were delivered,
nor did families in actual fact ever move through the stages, as there were
never adequate numbers of houses available. Ultimately, Heppel argues,
in respect of Western styles of living and Aboriginal styles of living, the
transitional housing scheme ‘permits neither set of living practices, nor
does it permit a compromise between the two’ (Heppell 1979b: 15).
Lastly, he points out the bizarreness of the idea that living Western-
style can be taught by moving people through a series of increasingly
complex architectural structures; this is certainly not how people in the
West learn to live in their houses.
What interests me is the fact that houses are seen as instrumental
in what was then called ‘the civilising process’, and in particular, the
assumption that by living in a Western-style house, somehow one
becomes Western or acquires Western social practices. This assumption
was most starkly expressed during the era of Assimilation, but it has
persisted.
Following the 1967 referendum, which gave the federal government a
clear mandate to legislate on Aboriginal affairs, the policy of assimilation
was succeeded by one of integration. While there was a greater emphasis
on self-management and equal participation than before, the terms
continued to be dictated by the Western majority, and in effect, policies
were not inherently different from the former period. They shifted in
focus towards those people considered ‘able to integrate’, and housing
assistance for them was provided in White suburbs and on pastoral
leases. Aboriginal people deemed ‘not yet ready’ were neglected in
terms of housing provisions. This period was succeeded by the Labor
government’s early 1970s policy which sought to restore to Aboriginal
38
Camps, houses and ngurra
39
Yuendumu Everyday
produced in continual dialogue with the other two; the series as a whole
is made up of processual, interconnected, interdependent processes. So
rather than state-provided housing transforming Warlpiri people in a
predictable and intended way, what happens is that the two series, the
Western one and the Warlpiri one, intersect, with reverberations that
shape the everyday at Yuendumu.
So how do Warlpiri people relate to houses at contemporary
Yuendumu? Today most residences are located in and around Western-
style houses, which come in a great variety of shapes and forms, reflecting
stages in policy, from one-room tin houses to the latest suburban-style
bungalows. The Warlpiri term for the physical structure of a house is
yuwarli. However, independent of the kind of physical structure in
and around which any Warlpiri residence at Yuendumu is located, it is
called camp in Aboriginal English or ngurra in Warlpiri. That is today, a
camp can be in a humpy or a suburban-style five-bedroom brick house.7
Practices of dwelling in contemporary camps at Yuendumu follow as well
as differ from those of the olden days in significant ways. Accordingly, the
Warlpiri use of houses is inherently different from that of Kardiya.
40
Camps, houses and ngurra
41
Yuendumu Everyday
42
Camps, houses and ngurra
an entry of this kind. If the visitor has a child with them, they talk
to the child in a clearly audible manner about who is inside the camp:
‘Look, your granny there’. In this case, people inside the camp ‘answer’
by calling out, for example, ‘Little Daryl is coming to visit his granny’,
thus implicitly sanctioning the entry. If a person comes visiting without
being accompanied by a child but there are children present inside the
camp, they greet the children by singing out, for example, ‘Hello little
nephew’. People inside the camp prompt the child to reply, for example,
‘Paul, look, your auntie’, again thus sanctioning the passage. If people
close to the camp residents come to visit, they simply enter and sit next
to the person(s) they came to see.
As in olden days etiquette, today the yunta present a further level of
privacy within the yarlu (see also Spatial Diagram of activity areas within
the yunta of Warlpiri jilimi in Keys 1999: 168). Yunta are only entered
by people actually sleeping in them or people very close to them, as for
example Tamsin was when she plopped herself down between Celeste
and myself in our yunta, the night we watched Who Wants To Be A
Millionaire? Without such established familiarity, entering uninvited into
yunta space, even if one is inside the yarlu, is either rude or a downright
threat. Normally only particularly close people or those invited in enter
yunta space.
Equally, the yalka space between the sleeper’s head and the windbreak
(today just above, or sometimes underneath, the pillow) remains the
most exclusive space within the camp. It is used for storage of essential
items and prized possessions, such as water bottles, money, matches,
handbags, talismans, tablets, photographs, tobacco and whatever else is
important to the sleeper.14 Nobody would ever go close to or take items
from the yalka of another person unless explicitly asked to do so. Even
though I have slept next to Celeste for years, she still asks me when she
wants the water bottle in my yalka, rather than taking it when she is
thirsty.
In terms of the yitipi and kulkurru positions of the sleepers within a
yunta, nothing has changed, except that nowadays people may actually
leave a yunta at night after it has been set up. For example, if a woman
stayed with relatives while her husband was away and he returns late
at night, she leaves the place she is sleeping at to move back with her
husband. Or there might be an emergency somewhere and a person
leaves to help out. In these cases, if the person leaving was positioned
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Yuendumu Everyday
kulkurru, in the middle, their swag, if they are not taking it with them, is
put back into storage, and the remaining swags are drawn together into
an uninterrupted yunta. If on the other hand, one hopes to be picked up
by a ‘loverboy’ at night, one would, if going to bed at all, sleep yitipi, on
the outside, so one can disappear without causing a major disruption. In
short, Yapa strive for ‘gap-free’ yunta.
Most significantly, today, as in the past, there is no concept of a
single person yunta as a single camp on its own.15 Close proximity when
sleeping enables the sharing of dreams (see Dussart 2000: Chapter 4
and Poirier 2005), it deflects possible accusations of sorcery, and most
importantly, it prevents ‘loneliness’. To be without marlpa (company)
is unthinkable and to be avoided at all costs.16 Sleeping alone is an
impossibility, not only because the ‘lonely’ person would be unhappy,
but also because should something happen to that person, the ones
who left them without marlpa, alone, would be the first to be blamed.
This two-directional relationality — seeking the company of others for
one’s own comfort as well as to provide comfort to others — principally
underpins the character of Aboriginal relations in central Australia, or,
what I call Warlpiri forms of intimacy.17
Through their structure (the ease with which they were erected and
unproblematic availability of required materials), or the way of building
in Heidegger’s sense, olden days camps accommodated for as well as
generated mobility, intimacy and immediacy, the core values encapsulated
in the concept of ngurra. Put differently, the particular structure of
camps allowed for as well as generated particular forms of social practices
(ways of dwelling, in Heidegger’s sense). In tandem, these structures and
these social practices embodied and produced Warlpiri ways of being
in and thinking about the world. The ways in which the structures, the
social practices and the ways of being in the world interconnect and
create meaning can be iconographically summarised and metaphorically
expressed through a set of concentric circles and the concept ngurra.
The values underlying the concept ngurra (mobility, intimacy and
immediacy) clash with the values the house is imbued with (stability,
privacy and future-orientation). Accordingly, when Warlpiri social
practices interact with state-provided houses the result is something
different to what Australian governments envisioned in the process of
sedentisation. Instead, contemporary life in the settlement of Yuendumu
continues along some of these parameters, and adapts continually to
44
Camps, houses and ngurra
the presence of houses and what they imply. Following Moore, these
changes in contemporary Warlpiri ways of dwelling in camps and in
houses need to be understood as situated in a web of new readings of
new and old practices — rather than a Warlpiri inability to comply with
a particular way of living in Western-style housing. Following Robben,
Warlpiri and Kardiya styles of dwelling in houses are not dependent on
the structures, the houses, but on the appropriation of meaning through
social practice.
45
chapter 3
Transforming jilimi
46
Transforming jilimi
In the 1980s, for example, according to Dussart (1992: 345), there were
six principal jilimi at Yuendumu. A decade later, Keys (1999: Appendix
5: Locations of jilimi in Yuendumu) details a total of thirty-two jilimi
locations between February and October 1995, seventeen of which
were spatially independent and fifteen of which were attached to or
surrounded by yupukarra (married people’s camps). During my research,
the number of jilimi fluctuated significantly, with a minimum of six large
and spatially independent ones and an ever-changing number of smaller
ones at any one time. In contrast to Bell’s characterisation of jilimi in
the 1970s at Alekarenge (previously Warrabri) (1980a, 1993), those at
Yuendumu are not land- and ritual-based, nor do they provide a power
base for women (see also Dussart 2000: 44). Yet today’s jilimi are focal
points around which much of everyday life at Yuendumu revolves, and
as such they are an excellent site to explore two aspects of the intersection
of the Warlpiri and the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking at
Yuendumu.
Firstly, I show how the transformation of jilimi from single-purpose
mourning camps to large, numerous and socially complex contemporary
camps needs to be understood in relation to changes that the institution
of Warlpiri marriage has undergone in response to sedentisation and the
resulting changes in circumstance. Jilimi in this regard are an example
of how core concepts belonging to the Warlpiri series of building–
dwelling–thinking are transforming.
Secondly, I introduce the actual jilimi that Nora, Joy, Polly, Celeste
and I lived in, the one that was my home for over a year of fieldwork,
and in which the ensuing case studies about mobility, immediacy and
intimacy are set. This jilimi is located in and around a four-bedroom
house, and I discuss how the four women relate to each other and the
jilimi’s four rooms. This interplay between a contemporary jilimi and
the structure of a Western-style four-bedroom house illuminates how
the first process (the transformation of jilimi) in turn feeds back into
the intersection of the two series of building–dwelling–thinking and
creates particular dynamics, played out in Warlpiri practices of dwelling
in Western-style houses.
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Yuendumu Everyday
moved into a yupukarra with their (first and much older) husband.
There they lived until widowed, when they spent the appropriate time
for mourning in a jilimi, before remarrying and moving into yet another
yupukarra with their next husband. With this ideal life cycle for women
in pre-contact times, jilimi did not have a prominent position in everyday
life, simply because women lived in yupukarra for most of their lives and
stayed in jilimi rarely and only for the purpose of mourning.
The dramatic changes in prominence, number, size and purpose of
contemporary jilimi result from changes in both residential practices
(sedentisation) and the Warlpiri institution of marriage. What constitutes
a marriage in Warlpiri eyes today? How has that changed from the past?
And what do these changes mean in regard to the ways Warlpiri people
live their lives today — and, specifically, how do these changes interact
with Yapa ways of relating to domestic space?
In the olden days, marriages were living and economic arrangements
between husband and wife, as much as they were (in a sense, contractual)
arrangements between the husband and a woman’s matriline, especially
her mother’s brothers. According to Meggitt, during the olden and the
early days, there existed three ways for a man to legitimately acquire a
wife, in the negotiations of all of which the matriline was instrumental.
These three kinds of marriages came about ‘through the levirate, through
private negotiation with the women’s kinsmen, and as a result of being
circumcised by a man who becomes his father-in-law’ (1962: 264). The
third type, arrangements made during initiation, where the circumciser
promises an as yet unborn daughter to the circumcised, according to
Meggitt, was the ‘ideal marriage arrangement, and indeed the most
common’ (Meggitt 1962: 266).2
Today, the few remaining examples of the first type of marriage, the
levirate (where a man ‘inherits’ the wife/wives of his deceased brother),
exist in the oldest generation of Warlpiri people alive. I am not aware of
a continuation of this practice by the younger generations.
The second type, where negotiations between families, particularly
matrilines, result in the marriage of a young girl, has also apparently
been discontinued. In regards to the third type, initiation rituals
continue to take place at Yuendumu almost every year, and marriage
promises continue to be made during them. However, for a number
of reasons, which seem to be working in tandem, today these promises
rarely eventuate in actual marriages.
48
Transforming jilimi
49
Yuendumu Everyday
50
Transforming jilimi
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Yuendumu Everyday
Our jilimi
The flux in numbers and locations of contemporary jilimi at Yuendumu
already indicates their lack of stability over time. This flux needs to be
understood not only in terms of location, but also in terms of residential
composition. As women decide to stay single, and the marriages of
others dissolve or are being formed, they and their (unmarried) children
move in and out of jilimi (creating some of the flow of residents through
jilimi discussed in the next chapter). The six more permanent jilimi at
Yuendumu are no exception.
I first knew ours as a long-established jilimi in this location when
I began research at Yuendumu in 1994. However, the women and
children who were some of its core residents in 1999 (the period of the
case studies) did not live there five years earlier, nor did they live there
just a year or so later. While the same locale remained a jilimi until 2005,
it is now a yupukarra.
52
Transforming jilimi
53
Yuendumu Everyday
Each room has a louvred window to the south (always shut) and a
door opening onto the veranda facing the north yard. At the western end
of the structure is another (windowless) room, which opens onto the
verandah without a door, and a (dysfunctional) kitchen. At the eastern
end are a storage place, which can be locked, and two bathrooms with
a shower, sink and toilet each, as well as a little laundry space with a tap
and a washing machine. The house is located in the southern half of a
yard. Nowadays, the yard is confined by a fence on three sides, about
25 metres long and 35 metres wide; and the back of an identical house
on the northern side (the neighbouring jilimi). In the middle of the
yard between the two houses is an iron structure which, when covered
with canvas, provides shade and often has shelters and leafy branches
for extra shade attached to it. To the north-west is a large tree providing
further shade. The yard space south of the house is rarely used, mainly
perhaps because it is not visible from the other spaces.10 It does not
usually comprise part of the jilimi’s yarlu space. The yarlu space, in the
main, is made up of the north yard and the verandah, where most of the
social activity within the jilimi takes place. This is where in the evenings
the yunta normally are arranged.
54
Transforming jilimi
55
Yuendumu Everyday
one time. This is not to say that disagreements between residents do not
take place, but whether or not a woman ‘has a room’ in these cases has
no impact on arguments.
What ‘room ownership’ did do for women while they ‘held’ a room
was associate them directly with the jilimi — which was considered by
them and others as their home. However, room ownership is in no way
a requirement for considering the jilimi one’s home. There are many
people who lived in the jilimi and called it their home but who never
‘owned’ a room there. Neither was room ownership an exclusive symbol
for social centrality in the jilimi; while Joy, Nora, Celeste and Polly were
central to it, at least while they lived in the jilimi, so were a number of
other people who did not own a room. To underscore the insignificance
of room ownership in this regard, I know of at least one woman who,
before Nora moved into her room, was said to ‘own’ this room while not
actually living in the jilimi.
The issue of ‘room ownership’ alerts us to the fact that rooms can be
ambiguous spaces. They are not easily and clearly related to persons; and
their use throws up interesting issues in respect to the sociality of camps
when set up in and around houses. Rather than following the Western
series of building–dwelling–thinking and using bedrooms as spaces of
privacy, Yapa seem pragmatic in their dealings with rooms, using them
in such a way that it suits their purposes (which, of course, are built
on the values underpinning the Warlpiri series of building–dwelling–
thinking). Interesting in this context also is that the fifth room, the one
on the western side without a door and with open access to and from
the verandah, was at no stage said to ‘belong’ to any particular person,
though in all other regards it was used in a similar fashion to the other
rooms, i.e. for storage of bedding and sleeping in when rainy or cold, by
a changing number of individuals. Since it had no door and no windows,
however, it was never considered a ‘proper’ room. Nobody ever claimed
it as theirs (even when using it over a period of months), nor was it ever
verbally described as ‘someone’s’ room.
Lastly, while these four rooms were said to belong to Polly, Nora, Joy
and Celeste for a while, the respective rooms belonged to other persons
before they moved into this particular jilimi (all at different times) and
after they left. This hints at the process of forming and maintaining
jilimi. They are not randomly formed by women and children who at
any one time choose to live in one; rather, when a woman decides to
56
Transforming jilimi
move into a jilimi, she generally moves into one where relatives live
already. This slow process of acquiring and losing core residents is what
happened to our jilimi too, and because it was one of the larger ones,
sheltering many more core residents than other jilimi, this is perhaps the
reason for its comparative durability.
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Yuendumu Everyday
in the jilimi. Celeste is Polly’s daughter; and Nora and Joy are thus ‘close’
mothers of hers.
These four women are connected by genealogical bonds, and share
much of their life histories, as well as, during different periods of their
lives, experiences of co-residency — thus drawing them together for the
time that they all lived in the same jilimi. Let’s look at the jilimi, then,
and examine how the values of mobility, immediacy, and intimacy are
integral in shaping its everyday.
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chapter 4
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60
In the jilimi: mobility
and what are the reasons and meanings underlying their mobility? To
answer them I first outline the quantitative realities of mobility through
the jilimi, and then analyse these statistical findings by contextualising
them ethnographically.
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Yuendumu Everyday
the minimum number for adults was 6 and the highest 19. For children,
the highest number was 11 and the minimum was one child present.
Table 1: Average numbers of adults and children sleeping in the jilimi over
221 nights
Average Highest Lowest
Adults 12 19* 6
Children 5 11* 1
*Note that this table does not include individuals from sorry mobs, in which case
these numbers would be substantially higher.
**This is the lowest number of actual residents present at any one time, not the
sum of lowest number of adults and children together.
Such averages have to be treated carefully, as they conceal another
dimension. These average numbers encompass different people at
different times, which distinguishes them from comparable non-
Indigenous statistics. In a case study about another Yuendumu jilimi
I presented elsewhere, there was an average of 22 people, but in actual
fact:
Over the fortnight there were a total of 27 different adults and
15 different children sleeping at the house; that is, a total of 42
different persons. Moreover, a ‘core’ of 11 persons (seven adults
and four children) slept at the house for the whole two-week
period. (Musharbash 2000: 59)
The point is that average numbers of residents conceal the actual flow of
people through camps. The figures in Table 1 should thus be treated with
caution and be read as indicating statistical realities rather than actual
practice. The fact that more than 160 people stayed in the jilimi over the
census period is at least as important as the fact that on average 17 of
them were present on any one night. Further analysis of the figures draws
attention to other features of the jilimi population. The graph in Figure
10 presents the number of nights the 105 named individuals spent in the
jilimi on those 221 nights I slept there (the graph excludes both un-named
individuals and sorry mobs).
Each column of the graph represents the number of nights a named
individual slept at the jilimi. Because it is based on the nights I myself
62
In the jilimi: mobility
spent in the jilimi, the tallest column represents myself and the 221
nights I spent there. The next column in line represents the person who
spent the next highest amount of nights in the jilimi, while I was there.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that this person, like most others
covered by the graph, would have been present on many of the nights I
was not. The graph is skewed by my own mobility; it does not present data
for a continuous period of time, and it may well under-represent some
people and over-represent others (especially those like Celeste, for example,
whose patterns of mobility I often followed). Nonetheless the data does
reflect well the way people relate to the jilimi. In analysing the data in the
graph it is helpful to divide the columns into four sections, splitting the
105 individuals into categories according to how many nights they spent
in the jilimi.
The first section comprises eleven individuals who during the census
period all slept in the jilimi more than 100 nights (133–221 nights),
and distinctly more than everybody else. I call these the core residents
and discuss them under this heading below. Then the curve takes a
deep plunge, and the next section is comprised of those individuals who
spent distinctly fewer nights in the jilimi than the core residents but dis-
tinctly more than the remaining individuals — these I call regular residents
(44–76 nights/12 individuals). Then the curve peters out slowly and I
divide it into two more sections, one comprising those individuals who
slept in the jilimi on an on-and-off basis (8–36 nights/36 individuals) and
the other those who slept there sporadically (1–6 nights/48 individuals).
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Yuendumu Everyday
Core residents
These are the eleven individuals who stayed in the jilimi for distinctly
more nights than all other residents over the same period, and who can
be described as relating emotionally to the jilimi as ‘home’ for most or
all of the census period. They would have thought of and talked about
the jilimi as ‘home’ when they were sleeping there as well as on the many
nights they slept elsewhere. In contrast to Bell’s description of jilimi
residents as senior, ritually active women (1980a, 1993), these eleven
individuals belong to four generations and include children as well as
elderly women beyond the state of social seniority (see Musharbash
forthcoming on the loss of social seniority). Next to Polly, Joy, Celeste,
Nora and I, the others are (see also Figure 11):
1) Neil (aged thirteen), who is the adopted son of Celeste, the
biological son of Celeste’s sister and Polly’s grandson. Polly and
Celeste, while co-residing, shared the responsibility of bringing up
Neil.
2) Nangala (in her eighties), Joy’s frail and blind mother, cared for by
Joy, assisted by Polly and Celeste.
3) Kiara (aged ten), who lives with her adoptive grandmother Joy,
and who is is the daughter of Polly’s son whom Joy adopted, and
thus is, in actual fact, Polly’s grand-daughter and Celeste’s niece.
4) Toby (aged twelve), one of Nora’s grandsons, whom she looks
after.
5) Pearl (in her seventies), a close sister of Nora’s. These two, Pearl
and Nora, co-resided and shared resources and time over long
periods of their lives.
6) Annie (in her fifties), who is the daughter of a close brother of
Polly’s deceased and Joy’s former husbands. Annie is not a co-
dependant of any of the four women and in fact moved into Nora’s
room when she left, taking up a similar focal position in the jilimi
as Nora held before.8
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In the jilimi: mobility
Who comes to stay at the jilimi, when, why and how long for, is
largely, but not exclusively, determined through the relationships people
have to any of these core residents. Based on age, social status and life
history, Polly, Joy, Celeste, Nora and Annie in this regard certainly had
a greater gravitational pull than the other core residents, and I describe
them as focal in this regard (however, people also came to stay with
Kiara, Toby, Neil, Nangala and myself, as well as with some of the less
regular residents). In the following case studies, I provide some examples
of why people came to stay in the jilimi, who they stayed with, how
long for and so forth, by paying particular attention to the nature of the
relationships between these residents and Polly, Joy, Celeste, and Nora
respectively. In these case studies, I also discuss these residents’ stays in
regards to the classification by amount of nights slept in the jilimi during
the census period.
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Yuendumu Everyday
few never stay with Polly, and the others are distributed across the four
categories of residents. This fact hints at a crucial difference between
types of residents: although people in one category may be equally
closely related to a focal woman as those in another, they stay with
her for different amounts of time and for different reasons. Residence
may thus acquire different qualities depending upon the factors under-
lying it.
Polly is Amy’s paternal grandmother; the reciprocal kin term for this
emotionally often close, caring and comfortable relationship (between
father’s mother and son’s children) is yaparla. Amy is in her late twenties,
and she has been married twice. Her first marriage was to a man from
Nyirrpi with whom she has a teenage daughter who spends most of her
time with her paternal grandmother in Nyirrpi. Amy’s second husband is
from Kintore and she has a five-year-old son with him, who usually stays
with Amy and sometimes with his paternal grandmother in Kintore.
Amy herself mainly lives in one of the Alice Springs town camps.
Then Amy became gravely ill. She told us that after several checks
at Alice Springs hospital, the doctors there decided they could not tell
what was wrong with her. Since her illness could not be determined
with certainty, everybody suspected sorcery, and Amy had to find a safe
place to stay and be cared for (this case is study is further discussed in
Musharbash 2008a). Neither the Alice Springs town camp, nor Kintore
or Nyirrpi seemed good places, since in all of them lived affines (in-laws)
of Amy — and affines, especially if marital relations are not too good
and there are fights over children, are the first suspects in cases of sorcery.
Since her parents are no longer alive, the place for her to go, then, was
to her yaparla, Polly. During her sickness, Amy stayed physically close to
Polly, sleeping next to her every night, and also shared her money and
food with Polly. Polly in turn looked after Amy and organised a number
of trips to go with her to other settlements to visit traditional healers to
find out the causes of and cures for her grand-daughter’s illness. Amy
stayed in the jilimi for 36 nights (while I was there), while her son
(Frederico) stayed with her for 28 nights.
In this instance, Amy and Frederico can be classified as on-and-off
residents who have a particular reason for staying in the jilimi for a
substantial period of time (Amy’s illness). Once recovered, Amy went
back to Alice Springs, and when she came to Yuendumu after that she
generally stayed in other camps. During Amy’s illness, her daughter
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In the jilimi: mobility
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Yuendumu Everyday
home with her, and so forth. The point is that in all her usual residences
there would always be a place for her to stay, and if she felt like it she
would come ‘home’ to the jilimi and simply crawl under the blankets
with Joy and Kiara.
Kiara’s and Charity’s sister Jenna stayed in the jilimi for 18 nights,
and like Charity, Jenna oscillated between a number of places: her young
husband’s parents’ place, Mt Theo outstation and the jilimi.9 Being in a
somewhat more stable marriage than Charity, Jenna would only stay in
the jilimi when fighting with her husband, or to be with her siblings if
all of them were at the jilimi at the same time.
Megan, the eldest sister, stayed 20 nights in the jilimi. She falls into
the category of on-and-off resident as well, but her story is somewhat
different to the others. Megan had been married to a man from the south
and lived there until their marriage deteriorated. When she returned to
Yuendumu she moved in with Joy, and lived in the jilimi as a single
woman until she got married again and moved with her new husband
into her close grandfather’s camp. Megan’s and her sisters’ patterns of
and reasons for staying were quite different; however, they all can be
classified as on-and-off residents and they all came to stay with Joy.
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In the jilimi: mobility
period they spent in the jilimi while looking for a new place (Adrian
stayed for 48 nights and Stella for 54), they can be classified as regular
residents. When Adrian was elsewhere, their yupukarra ceased to exist
and Stella shared a yunta with other women in the jilimi. While the
arrangement of having a yupukarra in the jilimi did not please anybody
(neither the couple nor the other residents), everybody agreed that for
the time being there was no other option. During the day, Adrian was
at work at the Mining Company or away with his brothers and cousins,
and he had previously, while unmarried, often been present in the jilimi
at mealtimes anyway. The only difference during their stay in the jilimi
was that the door to Celeste’s room was closed at night and access to the
room was restricted, symbolically marking the separation between jilimi
and yupukarra.
Jemima and Angelina are the six-year-old twin daughters of Camilla,
who is Celeste’s deceased sister’s daughter, making the twins Celeste’s
close grand-daughters and Polly’s great-grand-daughters. Celeste
and Camilla spend much time together and also work together at
Yuendumu’s Childcare Centre. When Camilla is away shopping in Alice
Springs or taking courses at Batchelor College, she asks Celeste to look
after her daughters. Angelina and Jemima spent 20 and 15 nights in
the jilimi respectively. The difference between the two girls’ stays is due
to the fact that while Camilla looks after Angelina, her twin Jemima is
being brought up by her paternal grandmother who spends substantial
amounts of time in Murray Bridge. Thus Angelina sometimes comes
to stay with Celeste on her own, while her twin Jemima is only ever in
the jilimi when Angelina is there too. When they stay in the jilimi, they
always stay with Celeste, not with Polly.
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Yuendumu Everyday
when their relations were smooth. More often, she would set up her
mattress next to some other people staying at the jilimi at the same
time, for example with Polly’s daughter Marion when she was staying
in the jilimi, or with Joy’s grandchildren. Sharon spent 29 nights in the
jilimi, and is thus yet another on-and-off resident. But due to her age
(she is in her early fifties) and her familiarity with the jilimi and its
residents, she moved into the jilimi as a free agent as much as she did as
Nora’s daughter.
Nora’s sister Leah (in her late fifties) and Joy’s half-sister Eva (in her
fifties), who have co-resided for many years, came to stay in the jilimi
with Nora twice for different reasons. The first time they came to care
for Nora, who had returned home from Alice Springs after having been
hospitalised with pneumonia. The second time they came because of
trouble at their former residence. Leah and Eva for a while had been
living with Leah’s daughter and her husband. However, that camp was
known to be a locus of violence, and after things got out of control
one too many times, they moved into the jilimi. With them came Ray,
Nora’s grandson and Toby’s half-brother. Previously, Ray had moved
between the two camps, and stayed alternately with Nora or with Leah,
as a regular resident in either camp. Now, these women, together with
their half-sister Pearl, who had been staying with Nora already, and
Nora’s grandsons, formed a tight-knit group, sharing resources between
them and living in close proximity. In fact, when Nora received ‘her own
house’, they all moved into that house together (except for Pearl who
joined them there much later). In early 2005, they still lived in that camp
joined by a continuous flow of people coming to stay with them in turn,
and later that year moved en masse into another house because their
previous one had come under a death-related taboo (yarrkujuju, see also
Musharbash 2008b) when one of Nora’s grandsons passed away.
Two things are interesting here. First, Eva, who is more closely
related to Joy, stayed with Nora because Leah did so. This is a case were
friendship ties, those between Leah and Eva, were more significant than
kinship ties, those between Joy and Eva. Second, while Leah and Eva
were on-and-off residents in the jilimi where they did not stay long and
for necessity only, once they moved into the new house with Nora, all
three of them, as well as their grandsons, became core residents there.
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yunta on the spatial margins of the jilimi, in many respects she paralleled
the focal women in terms of access to rights and space within it, as well
as through the gravitational position she was in. When living in the
jilimi, she was often joined there by her daughter-in-law and a number
of grandchildren.
A final woman in this category was a close sister of a former focal
woman who had passed away some time ago. Since this woman was
also a close classificatory relative of some of the current focal women,
she continued to stay at the jilimi for a period before moving elsewhere
for good.
The 48 sporadic residents (1–6 nights) are similar to the on-and-
off residents in that they are made up of actual and close classificatory
relatives of the focal women. Some differences between the two categories
are that the former includes ex-focal women and that persons in the
latter stayed in the jilimi less frequently and for shorter periods, often
for one night only (during the census period, that is). It can safely be
assumed that these patterns of occasional short stays were repeated at
other times.
Those latter, most infrequent short-term stayers fall into two dif-
ferent kinds. Firstly, there were those who would have a number of
other options to explore before staying at the jilimi, whereas for many
individuals described as regular and on-and-off residents the jilimi
would be the first choice — after their own ‘home’. And secondly,
such short-term stayers are also made up of those who came from other
settlements and stayed in Yuendumu for brief periods only. While only a
few individuals in the above categories have their usual place of residence
elsewhere than Yuendumu, a striking difference about sporadic residents
is that almost half of them are individuals usually based elsewhere. Many
of these are grandchildren of the focal residential women visiting from
other settlements, as well as sisters and cousins. And while no adult core
resident is male (some of the children are, though), and the categories of
regular and on-and-off residents contain one and two men respectively,
four of the sporadic residents were men. Men do stay overnight in the
jilimi, but not many and rarely for very long. These men were sons
and grandsons of the focal women, and two were the husbands of the
daughter and grand-daughter respectively of one of the focal women.
It is important to note that all these (named) residents can and do
trace their relationships to people already staying in the jilimi, in many
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In the jilimi: mobility
cases (but not exclusively) to the focal women. Apart from myself and
possibly some people in the sorry mobs, there were no ‘strangers’ who
came to stay in the jilimi. However, a genealogical link alone is not
enough cause to come and stay in the jilimi; what matters is the actuality
of such relationships. Such relationships need to be lived, sustained
and continually affirmed — practices which create the formation of
personal networks.
I discovered these personal networks through participation rather
than by being told about them. Warlpiri people do not generally teach
the anthropologist by answering questions; they insist on one doing
things (see also Harris 1987; Morphy 1983; Myers 1986a: 294). ‘You
did this and now you know’ were words I often heard. In respect to
mobility and residence choices it is only in retrospect that I realise what
I have learned, and created. When I now return to Yuendumu I have
choices as to where and with whom to stay. There are those people I am
closest to, but should they be elsewhere I would not be homeless. There
are a number of others whose camp I could join with equal ease. I cannot
approach somebody and tell them, ‘I’ll stay with you for a while’ just
because they are my classificatory mother, sister or daughter; however,
I can do exactly that with somebody who is part of my personal net-
work. Personal network relationships are based on shared experiences,
shared residency in the past, and continued practice of reciprocal
exchanges based on demand sharing. To be able to walk into a camp
with one’s swag and put it down next to a person there, to stay there for
an unspecified period, is possible only once one knows from whom one
can demand hospitality.
This perspective on the personal trajectories of people’s residentiality
alerts us to the fact that the classification into four types of residents
according to the length of stay is arbitrary in some crucial regards. It only
makes sense from a camp-centric perspective, during a specific period of
time. Had I taken the same census a year later, people who were in one
category might have been in another, or in none at all; others that did not
stay there when I actually did take the census, stayed at the jilimi before
or after, and so forth. Most importantly, if one examines the residential
trajectories of individuals, one would find that each person falls into
each category in different camps at different times. For example, while
Polly, Joy, Celeste and Nora were core residents of the jilimi during the
census period, they were not so a year before or after, and, what is more,
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during the census period they often stayed in other camps — where in
turn they fell into one of the other residential categories.13
Both the camp-centric and the personal network perspectives provide
crucial insights into contemporary mobility. The quantitative data
presented here express the high rate of movement of people through the
jilimi and are characteristic of social life throughout the settlement. The
qualitative data suggest that people’s mobility patterns reflect their need
for sanctuary when ill or involved in marital disputes, their involvement
in mortuary rituals, their visiting of relatives, their need for or provision
of help, their arrangements for childcare, and simply socialising. Above
and beyond the particular reasons for any move stands the common
practice of creating and the need to maintain personal networks through
face-to-face interaction, for Warlpiri social relations depend on such
networks. Mobility is a taken-for-granted aspect of life; in order to
create and maintain the conditions for one’s own mobility one needs to
accommodate the mobility of others.14
Thus, in order to truly understand mobility at Yuendumu, we must
also take a step back and look at mobility not only as a practice but also
as the value that it so obviously is. It shapes people’s everyday experiences
and their lives. Why should this be the case? A clue to this lies in
the Aboriginal English term for ‘staying at’ or ‘living with’, which at
Yuendumu is stopping. As Warlpiri residential patterns are processual, to
stop is an apt term underscoring the halt that the flow of people through
the camps comes to every night. In this vein, when I return to Yuendumu
these days, my friends and I reminisce about ‘that time we stopped in that
jilimi’, or, when giving somebody a lift home, a sensible question to ask
first is ‘where are you stopping?’. Stopping aptly characterises residential
patterns in a life where they change on a regular basis.
In the olden days people moved from one place to the next, where they
stopped and set up camp before moving on to the next place, where they
stopped again, and so on. The contemporary settlement of Yuendumu is
fixed in place, as are its houses. Yapa, however, continue moving — not
across their country as in the olden days — but in such a way that each
night, when putting up yunta, they stop, bring the events of the day to
a halt and arrange themselves in ever-changing camps in and around the
houses of the settlement.15
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In the jilimi: mobility
Conclusion
At Yuendumu, the flow of people is halted each night when people stop.
Warlpiri people move; nobody lives in the same place with the same
people permanently. Rather, people follow their own paths, which
continually crisscross and occasionally run parallel to those of others,
forming flows of people through camps. These flows of people through
the camps cannot be captured within the standard terminology. Applying
terms such as ‘the household’ in this context would entail the creation of
analytical boundedness in a situation where there is none.
Nonetheless, I would like to examine one last definition of the
household, or rather in this case, the ‘residential group’16 as it illustrates
its own non-applicability in the Warlpiri context in particularly pertinent
ways. This definition is the result of Verdon’s (1979) effort to criticise
the original concept of the ‘residential group’. He argues that it is futile
to define it by activities such as cooking, eating, pooling of resources
and labour, as they are commonly engaged in with others from other
dwellings. Instead, he proposes that the ‘residential group’ should be
defined by the only one activity shared exclusively by all people in
one dwelling, namely sleeping. Elaborating on the possible range of
relationships between sleepers, he says that
in every society with residential groups, one thus observes a
certain limit of internal complexity in their composition, some
kind of ‘breaking point’ which is only exceeded in uncommon
demographic, economic or physical circumstances (Verdon 1979:
420).
His proviso that this is true only for societies with residential groups
begs the question who these are. Maybe Warlpiri people do not fall into
this category. Or maybe the ‘uncommon demographic, economic or
physical circumstances’ of settlement life cause them to exceed ‘certain
limits of internal complexity’. Or, to make a third suggestion, maybe our
obsession with searching for bounded categories blinds us to the possibility
that reality (in some circumstances) is better understood without them.
The extensive internal complexity of residence in Yuendumu camps, I
hope to have shown, is the result of focussed agency, rather than random
activity. There are as many reasons to stop in the jilimi as there are people
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who do so on any one night. The flow of people through the camps
of Yuendumu is an expression of social practice being lived out, it is
the result of negotiated relationships, and we should interpret it as such.
The volume and rapidity of residential mobility is a direct consequence of
the way Warlpiri people organise their everyday life around relationships,
while the particular shapes residential mobility takes today are formulated
in dialogue with the permanent structures of houses and the settlement.
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to cold and from cold to hot weather. Often they turn into sandstorms,
making sleeping outside rather unpleasant, and the rooms and the
verandah are preferred options. However, often storms die down
during the night, in which case the usual decision is to move outside —
frequently to be awoken by small gusts full of sand in the morning. The
hot storms announcing the end of the cold season and the beginning
of summer, with the skies overcast and cloudy from the burning of
surrounding country, are oppressive. During this time, people become
cantankerous, suffer from headaches, and say that they generally feel
weak. One informant described these winds as karikurda — ‘upside-
down-winds’ — and because of them ‘people get cranky and [have]
lots of jealousy fights’. Sleeping on the verandah, if possible, is much
preferred during this time and people announce this verbally. The same
response is made when there are strong willywillies (whirlwinds), which
sweep up and whirl around debris from a large area, turning items such
as sheets of corrugated iron into dangerous projectiles.
Then, there are the cold winds, the ones announcing the cold season,
but also ‘freak’ cold winds at other times. People detest cold winds, not
only because of the physical unpleasantness of the actual winds, but
because severe cold winds are associated with bad news: that is, death.3
Age-graded ideas about causality in relations to cold winds are discussed
by Keys, who says that ‘younger women described changing weather
conditions as causing deaths, older women saw the change in weather
resulting from a series of deaths’ (Keys 1999: 197, original emphasis). In
my experience Warlpiri people generally are aware that the cold winds
can cause illness, and especially so for the very young and the old and
frail, but the main concern, regardless of age, is that strong cold winds
are a harbinger of bad news. Cold winds make people want to sleep inside
or in more protected areas where they feel sheltered from the piercing
cold, but more importantly, people feel safer because they are sheltered
from the winds and what they may bring.
A further issue triggering discussions and making people prefer to
sleep inside or in a more sheltered position than usual is the presence
of jarnpa; also commonly known throughout central Australia and the
literature as kurdaitcha. The Warlpiri dictionary translates ‘jarnpa’ as ‘a
person who walks around at night in order to kill another person and
make trouble, with special powers to make themselves invisible, who wears
emu-feather foot covering to dissimulate tracks’ (see Meggitt 1955 for a
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Tacit negotiations
Putting out bedding at night is not a communally orchestrated effort.
Apart from the issues outlined above, it does not normally involve
debate, nor indeed does it engender much comment. Mostly, these
arrangements are made ‘automatically’, they simply ‘happen’. Someone
or other will get up first and get their bedding from a room or the
verandah, drag it outside into the yard and put it up at a place of their
choosing. Others follow in their own time and arrange their bedding
in a location of their respective choice. The result, however, is not a
random aggregation of swags strewn all over the yard, but a rather neat
arrangement of a number of yunta distributed over the jilimi’s space. All
yunta are oriented so that the sleepers’ heads point east (unless people
are sleeping in rooms or on the verandah, where spatial orientation is
dictated by walls and doors). Who sleeps next to whom in what yunta to
a large extent reflects general social relations and more specifically what
has happened during the day.
Logistics would be Celeste’s calling. In the jilimi, she was the one who
often ensured that there was enough firewood, that children were being
fed, that old women slept in a good enough shelter, and, when going
on trips, that all things necessary, from groundsheets to billycans and
water, tea, and meat, would be taken. She organised trips out bush to
get poles and branches to build proper windbreaks. Celeste was the only
person who took an active role in organising sleeping arrangements and
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In the jilimi: immediacy
the only one I ever encountered to frequently give directions and make
decisions about who should sleep where. Nobody else in the jilimi ever
showed any great interest in these matters. While often it seemed they
good-naturedly let Celeste take charge, when she was away or when she
took up paid work and spent less time in the jilimi, complaints started
arising. In particular a number of elderly women who were living in
the jilimi at the time had come to depend on her. They protested about
being neglected; general grumbling could be heard about the lack of
firewood, and so on — none of these accusations would be aimed at
anyone specific, but all lamented the absence of the kind of organisation
that they had come to take for granted. When Celeste was present, things
seemed to run more smoothly.
Most nights, after dinner, Celeste would get up and say to me, ‘Come
Napurrurla, let’s get the swags’. The two of us would go to her room, get
her large blue plastic groundsheet and take it onto the verandah or into
the yard to the place Celeste chose for us that night. After putting out the
groundsheet, making sure it was all smooth and in the right direction,
we would get the swags, Celeste’s first. She would put hers where she
wanted to sleep. Then mine. ‘Put it there’, Celeste would direct, usually
indicating either north or south of her own swag. Depending on who
else was staying in the yunta with us that night, she would direct them
too. ‘Napaljarri can sleep here, and Nangala there.’ Our activity would
be a sign for the others present to get up from around the fire(s) and
start their own preparations for the night. Their putting up swags into
yunta however normally included little or no discussion. As Celeste had
made a start, people not included in our yunta would set up theirs in
a distance and orientation to ours, mirroring what suited them and, as
I later learned, indicating their relations to us. Initially, however, these
ever-changing arrangements puzzled me immensely.
In order to find and understand the patterns of the social dynamics
underlying these continually changing sleeping arrangements, every
morning I drew a map of the previous night’s sleeping arrangements.
These maps are made up of a mix of Warlpiri iconography and written
directions. They include lines depicting individuals (shorter ones for
children, and longer ones for adults) with the name of each individual
written next to them. Horizontal lines above them describe the extent
of each yunta. I marked cardinal directions, described the location of
fires with asterisks, and if relevant, included indications where a fence, a
verandah, or the walls of rooms were.
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Maps of the first nights in the jilimi and how to read them
The night of 29 November 1998 was my first in the jilimi (Figure 12).
It was clear but unusually cold for November, so rather than moving out
into the yard, the old and frail women (Lydia, Bertha, Nellie and Lynne)
stayed on the verandah and put up their swags next to the fire on which
they had cooked dinner. Lynne had two little grand-daughters staying
with her, and they slept next to her on the same mattress. Nora and her
grandson Toby, who often had their own little yunta, had spent much of
the day with the old ladies (who are Nora’s sisters Lydia and Bertha and
her father’s sisters Nellie and Lynne). Since they were all getting along
famously during the day, Nora and Toby put their yunta up right next to
the old ladies, in front of Nora’s room on the verandah. (Note that the
alternative would have been for Nora and Toby to carry their bedding
out of Nora’s room past the old ladies and away from them, an action
contrary to the events of the day.) Toby slept, as always, on the same
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In the jilimi: immediacy
mattress as Nora (his grandmother who was bringing him up). Since the
verandah was warm and snug and there was marlpa (company) there,
old Nangala was put next to one of the women there, rather than being
taken out onto the yard to sleep next to her daughter Joy, close to whom
she usually slept.
In the yard, Celeste shared a mattress with her sister’s daughter
Josephine, who often stopped with her. Normally, Celeste’s ‘son’ Neil
(Josephine’s brother) slept under Celeste’s blankets, but since Josephine
took up his spot this night he stayed with his grandmother Polly. I slept
with Celeste and Josephine on one side, and Joy and her grand-daughters
on the other.
This was the first night I slept in the jilimi, and there were a number
of reasons why Joy and I had moved there that day. Moving from our
previous camp, where we had lived with Joy’s (divorced) husband and
a number of her grandchildren, to the jilimi somewhat decreased Joy’s
burden of looking after me. She was ‘the owner’ of one of the jilimi’s
rooms and closely acquainted with as well as related to the other core
residents of the jilimi. She could expect them to help her look after
me. This added help was doubly important as she had just switched
from working part-time to full-time at the school’s Literacy Centre,
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and thus had less time for me, especially considering that she was also
looking after her old husband, her old and frail mother and a number
of grandchildren.
Moreover, while Joy was my ‘first mother’, the person I knew best
and who initially looked after me, tensions had begun to arise in our
relationship. In retrospect, I suspect tensions had also mounted between
Joy and the jilimi residents as they had observed her directly benefiting
from and restricting from others’ access to my resources. The move to the
jilimi also meant that I became more of a ‘shared commodity’, pacifying
others but in turn furthering tensions between Joy and myself. Use of
my Toyota, access to which Joy had previously controlled tightly, caused
much friction. When Joy and I moved to the jilimi she had asked Celeste
to help look after me, that is, cook tea and damper in the mornings and
generally share the responsibilities of ensuring I was all right and did not
commit too many blunders.
Joy, wherever she went, usually had her grand-daughter Kiara with
her and often some of Kiara’s siblings. My sleeping position in between
Celeste and her ‘daughter’ and Joy and her grand-daughters indicated
my social position at the time. Sleeping in between them, connecting
their two otherwise separate yunta indicated their shared responsibility:
I was being looked after by both women and was not particularly close
to either.
Further west in the yard that night was a third yunta, comprising
Polly, Neil and Mabel. Mabel usually slept in her camp with her divorced
husband and her daughter’s family. At the time, however, Mabel was
gravely ill and it was hoped that her stay in the jilimi would help her
regain some of her strength, as there she could be looked after rather
than having to look after others. Most nights, her sister Greta stayed
with her, but as she was absent that night, Mabel shared a yunta with
Polly.
The next night was even colder, and all jilimi residents (including
Greta who had returned from another settlement) slept on the verandah
(Figure 13). On the eastern end was old Nangala, who always slept
yitipi (on the outside), ‘so that she could make wee in the night on the
side’. Joy and her grand-daughter slept next to Nangala, and I slept next
to them, with Celeste, Josephine and Neil on my other side. West of
them was Polly, and west of her the other old women who had slept the
previous night on the verandah, together with the same grandchildren,
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In the jilimi: immediacy
and then Toby and Nora. At the furthest end were Mabel and her sister
Greta and Greta’s grand-daughter, who stayed with Greta in the same
way as Toby did with Nora and Kiara with Joy.4
Variations of these two patterns — everybody on the verandah, or
one yunta on the verandah and one or two yunta in the yard with similar
social compositions — prevailed over the next week. Some small changes
were made when new residents joined the jilimi. For example some of
Joy’s other grand-daughters and one of her close daughters joined her
and Kiara, and another of Nora’s grandsons, Ray, joined her and Toby.
The next major shift occurred when Nora had a minor fight with one
of her sisters, and left the yunta of elderly women and instead made up
a yunta with Mabel and Greta. A few days later, after yet another minor
affray, Nora and her grandsons put up their yunta even further away
from the old women, taking up their previous and often later repeated
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habit of having their own separate little yunta, this time equally far away
from all other yunta. Mabel and Greta joined Celeste’s yunta.
None of these moves were ever discussed, especially not when actually
putting up the yunta in the evenings. In a way, it was as if the storing of
the bedding inside or on the verandah in the morning wiped the slate
clean of the affairs of the previous twenty-four hours. The day would
begin, and whatever it would bring would be reflected in the sleeping
arrangements of the next night, when people took their bedding out and
placed it where they felt (socially) comfortable. Sleeping arrangements
are a spatial expression of each person’s reaction to, interpretation of,
and statement about the happenings of the day, and as the following case
studies suggest, are read by others as such. Since these readings are rarely
discussed (but see below), and even though I had the maps, it took me a
while to come to understand and be able to read sleeping arrangements
myself. I can read the meanings of the sleeping arrangement maps of the
first few months I spent in the jilimi only in retrospect, and only with
the help of my notebooks in which I recorded the daily happenings.
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In the jilimi: immediacy
These frequent moves from one yunta to the next were triggered by
two separate objectives. The first was Greta’s concern about Mabel’s
illness and her — successful — attempts to involve as many jilimi
residents as possible in the care of Mabel. This raised awareness in
different social sets about Mabel’s needs and thus during the day, when
Greta was absent, there were a number of different people who looked
after and cared for Mabel. As a result, Greta and Mabel slept in different
yunta on successive nights.
The second objective was to do with the fact that Greta had once
been a core resident in the jilimi but was not any more. By sharing the
yunta of all new focal women present on successive nights, she made
an implicit statement about her relations to them: that she related to
all of them in equally congenial ways, that she did not prefer any of the
women to any others. In fact, her movements through the jilimi space are
an explicit political statement about her wish to maintain good relations
with all focal women of the individual yunta. Her spatial movements
from yunta to yunta within the jilimi also attest to her personality, as
a woman who seriously cared about the maintenance of amicable and
harmonious relations of all around her.
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by Joy and Celeste: that both would look after me and ‘shared’ access to
my resources. Accordingly (as indicated in Table 3), during the first 60
nights I stopped in the jilimi, I spent 23 nights sleeping in the middle
between Joy’s yunta and Celeste’s yunta, combining the two into one
long yunta. For 14 nights I was sleeping next to Joy; for 20 nights next
to Celeste; and three nights I slept next to other people in their yunta.
Table 3: My positioning in the jilimi for the first 60 nights
Positioning Number of nights
Joy one side — Celeste other side 23 nights
next to Celeste 20 nights
next to Joy 14 nights
next to neither 3 nights
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Figure 14: Sleeping arrangements for the nights 3–8 May 1999
Figure 14: Sleeping arrangements in Joy’s room for the nights of
3–7 May 1999.
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In the jilimi: immediacy
in the sand, while recounting their names, and the yunta is drawn by a
horizontal line above them.
Had a sand story been recounted about the night of 29–30 November
1998, the lines would have been drawn into the sand exactly as they are
represented in Figure 12, and the respective names would have been
spoken while each line was drawn into the sand: ‘Joy Napaljarri, and
the two Nakamarra here, then Napurrurla, Celeste, Josephine. And
there Mabel, Polly and that Japangardi. And on the verandah ...’. Even
a question such as, ‘Who went to Papunya Sports Weekend?’ would
generate a large sand drawing. This sand drawing would outline where
exactly different people from Yuendumu put up their yunta, how these
were positioned to each other, and where people from other settlements
camped. The speaker would always include a detailed description of the
actual sleeping order of people in the yunta he or she slept in, as well as
those other yunta the speaker had knowledge of.
While the explicit description of who slept next to whom and in
which yunta is an essential part of Yapa story-telling, it is of utmost
importance to note that neither in these stories nor during the actual
putting up of yunta are the meanings of the composition of yunta
ever enlarged upon. Actual sleeping arrangements and sand stories
themselves reveal these meanings, as everybody who sees them or listens
to them recounted knows everybody involved. A person who was not
present learns a lot from such a sand story. Warlpiri listeners can easily
make many deductions by being told that X slept next to Y, and that Z
did not. There is no need to verbally and publicly analyse the implicit
meanings, as they are all equally clear to all — and this rather oblique
way of relating stories of social relations has great appeal to Warlpiri
people in general.
The nightly sleeping arrangements are thus understood (but not
discussed) as summary statements about the impact of that day’s
occurrences upon webs of social relations and about the way each
person related to the others present — on that night. As much as people
understand the meanings implicit in nightly arrangements, they are aware
that both the meanings and the order may change as a response to the
social interactions the next day will bring. Verbal interpretation would
thus not only contradict Warlpiri decorum in terms of being explicit
rather than oblique, but also and rather unsubtly make a statement
about something that is constantly in flux.
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1979: 120), alerting us to the fact that the body is employed (and read)
on three interconnected levels: the physiological, the sociological and
the psychological. He provides a list of body techniques in which, listed
under ‘sleep’, there is an inventory of sleeping positions and contexts:
sleeping lying down or standing up, on a horse, in a bed, on a mat, on
the ground, under a blanket, alone, with others, in a circle, and so on.
He adds that ‘hundreds of things still remain to be discovered’ (Mauss
1979: 112). In exploring Warlpiri intimacy through ways of sleeping, I
am following Mauss’s call to sociologically investigate sleep.
Sleep is a physiological need. Our bodies must sleep in order to live,
we get cranky when we are tired, we feel great after a long deep sleep,
and so forth. Sleep is sociologically (or socio-culturally) organised, or, as
Mauss said, ‘the notion that going to bed is something natural is totally
inaccurate’ (Mauss 1979: 112). Sleep in this regard approximates most
closely some of Bourdieu’s ideas about embodiment, as sleep is socio-
culturally organised in terms of space, gender, protection, ritualisation
and forth.
In socio-cultural contexts in which ideas of separating private and
public, for example, are given moral priority, the sleeping person is
protected through various thresholds and institutions, and the acts of
preparing for sleep and re-entering waking life are ritualised (see among
others, Aubert and White 1959a, 1959b and Schwartz 1970). At
Yuendumu, sociality is formed through webs of personal networks, each
of which is established through numerous person-to-person relationships.
The distinction of public and private cannot play the same role in a
context in which relationships are extensive and always personal, and
formed around the tensions of autonomy and relatedness, or being boss
for oneself and looking after others.1 As a result, sleep is shared, within
certain limits. Marital status and gender dictate some of the spatial aspects
of sleep everywhere, through the ways in which marriage and gender are
conceptualised and spatially organised in everyday life. At Yuendumu,
as we saw, this happens through the separation of jilimi, yupukarra and
jangkayi. Marital sexual relations and marital sleep take place at night in
yupukarra, extra-marital sexual relations take place during the day and
away from yupukarra. As Warlpiri sexuality is defined purely through
heterosexual relations, all other non-sexual sleep, by implication,
happens in jilimi and jangkayi, reinforced through the simple fact that
in these places, blankets and mattresses are shared without connotations
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In the jilimi: intimacy
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In the jilimi: intimacy
Joy and Celeste contrast with Nora and Polly by having more than
one main immediate sleeping partner. Partly, this is due to the fact
(discussed in more depth below) that these two slept kulkurru (in the
middle of their yunta) more often than did the other two, and hence
had more people sleeping next to them anyway. Moreover, in both cases
I was one of their immediate sleeping companions (attesting to my
initial lack of independence more than to their closeness to me at the
time, I suspect).
In terms of the relationships between each woman and her immediate
sleeping companions, there are a number of noteworthy similarities.
Firstly, and underscoring the fact that the data derive from a jilimi, there
are few affinal sleeping companions: one daughter-in-law each, in Nora’s
and Polly’s cases, and one son’s son’s wife in Joy’s case. The most prominent
companions amongst all four women are mothers, sisters and daughter,
and grandchildren. Beyond this, Polly’s and Celeste’s companions
come from a wider range than do Nora’s and Joy’s, encompassing more
generations and more complex genealogical relationships.
Contextualising these statistical data with ethnographic background,
what do they disclose about these four women? Celeste’s entries in the
table are a testament to her intensely social nature and her desire to
be surrounded by people, especially younger relatives of hers. This is
attested by the number of people she slept next to, distinctly more than
Joy and Nora and from a wider range of relationships. Further, a lot
of these sleeping companions were from descending generations and a
lot younger than herself, underscoring the fact that she especially likes
looking after children. When putting up yunta Celeste often makes
conscious efforts of grouping as many people around her as possible
— very successfully.
What stands out about Joy and her data is the small number of people
she slept next to and the narrow range of their relationships to her. It is
this small sample of sleeping companions that says much about her as
a person. To explicate upon the list of relationships: the two ‘daughters’
who slept next to her were Lydia, her sister’s daughter whom she had
brought up, and myself. The two sisters were Nora and Polly, next to
whom she slept one time each when there was a long yunta on the
verandah. The mother was Old Nangala. Her two son’s daughters were
Kiara, who stayed with her the largest number of times, and Kiara’s sister
Charity, who stayed with Joy often. And lastly, Joy once slept next to
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Martina, her grandson’s wife, when she was staying in the jilimi. These
people come from a small and very close range of relations, attesting to
the fact that the ‘gravitational pull’ described for the four women was
much less intense in Joy’s case than for the others.
Polly’s entries in the table are illustrative of her independence and
her capacity to both be boss for herself and look after people.6 Polly is a
widow in her seventies, fully in control of her life and resources. Other
Warlpiri women of her situation and constitution often choose to form
close relationships with another person. They share their lives with either
another woman, particularly a close sister, in a similar age and position
to themselves, or with a grandchild, most often a son’s child, yaparla (as
for example do Joy and Kiara, Nora and Toby, and Greta and her grand-
daughter). These women tend to sleep next to and move about with
either their sisters and/or their grandchildren. Polly chose not to, and
by this exhibits a tendency toward more autonomous and independent
behaviour than most. As she often said, she had had two husbands and
brought up many children and grandchildren. Now she tremendously
enjoyed being her own boss without responsibilities for another person.
While she was keenly interested in what was going on in the jilimi and
what was happening in the lives of her large number of descendants
and age-mates, whenever possible she preferred to be in the position of
observer rather than participant. She also lacked the patience to deal in
great depth with or spend much time on things she considered trifles in
the larger scheme of things. Because she had experienced and witnessed
almost everything in her own life, a daughter with a philandering
husband, for example, could not expect sympathy from her but only
a ‘leave it, and find somebody else’. Her sense of judgment however
is keen and greatly admired and this is part of her independence: she is
a person other people seek but who does not seek nor needs to seek
others herself.
Generally speaking, Nora exhibited more solitary behaviour than
the other women (unlike Joy, who had fewer people around her but
spent more time with them). Unless it rained, or there were particularly
amicable relations, Nora did not join up with other yunta and neither
was her yunta regularly joined by others. Largely this was due to the fact
that she saw her stay in the jilimi as of short duration and not due to
her choice. She was waiting for ‘her’ new house to be built, into which
she would move with two of her younger sisters once it was completed.
In the meantime, these younger sisters lived in the camp of one of their
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the women took within a yunta: that is, how often each woman slept
yitipi and kulkurru. The first row lists the number of nights each woman
was present in the jilimi during the sixty nights. The second and third
rows give the number and percentage of nights each woman slept yitipi
and kulkurru respectively. The last row provides additional relevant
information about positioning, noting, for example, when women slept
in a single-person yunta or in a room, in which case yitipi/kulkurru
positioning could not be determined.
Nights present of 44 48 55 41
60 nights total
Yitipi 22 nights 5 nights 24 nights 27 nights
(nights/per cent) 50% 11% 44% 65%
Kulkurru 18 nights 35 nights 31 nights 13 nights
(nights/per cent) 41% 73% 56% 31%
Other 4 nights alone 8 nights 0 nights 1 night alone
(nights/per cent) 9% in room 3%
with children:
16%
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sleep yitipi so often points towards their authoritative role within the
nightly arrangements of the jilimi. The yitipi position is generally taken
up by those people requiring the least protection and able to provide
others with the maximum amount of security — both in the social and
physical senses. As these women are ‘at home’ in the jilimi, they are
more acquainted with it and therefore more often sleep yitipi, sheltering
those who have come to stay with them. Further, their yitipi positioning
is also a manifestation of their social seniority; they are mothers and
grandmothers, and with the exception of Joy, active in the ritual sphere,
hence knowledgeable in dealing with spiritual threats. They frequently
sheltered people in the kulkurru positions who were either younger or
much older than themselves, and in both cases the responsibility of
looking after lay with them, due to their relative age and their social
standing.
From this angle, and considering Celeste’s considerable pull of
residents into the jilimi, her low rates of yitipi sleeping are peculiar
(she slept yitipi only five nights). She slept kulkurru much more often,
having been on the inside position 73 per cent of the nights, which is a
much higher rate than any of the other women display (more than twice
as often as Nora and distinctly more often than Joy and Polly). These
choices, however, underscore Celeste’s nature quite well. Her sleeping
kulkurru, in the middle, so often is an expression of her achieving what
to her is her ideal of domestic bliss: a neat yunta, snug and warm, filled
with people she is close to and ideally with herself in the middle (=
surrounded by others). It also points towards another trait: namely, that
in daily social interaction Celeste sees herself and is seen by others as less
senior and authoritative than, for example, the other three women. Her
sleeping kulkurru so much more often than the others testifies to her
relative lack of authority.
A further reason why Celeste mainly slept kulkurru is that her yunta
was regularly connected to Polly’s. In these cases, Polly would be yitipi
on one end, Celeste somewhere in the middle and somebody staying
with her on the other yitipi end. While independent of each other in
most respects (except for their shared responsibilities in bringing up
Neil), Celeste and Polly relied on each other for resources in times of
need; and often also pooled resources when people came to stay with
both of them. Since they are mother and daughter, many of the people
who came to stay with them were equally related to both of them. In the
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case of adults — for example Marion, who is Celeste’s sister and Polly’s
daughter — this did not cause them to move close together and share.
Rather, Marion would take up yunta with one or the other. However,
there were many instances of children from other settlements coming
to stop with them. Generally, these were Celeste’s nieces and nephews
and Polly’s grandchildren, and in these cases Polly and Celeste often
formed a yunta together. Significantly, this never caused either of them
to move into the same yunta with Joy, whose visiting grandchildren were
Celeste’s actual nieces and nephews and Polly’s actual grandchildren, but
who were socially considered Joy’s by all, since she had adopted and
brought up their father, Polly’s son.
Polly’s positioning in yunta attests to her popularity and her capacity
to look after people when needed, as well as her independence. This
achievement is clearly visible in her sleeping patterns: she often sleeps
yitipi, in the position those people sleep who are able to offer the greatest
amount of protection. Moreover, she sometimes sleeps in single-person
yunta, always of course within the jilimi, as sleeping in a camp on one’s
own would be anti-social indeed. Her little yunta, when sleeping alone
was always positioned close to another yunta, thus not expressing social
disconnection but just independence. Her sleeping patterns illustrate her
highly successful (and idiosyncratic) management of the complementary
pulls between looking after and being boss for herself. Not only is there a
great number and range of people she sleeps next to, by far surpassing
the other three women, but she sleeps yitipi often, and sometimes even
in her own yunta.
Neither Joy nor Celeste ever slept in their own single yunta (nor can I
imagine them contemplating this), Nora did once. While in Polly’s case
this kind of sleeping pattern was a choice and a positive expression of
independence, in Nora’s case it was an instance of expressing displeasure
about and disconnection from the other jilimi residents (on a night that
her grandsons were absent). Nora slept yitipi much more often than the
other women (65 per cent, as opposed to 50 per cent in Polly’s, 44 per
cent in Joy’s and 11 per cent in Celeste’s case) because she slept in small
yunta much more often than the other women. On many nights she
shared her yunta just with one or both of her grandsons, often at some
considerable distance from the other yunta in the jilimi.
Lastly, how can Joy’s statistics be interpreted? Again, we find an
idiosyncratic explanation for the fact that she slept kulkurru slightly
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Conclusion
In the introduction to this book, I said that clues to understanding
the view(s) people take of the world can be revealed by analysing the
most routine issues of everyday life; and in this and the two preceding
chapters I have used the mundane occurrences of the flow of people
through the jilimi, the social composition of yunta and the positioning
of individuals within yunta to explicate on mobility, immediacy and
intimacy respectively. Naturally, the flow, the composition and the
positioning can only be separated in analysis; in real life they happen in
tandem. Equally, the three values — mobility, immediacy and intimacy
— feed into each other; none can exist in their contemporary shape and
form without the others.
Warlpiri people use their bodies to continually communicate these
values, to themselves, to others and to the world. The content of this
communication is about the state of social affairs. What is expressed
from a person-centric view, however, is the internal state of things.
Where one sleeps, how close to another one sleeps, where one eats, how
one walks, next to whom one sits, and a myriad of other actions express,
but never spell out, how one feels — about oneself, about others, and
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The camp does this as well, and in similar ways; it is the contents of
the ‘book’ which differ. Warlpiri people through and with their bodies
learn ‘their vision of the world’. In regards to intimacy this means that
living in camps, no matter whether in olden days or contemporary ones,
fosters, imparts and teaches intimacy. Sleeping is one of many possible
practices, or, in Mauss’s terms, body techniques, and is both socio-
culturally regulated and a sphere for self-expression. That is, the body
is not only an instrument of learning but also an instrument that is
‘played’. Nobody is slave to the embodied rules, but everybody finds
room within them to express themselves — and the rules allow for
others to read such expressions. How much one engages in the pursuit
of such knowledge and how many people one opens the self to changes
from one person to the next.
As the comparisons suggest, Polly’s positioning in the world is vastly
different from that of, say, Joy — a difference that is both expressed in
her sleeping arrangements and perpetuated through them. The small
numbers of Joy’s co-sleepers are a manifestation of the size of her personal
network, which is dwarfed by the size of Polly’s. Personal choice, personal
inclination, personal ability as well as age are all contributing factors.
Intimacy, at Yuendumu, means knowing others through under-
standing (being able to read) how they position their body in the world,
and, expressing one’s own selfhood in the same subtle way. This is not to
say that verbal communication does not serve similar purposes, but that
there are specific ways in which Warlpiri people engage through their
bodies with domestic space and the world, as the example of sleeping
suggests.
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111
chapter 7
At night, the jilimi (or any other camp) shelters its residents, those
people who sleep there. Who sleeps in which camp and next to who, I
previously declared, is related to social engagement during the day. Here,
I present and analyse examples of such daytime social engagements of
jilimi residents (and others), showing how these interactions cultivate
— and are cultivated by — mobility, immediacy and intimacy.
The relationship of daytime activity and the restfulness of night
has also been elaborated upon by Sansom in regard to the relationship
between spatiality and sociality in Darwin fringe camps, about which
he says:
Although there is a day and night contrast between the camp
doing and reforming and the camp resting and formed, people
in both the active and the resting state should locate themselves
in places where they have reason and business to be. Unrolling a
swag ‘one side’ and spending long day-time hours ‘other side’ are
contrary allocations of time. They raise the issue: ‘Which way you
bloody think you goin?’ (Sansom 1980: 111)
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its sociality. This is the time when the first visitors from other camps
might come over to share breakfast (or people leave the camp to do so
themselves elsewhere). Breakfast is a sociable time, with people eating,
chatting, and discussing their nightly dreams or their plans for the day.
Once breakfast is finished the cooking fires are allowed to burn down,
unless it is cold, in which case they are turned into warmth fires for those
residents remaining in the camp. Bedding is put away, and residents with
a job, a hunting trip planned or any other task at hand leave the camp.
Usually only the old and infirm and young children remain in the camp,
with a few people to look after them and keep them marlpa (company).
They pass the time chatting, playing cards, working on acrylic paintings,
making carvings and so on. Older children go to school, play in the
camp or may go to find friends to play with — and often take off not to
be seen again until dinnertime.
Around lunchtime (kala-rla) the camp fills up again. Many eat lunch
away from the camp at work, or at the shop’s Take Away. For those who
come home to the camp, lunch is a more individual and briefer affair
than either breakfast or dinner, and not highly structured. Sometimes a
large pot of soup is made, from which everybody who comes to the camp
for lunch serves him or herself. After lunch, some people return to their
jobs, or go hunting or for a drive or walk around the settlement to see
what is going on, and the remaining people stay in the camp. Especially
in summer when it is overpoweringly hot, a camp after lunchtime is made
up of groups of people congregating on blankets in any available shaded
place, dozing, reading magazines, de-lousing each other, discussing what
happened earlier in the day and gossiping.
As the afternoon (wuraji) wears on, many people who had been
elsewhere return to the camp, and others from other camps may come
visiting. By now there will be large groups of people sitting on blankets,
socialising; this is also the time to start getting firewood. As it gets dark,
most visitors leave the camp they are visiting for their own camps, and
the cooking fires are started again. Dinner is a more intimate affair of
people gathering around ‘their’ cooking fires in small groups, sharing
food and company. A large billy of tea is cooked on each and shared by
the group of people using that particular fire. Individual women around
one fire put meat they each bought (or received as gifts) on the fire and
then share it with those they are looking after.4
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grandmother, or the whole day, e.g. an old lady coming to visit a resident
old lady to pass the day with her.
There may be one breakfast fire to each yunta; however this is
unusual. More frequently only one or two fires are lit. Fires are located
a little distance from the yunta, so as not to wake up the sleepers with
the clatter and the smoke. By and by, as the other sleepers wake up, they
gather around the breakfast fires according to their closeness and the
state of relations to the damper-making women. Seating arrangements
around breakfast fires could be mapped in a parallel way to sleeping
arrangements in yunta. In retrospect, I wish I had taken regular maps
of the number and locations of breakfast fires, and especially of seating
arrangements around these fires. But breakfast-time was when I wrote
up my fieldnotes. It was the only time I was able to write without being
interrupted, and accordingly I scribbled madly while drinking my tea
and eating damper, without time to note too closely what was going on
around me. As soon as I put the pen down ‘the day started proper’ and I
was too busy for further note-taking, and breakfast was over in any case.
I therefore cannot produce any such maps, only some general statements
about breakfast fires and seating arrangements that such maps would
have provided and underscored.
Unless relations between yunta are really bad, there are fewer breakfast
fires than there are yunta. The reordering of people from a number of
yunta where they slept to a smaller number of breakfast fires where they
eat points towards a beginning of an increase in the volume of sociality.
The state of restfulness of the night is lifted by opening up the more
intimate formations of yunta. Breakfast fires invite people to begin the
day through increasing contact with more people.
Which fire to choose and where to sit depends on similar issues to
— and is conducted in an equally non-verbal manner as — the nightly
establishment of yunta. Invitations are not issued. People get up from
their yunta and walk over to a fire of their choice. This choice depends
upon who else is sitting there, who one would like to sit next to or not
sit next to, how much room there is around individual fires, which way
the wind and smoke are blowing, and similar issues.
Sometimes (especially after the redistribution of flour after ritual,
discussed below), there may be a number of breakfast fires in the jilimi,
on all of which tea is cooked, and around each of which people sit and
eat their breakfast, but only one fire for the production of damper. In
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this case, people eating breakfast at one of the other fires get up, get
their damper from the damper-making woman, and return to share and
eat it at their fire. Other food items such as butter or jam are generally
shared by the people around one fire, and if relations between different
fires are good, may also be passed from one fire to the next. People
from neighbouring camps may also come over to ask for some butter,
jam, sugar or salt.7 Closely related people residing in another part of
Yuendumu may drive over to request one of these items if they need
them and know that they are available in the jilimi.8
The fire one chooses to sit at is the fire where one eats. Parallel to
the way one sleeps in only one yunta, one eats at only one fire. A major
difference to yunta is that breakfast fires may be joined by people from
other camps, especially by younger people coming to receive their share
of their older (always female) relatives’ food. Others who come to pick
up damper from a breakfast fire to take over to their own camp may
briefly join in; however they usually eat elsewhere.
The mood around a breakfast fire depends upon a number of issues. If
relations are good, or there is enough firewood available for a number of
breakfast fires, breakfast can (and usually is) a sociable yet homely affair.
If relations between yunta are uneasy and a shortage of firewood forces
people to share a breakfast fire despite their personal inclinations, then
people tend to cut breakfast-time short. Lastly, as happens frequently,
particularly towards the end of the fortnightly pay period, there may not
be any food in the jilimi, and in this case only tea is boiled and quickly
drunk, and then the fires are left.
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Intimacy, mobility and immediacy during the day
in turn, is more public than damper made from privately owned flour,
and less public than the damper distributed in central gendered ritual
distributions described above. Firstly, it is passed on to all the residents
in the jilimi, and to the sons who had passed on the flour in the first
place. They come to the jilimi every morning to receive damper for
themselves and residents of their respective camps while the flour lasts.
Neighbouring camp residents may also come over and ask for a damper
or two, if their senior female residents did not receive flour from the
ritual. This goes on every morning for as long as the flour lasts (as this
kind of flour often comes in numbers of 20-kilogram buckets, it may
last for a week or two).
It is after mortuary rituals and other ceremonies involving the dis-
tribution of items such as flour that the above described central damper
production takes place in the jilimi (and other camps), where all damper is
produced on one fire and eaten around many. One woman is responsible
for turning this flour into damper, and the damper rather than the flour
will thus be further redistributed. Damper made from this flour is not
public in the sense that it passes to all and sundry, but its distribution is
more extensive, and crosses more camp boundaries, than that of damper
made from privately owned flour. Once this flour is gone women fall
back on their own flour, and distribution of damper made from this is
much more limited.
Breakfast at Napperby
To further illustrate the significance of damper production, I describe
a breakfast we made and ate at Napperby (also called Laramba), a
mainly Anmatyerre settlement about 100 kilometres east of Yuendumu.
Polly, who has part Anmatyerre heritage herself, and many of her close
descendants, try and go to the Laramba Sports Weekend every year, as
they have many relatives there. I went with Polly, Celeste and some of
their close relatives to Laramba Sports Weekend in late August 2000,
and we camped in the creek, just near the entrance of the settlement.
Napperby Creek is a magnificent camping spot, wide enough to allow
for the comfortable putting up of many yunta, with large ghost gums
providing shade. All people who came ‘for Sports’ from Yuendumu
camped in the creek, and we took up a position at the northern end,
furthest away from the road that crosses the creek into the settlement.
Our camp was made up of a number of yunta, all sheltering close
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descendants of Polly. Polly herself, in a yunta with Neil and Amy, was in
the middle of our camp. North of hers was a yunta with Gladys, her close
sister, and Gladys’s daughter Sandra, and Sandra’s son Pete. North-east
of them were Polly’s daughter Marion and her husband. South of Polly
was a yunta with Celeste, her ‘son’ Brian, and myself. South-east of us
slept Gladys’s other daughter Kate in a yunta with Polly’s granddaughter
Camilla, her husband, and their daughters Angelina and Jemima, and
south of them was Celeste’s adopted daughter Tamsin and her husband.
In the morning, we congregated around one breakfast fire and were
joined by more of Polly’s relatives: two of her grown-up grandsons and
their children, and a son of Gladys’s, his wife and child. Polly sat in
the middle, surrounded by her relatives, next to the fire and positively
turned into a damper-producing machine. The breakfast party quickly
transformed into a carnivalesque scene with everyone shouting for more
damper, the jam, some tin-of-meat; demanding spaghetti, the knife, tea,
sugar; passing salt one way and meat the other; becoming louder and
louder, everybody talking over everybody else and, most memorably,
lots and lots of laughter. At some point, Camilla said to me, ‘Oh, I am
happy. All the family together. This is good!’
I found that this breakfast was a celebration of relatedness. The
sharing of food and the space around the breakfast fire, being grouped
around Polly who churned out the damper, created a euphoric feeling of
togetherness. Polly was central to this in a number of ways. Literally, she
sat in the middle, next to the fire. She was also the common link through
which all persons present could trace their relationships. And while
everybody contributed to the breakfast with additional items such as
tinned meat and jam, the staple, damper, came from her. The celebratory
mood this breakfast projected was due to it being an anomaly. Not only
was there an abundance of food (very unusual), enough for everybody
to truly fill themselves, but there was an abundance of closely related
people who did not usually share their breakfast with each other. In fact,
with slightly varying compositions, the only other times I experienced
breakfasts similar to this one were at other Sport Weekends, which is
when relatives living afar meet in great numbers.
Polly’s centrality as a damper-producing woman, and, in this case, her
role of ‘matriarch’, is what bound people together. Goodale (1996) has
described the role of senior wives and female heads of households, so-
called taramaguti, in the Tiwi Islands.12 There men tried to acquire large
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Cruising I
When a person has no particular task at hand, the thing to do is to go
cruising. At Yuendumu the usage of the term cruising is largely limited
to describing the activity while driving around in a car. There is no
specific word to designate the same activity performed on foot, and I
use cruising to describe both.14 Cruising is more exhilarating and more
fun in a car, but since cars are not always readily available, it is more
regularly performed on foot. Cruising entails leaving the home camp and
heading towards one’s usual stops: camps of close relatives, the shop, or
the locations of specific organisations and institutions where one knows
or expects to find people to talk to and hang out with. From the first
stop one is propelled on to the next depending on who is there, what
kind of news and gossip are exchanged and what is going on at the time.
This is repeated at the next stop. To give an example:
In the morning after breakfast, Lydia, who did not have anything
planned for that day, decided to start the day by walking over
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Cruising II
From a personal perspective, the trajectories of cruising take an individual
from place to place in their personal fashion. From a spatial perspective,
the practice of cruising means that people’s trajectories cross and overlap
in some places more than in others, making them points of convergence
for a great number of individual cruising paths. At Yuendumu, the Big
Shop is such a place of intensified sociality due to overlapping cruising
trajectories. Since most people shop for each meal, there already is
much coming and going at Big Shop. People also go there to cash in
cheques they have received, to spend money they have been given, to ask
people there for money, and quite simply to see who else is there already.
Another such main centre is the front of the Council building on mail
days, especially on paydays. People go there to pick up their cheques,
and other people go to receive (demand share) money from those who
received cheques. Others go because many people are there already, and
it is a good place to ‘hang out’ for a while and catch up on news. Other
places where trajectories meet in a concentrated manner at various times
are the buildings where Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Association is
housed, Warlpiri Media, the Women’s Centre, and around ‘smoko’ the
front of the school. And, some camps equally become the focus of many
individuals’ trajectories, the jilimi chief amongst them.
The jilimi I lived in was empty only under rare circumstances (when
a death occurred in the jilimi or when, very unusually, all residents went
away from Yuendumu at the same time). Many of the older women
resident in the jilimi stayed there during most of the day, attracting older
women from other camps to come and stay with them, marlpa-ku (for
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Intimacy, mobility and immediacy during the day
company), so that both the resident old women and the visiting old
women had company. These aggregations of old women in turn attract
younger women, who come past to chitchat with their mothers, aunties
or grandmothers for a while, which in turn attracts more young women
and children.
Paydays always meant that card games were played throughout
Yuendumu.15 These games in turn attract more people to come, either
as spectators or as participants, and turn into ‘gambling schools’ easily
encompassing more than thirty people or so. The jilimi regularly hosted
‘gambling schools’, causing frequent tension. On the one hand, residents
were happy about the diversion, participating themselves in the gambling,
and enjoying watching the games when the stakes were getting high. On
the other hand, after each such event complaints mounted as the camp
became ‘dirty’ with so many people being hosted, who ‘just leave their
rubbish’ and ‘use toilet all the time’. Moreover, these gambling schools
often continued all through the day and late into the night, hindering
the jilimi residents from getting any sleep. One woman or another would
turn the main electricity switch off and declare that the power meter,
which in Yuendumu needs to be fed by ‘power cards’ was empty — but
the gamblers always saw through the trick. Getting up in the morning
after a night of no sleep, with no money left and in a camp littered with
soft drink cans and chips packets, caused jilimi residents on a fortnightly
basis to declare ‘no more cards in this jilimi’. But, with most of them
being gamblers themselves all this was forgotten the next time cruising
patterns caused the jilimi to be the locus of big gambling schools.
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Intimacy, mobility and immediacy during the day
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Figure 16 shows the paths we took during this ‘h&t’ for a short
hunting trip mapped onto a mud map of Yuendumu. Drawing a map
of the paths a car follows during the ‘h&t’ before any one (hunting)
trip, one inevitably comes up with something similar to this, namely,
a representation of a finely spun web connecting a number of camps
and other places distributed over several of Yuendumu’s Camps, and
often spanning over the whole geography of the settlement. The Oxford
English Dictionary translates the expression ‘to hither and thither’ as ‘to
go to and fro; to move about in various directions’. And rather than
disorganisation being the root of this practice, it is the purposeful moving
about in various directions, the tying of connections, that underlies it.
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Intimacy, mobility and immediacy during the day
The actual paths taken and the connections created through them
are important, as is the activity that takes place at each stop. Usually
a stop, for example, at a camp so crowbars can be picked up, involves
intense discursive activity between the people in the car and the people
in the camp. During these brief (and sometimes not so brief ) periods,
all sorts of ‘essential’ information is exchanged, and if need be new
decisions pertaining to the planned trip are made. The people in the car
broadcast their intentions, the anticipated itinerary the trip will take, the
intended composition of people going, ideas about the time of return
and so on. From the people in the camp they receive similar information
about other trips in preparation, as well as any other news and gossip
the people in the camp have received from others passing by on their
respective itineraries of cruising and ‘h&t’. Information about other
hunting parties as well as other gossip is ‘exchanged’ and updated in
turn at the next stop so that within the one hour or so of ‘h&t’ both the
people in the car as well as most people in camps at Yuendumu will have
been filled in on anything that there is to know. This is one reason why
‘h&t’ often includes quick stops at any of Yuendumu’s organisations and
institutions, to quickly inform those who are at work of something just
found out that may concern them.
To believe ‘hithering and thithering’ is caused by lack of organisation
is to utterly fail to understand this practice, which fulfils a range of vital
purposes. It is a central social practice shaping both social relations and
the everyday. It underscores the fact that approval needs to be sought for
most actions, however implicitly, e.g. in the case study approval needed to
be sought for the purpose and destination from those people responsible
for the country the trip was going to be made to. The ‘h&t’ in the first
instance informs all people with a right to know of the intended trip and
gauges its acceptability in terms of destination, itinerary and compo-
sition of people going. Highlighting the importance of this approval
seeking is the fact that regularly after a bit of ‘h&t’ the planned destination
and/or itinerary and/or the composition of people in the car change. It
is not uncommon at all to start off with four people in a car planning
to go hunting out east and end up with seven other people going west
instead. ‘Hithering and thithering’ is about connecting people and
places. The map in Figure 16 outlines the paths taken, and presents
a visual image of the web thus spun during one particular episode of
‘h&t’. Realistically, what needs to also be taken into account is the fact
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132
Intimacy, mobility and immediacy during the day
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Intimacy, mobility and immediacy during the day
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136
Intimacy, mobility and immediacy during the day
argument as well. The yelling and screaming over that particular load
of wood, containing lots of ‘this one’s my wood’, ‘that one’s your wood’,
stands in stark contrast to the idea of demand sharing in connection to
firewood described above. This particular case of fighting over firewood
was fuelled by the emotions about a trip to Melbourne. Originally all
three women were to go on the trip but earlier that morning the Kardiya
woman who was organising the trip had told them that there was only
enough money for Polly to travel. Celia’s and Nora’s anger, due to their
disappointment about not being able to go, and some envy because Polly
was, did not get played out verbally. Instead the emotions about it were
transferred to the issue of ‘wood ownership’.
Lastly, as often as there were separate piles of firewood in the jilimi,
we had only one communal pile. This happened when relations between
residents were relaxed and amicable. On these days, people from different
yunta came on the one firewood trip and the firewood was randomly
piled onto the Toyota and then unloaded as one pile somewhere central
in the jilimi — for everybody’s use. The use of and negotiations about
firewood thus parallel other markers of the nature of social relations:
ideally, firewood is shared by all within the jilimi. Just as often, though,
rifts in social relations are expressed through the separation of firewood
into different piles for the uses of different social fractions.
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138
chapter 8
Tamsin’s fantasy
Personal networks
When Tamsin’s mother Chloe was a little girl, she was ‘given’ to Polly by
her mother, Polly’s close sister. Celeste, Polly’s own daughter, and Chloe,
Polly’s adopted daughter, grew up together (with their other siblings)
and later married their promised husbands: two brothers, Basil and
Rory. Chloe, who in turn had seven children, gave her eldest daughter,
Tamsin, to Celeste, who only had one son herself (see Figure 17).
Tamsin’s emotional relationships with these four close parental figures,
who brought her up and looked after her at various times and to varying
degrees, are complex. She grew up with Celeste and Basil while they
were married, and after their marriage deteriorated, mainly in a number
of jilimi with Celeste. However, she regularly went (and continues to
go) to Willowra, where Basil and his next wife live, to stop with them, or
with her yaparla, Basil’s and Rory’s mother. She also regularly stops with
her biological parents, Chloe and Rory — or, when they are involved in
one of their frequent marital disputes, with one of the two.
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140
Tamsin’s fantasy
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on the other hand, does not command anything like this focality. While
firmly anchored within her personal network, she is still at the beginning
of expanding it and has relatively little influence within it. Moreover,
emotionally, economically and socially she is highly dependent upon
other people in her network — being looked after rather than looking
after. The frustration that goes with this is voiced in her fantasy, where
she owns everything she wants and does not need to ask anybody for
anything.
Performative kinship
Relationships within these egocentric networks are, as are relations
at Yuendumu generally, always formulated as kin relations. However,
the classificatory nature of the Warlpiri kinship system, as well as the
extensive use of subsection terminology in everyday discourse, effectively
veil the finer nuances of how these networks are created. Sansom has
analysed similar realties in terms of performative kinship, which he says
is the north Australian mode:
Its spectacular features receive less than due emphasis in the
literature because most contributors evince interest in what they
call kinship structures, kinship systems and social organisation
where these umbrella terms shelter everything that pertains to
kinship save the conduct of relationships of kinship between
persons (Sansom 1988: 172).
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Tamsin’s fantasy
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Yuendumu Everyday
share a camp, a yunta, and their blankets harmoniously for a while, but
if relations deteriorate, they will gradually increase the distance between
them by moving into separate yunta within the same camp, by pooling
resources to a lesser degree, by beginning to use separate piles of firewood
and so on. These are ways in which a slow drifting apart from each
other is expressed spatially and socially. On the other hand, relations can
also be ruptured swiftly and suddenly, tensions may erupt in fights, and
new social distance is marked by packing one’s swag and leaving. Many
of Tamsin’s relationships are emotionally volatile, underscored by and
perpetuating her high residential mobility. The fantasy of a house of her
own, a space of ‘peace and quiet’ just for herself, must be contextualised
by the nature of her relationships to others.
Testing relationships
Demand sharing is a one of the social practices that on the one hand
underscores the nature of certain relationships and on the other serves to
test the nature of relations. The demands made in demand sharing take
on different qualities depending on the relations between people and
the item requested. Between close people a simple ‘yungka-ju X!’ (‘give
me X!’) suffices, as both the person demanding and the person giving
are aware that the transaction is part of their everyday way of relating to
each other. If the item demanded is something more than food, small
amounts of money, a dress or some such thing, then the demand is more
carefully formulated, as it is in the case of the person demanding and
the person asked not being quite so close to each other. However, while
the placing of demands is normally conducted in a socially accepted
manner it is also fraught with possible friction. To demand something
too big, to demand something inappropriate from another person, or
to place demands too incessantly may cause refusal. This creates anger
both in the person refusing and in the person refused. Indeed, Myers
links anger to compassion and says it is aroused ‘by a perceived rejection
of relatedness [and an assertion] of autonomy in the face of loss’ (Myers
1988b: 596).
This took a comical turn in the above-recounted conversation with
Tamsin. When she said that she will keep the door locked and not let
anybody in, I said, ‘What? Not even me?’ ‘Oh, okay’, Tamsin answered,
‘you can come and visit, but not Celeste!’ She said this within earshot
of Celeste, who was lying right next to Tamsin and following our
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Tamsin’s fantasy
conversation. Tamsin was fully aware that Celeste was listening and said
it in order to tease her. Celeste replied, ‘You can keep your house, you are
not my daughter anyway’ — playing along with the joke built around a
refusal to share and the subsequent negation of the relationship.
There is another element to Tamsin’s fantasy about her house full of
coveted items, where ‘every room has furniture in it. Sofas, and beds,
new blankets, and tables and chairs. And every room has a stereo in it,
and a television, and a video player and a playstation.’ These are not the
little things given in everyday demand sharing, like a handful of chips,
five dollars, a T-shirt, or half of one’s soft drink, these are the things she
sometimes tries to demand from Celeste and especially from Basil. ‘Can
I get a playstation, get me a playstation.’ They are also the things she
would declare Chloe or Rory would never get her. They are items much
more expensive than anything Tamsin can afford on her own — they are
not something she is in a position to give, they are something that she
wants. Wanting them in her fantasy house, owning them on her own
terms, thus also expresses a frustration with reality, where she is utterly
dependent on others for those big things (that, moreover, these senior
others often cannot afford themselves).
Demand sharing is one of many social practices of testing, establishing,
maintaining and breaking relationships; however the subtleties of the
actual relationships are worked and reworked also in more intricate and
more obliquely expressed ways.
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Above and beyond verbal language, and the more subtle manual sign
language, Warlpiri people use their bodies to continually communicate
with others and the world. The content of this communication is about
the state of (social) affairs. What is expressed, from a person-centric view
however, is the internal state of things. Where one sleeps, how close to
another one sleeps, where one eats, how one walks, next to whom one sits,
and a myriad of other actions express, but never spell out, how one feels
— about oneself, about others, and about the world. These are subtly
accomplished statements about the state of relations whose diplomacy
derives from their non-verbal execution. Through movement, within
camps and yunta as well as between and out of camps both autonomy
and relatedness are tactfully expressed. This was further explored in the
circumspect way in which during ‘hithering and thithering’ consensus is
sought for any planned activity (see also Povinelli 1993). It seems vital to
me that Warlpiri forms of intimacy are understood through the subtlety
of the ‘texts’ in which they are expressed, and the oblique manner in
which they are performed.
How then to interpret Tamsin’s bold statement of wishing for ‘peace
and quiet’ inside a house, a placing of her body (and self ) away from
those that surround her daily, by locking them out and herself in?
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Tamsin’s fantasy
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148
Tamsin’s fantasy
mentions who she stayed closest to, or when making plans to visit me
upon my return to Canberra: ‘I’ll come and visit you, and Celeste, and
Chloe, and Neil, and Polly, we’ll all come together’. Thus, while there
is a willingness, and sometimes even an eagerness in Tamsin to travel
beyond the points she knows and is familiar with, she does not seem to
want to go on her own.
Why then locate the fantasy house in Yuendumu?
Tamsin is keenly aware that Yuendumu is the centre of her universe,
not only spatially, but socially. Yuendumu is the place most of her close
relatives live, where her networks are the strongest and most supportive,
where she will always have people to fall back on, people whom she
cares about and is intimately linked to. Yuendumu is where she is from;
spatially and socially it is her home. Importantly, I think, her answer
to my questions encapsulates the desire not to escape the realities of
Yuendumu, but to have a life she is in control of and happy with exactly
at Yuendumu. It stems out of an implicit awareness that going to some
other place will not change anything, that the most difficult thing, the
‘biggest challenge’ (to use Who wants to be a Millionaire terminology)
for her is to achieve independence rather than interdependence, to make
come true her wish for a calm centre of protected selfhood situated in
the middle of life as she knows it. The ultimate fantasy is not to have full
control over her resources, personhood, domestic space, but to have all
this at Yuendumu.
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Conclusion
150
Conclusion
Building
‘We attain to dwelling’, Heidegger says, ‘so it seems, only by means of
building’ (Heidegger 1993: 347). In order to dwell, in order to live the
way we live, we need physical structures to live in, structures which allow
us to live the way we do. As Heidegger elaborates: ‘Building as dwelling,
that is, as being on earth, however, remains for man’s everyday experience
that which is from the outset “habitual” — we inhabit it, as our language
says so beautifully: it is the Gewohnte’ (Heidegger 1993: 349).1
This deeply embodied sense of continuation between the structures
we live in, the way we live in them, the way we think about them, and
the way in which, as a result, we build them, is manifest in both the
Warlpiri and the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking. Houses
through their very structure allow for and perpetuate stability, privacy
and future-orientation; while camps through their very structure allow
for and perpetuate mobility, intimacy and immediacy.
At Yuendumu today, Yapa live in and around Western-style houses,
the built structures of the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking.
This situation is somewhat reminiscent of Robben’s (1989) study of
canoe fishermen and boat fishermen, who lived in houses that were
physically exactly the same, but lived in them in crucially different
ways. The Yuendumu situation diverges from Robben’s example in that
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Yuendumu Everyday
the Brazilian fishermen, of both canoes and boats, even though living
somewhat differently in their respective houses, both live within the
same series of building–dwelling–thinking. Their respective differences
can be and are accommodated within (and inside) their houses, because
their differences are variations of the values underpinning their shared
series of building–dwelling–thinking. At Yuendumu, on the other hand,
the practices and values jar with the structures.
The reasons for this become clearer if we look at what exactly
Heidegger meant by ‘building’. Building does not mean that one has
to build one’s abode with one’s own hands, but that building is done
in a way that reflects practices of dwelling and thinking. At Yuendumu
(and in other Aboriginal settlements across Australia) however, houses
reflecting the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking have been
provided. At no point in time has there been any consideration for
accommodating Yapa practices of dwelling in the provision of houses;
building thus cannot be said to have happened by Yapa in Heidegger’s
sense. Houses are ‘built for’ not ‘built by’ Warlpiri people.
Depending upon funding, every year or two a few new houses are
built at Yuendumu — and they are much coveted. Everybody wants
one, and accordingly meetings about their allocation are probably the
best attended and certainly the liveliest meetings held by the Yuendumu
Council. There exists a long, much discussed and ever-changing ‘waiting
list’ for houses yet to be built. Once the people to ‘receive’ a new house are
identified, the ‘consultation process’ begins. Rather than any involvement
in the architectural process, such actual consultation is limited to taking
into account wishes as to design and location in the following ways.
Usually, the number of bedrooms has been predetermined by council
finances, and so if a three-bedroom house is to be built, the new ‘owner’
(in fact the person receiving the house does not hold legal title to the
property and is required to pay rent to the council)2 is shown three models
of three-bedroom houses that fall within the budget constraints of the
council. I have not been able to undertake extensive research on this,
but my impression is that Warlpiri people generally choose the biggest
house, or, if they are all of equal size, the one most closely resembling a
stereotypical ‘suburban’ style. Next, they have some control over where
the house is to be built (within given building constraints, sewerage and
power connections and so forth) and in some instances, the orientation
in space of the house on the chosen block.3 Lastly, and also of course
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Conclusion
Dwelling
Dwelling, according to Heidegger, is intricately interlinked with
building, but has some degree of primacy over it. He says that we ‘do
not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because
we dwell, that is because we are dwellers’ (Heidegger 1993: 350, original
emphasis). Dwelling, in Heidegger’s sense, is the way we are in the
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world; it does not, and it cannot, arise solely out of the structures we
dwell in but is reflected in them. What happens, though, if there are
two series that intersect, where building is done both ‘for’ and ‘by’, as
at Yuendumu?
Practices of dwelling, or ways of being in the world (which I have
analysed throughout this book through the example of Warlpiri social
practices of engaging with domestic space), are always formulated in
dialogue with the world. As the world today is different from that of the
olden days, so ways of dwelling today differ from ways of being in the
world in the olden days. For example, living in settlements, in prolonged
and close proximity to more people than ever before has meant, amongst
many other things, that marriage practices changed as a result, which
in turn has impacted on the ways in which jilimi have transformed
into phenomena of novel social complexity, purpose, size and number.
The jilimi I described in this book has certain commonalities with an
olden days one, but is inherently different. Moreover, the jilimi is both
a camp and a four-bedroom house. Warlpiri people dwell within this
intersection; they live in both simultaneously, camps and houses; they
speak English and Warlpiri, they know their country and how to hunt
and gather, they watch television, go shopping, perform Warlpiri rituals,
drive cars, work for the council or the childcare centre, go to church,
know which firewood burns slowly or gives most heat, which one
smokes. This does not, however, mean, as is often assumed in populist
models, that Yapa live in between worlds — one (that of the hunting
and gathering past) that is lost, and another (that of Western modernity)
that is not yet reached — or that they negotiate two worlds (a Yapa one
and a Kardiya one).
‘Dwelling’, Heidegger says, ‘is the manner in which mortals are on
earth’ (Heidegger 2001: 146).4 We experience the world through our
bodies, through ways of knowing that are embodied, and we continually
communicate with the world about this knowing and understand the
world through it. There is only ever one way of being, as there is always
only one body from which one experiences such being in the world. By
their being in the world and through their bodies, Yapa accommodate
the intersection of the two different series of building–dwelling–thinking
that characterises their contemporary lives. Dwelling at contemporary
Yuendumu thus means that people live in camps (and in houses), and
that these camps are in a settlement — a spatial manifestation, if ever
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Conclusion
there was one, of sedentisation, and the myriad of other colonial and
post-colonial processes flowing from it. Yapa continually deal with the
reverberations of this intersection of two different series of building–
dwelling–thinking, through transforming, adjusting and modifying
ways of dwelling, and thus absorb and accommodate the contradictions
posed by the intersection of the two different series, the contradictions
inherent in being fourth world people in a first world nation state.
Thinking
The third part in each of the series, thinking, is a way of being in and
understanding the world that is intricately linked to, arises out of, and
feeds back into building and dwelling. As Heidegger puts it:
Where the word bauen [building] still speaks in its original sense
it also says how far the essence of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen,
buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am,
du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich
bin [I am] mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs,
answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell. (Heidegger
1993: 349, emphasis in original)
And where in Germanic languages ‘to build’ equates ‘to be’, in
Warlpiri ‘ngurra’ equates camp, family, time and country. Each series, in
its own way, summarises notions of being in the world and of being a
person. Personhood, in the Warlpiri case, revolves around the tensions
of autonomy and relatedness. To live, shape, create, form, transform
and express personhood thus defined, mobility permeates everyday life,
immediacy is the primary way of being in the world, and intimacy is
expressed and learned in specific ways. These core values — mobility,
immediacy and intimacy — underpin Warlpiri sociality, Yapa ways of
being in the world, Yapa thinking in Heidegger’s sense.
However, through the ever-presence of the intersection of the
Western and the Warlpiri series at Yuendumu, the values underpinning
the Western series — stability, privacy and future-orientation (through
accumulation) — are there at Yuendumu as well. They may not be given
precedence in the ways in which people relate to each other and the
world on the level of everyday interaction, but these values certainly
exist in Yuendumu, and are often communicated to Yapa through the
criticisms by people who live within the Western series of building–
dwelling–thinking.
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156
Conclusion
157
Appendix
Yuendumu infrastructure
158
Appendix
159
Appendix
160
Appendix
161
Appendix
162
Glossary
163
Glossary
kala-rla — lunchtime
kapu — he/she/it will (do something)
kardirri — white, light in colour
Kardiya — non-Indigenous person, whitefella
karikurda — erratic wind that changes direction, ‘upside-down’ winds
karlarra — west
karlarra-wardingki — ‘those belonging to the west’, polite way of
referring to women
karna — I am (doing something)
-ku — suffix: to, for
kulkurru — in the middle
kumparri — thunder
kunarlupu — storm clouds, hail
kurdaitcha — see jarnpa
kurdu-kurdu — children, storm clouds
kurdu-kurdu-pinyi — to form clouds, make offspring, generate, form,
spawn, and procreate
kurlangu — belonging to
-kurra — towards
lawa — no
look after — to be in a relationship of responsibility towards (a child, a
ceremony, country)
marlpa — company, companion, companionship
-mayi — turning a sentence into a question, ‘isn’t it?’
munga — night
mungalyurru — early morning
mungalyurru-rla — as the sun comes up
munga-ngka — night-time, at night, in the night
ngapa — water, rain
ngati — mother, kinship term
-ngka — on, in, at; suffixed onto words with one or two syllables
ngunaka — lie down!
ngunami — to be, to lie, lying down
ngurra — home, camp, shelter, nest, ancestral place, country
ngurra-jarra — two camps, two nights
ngurra-jinta — one camp, one place, one night
ngurra-kurlarni-nyarra — (lit. camp-southside) = patrimoiety of
J/Nakamarra, Jupurrurla/Napurrurla, J/Nampijinpa, J/Nangala
subsections
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Glossary
ngurra-ngajuku — my home
ngurrara — country, fatherland, place, land, home
ngurrarntija, ngurra-wardingki — person belonging to a certain place,
countryman, householder.
ngurra-yatuju-mparra — patrimoiety of J/Napanangka, J/Napangardi,
J/Nungarrayi, J/Napaljarri subsections
ngurra-yuntuyuntu — place where many people lived for an extended
period of time, large camp, long-term camp
nullahnullah —Aboriginal English term for fighting stick, also kuturu
olden days — pre-contact and early contact times, characterised by a
nomadic lifestyle, a hunting and gathering economy and an elaborate
ritual life
pipa —paper, bible, church service, funeral
-rla — on, in, at; suffixed to words with more than two syllables
run around — having transient sexual relationships
sorry, sorry business — vernacular term for mortuary rituals
sorry camp — camp people sleep in during mortuary rituals
sorry mob — group of people who have travelled from other
settlements to participate in mortuary rituals
stopping — staying at, living with
story time — sitting around a fire with close friends and relatives and
exchanging news and gossip, remembering events from the past,
planning trips, and joking
visiting — coming and going from camp to camp for social interaction,
daytime activity
visitor — ‘strangers’, people one does not know but who are in
Yuendumu for some reason
wantimi —to fall
Warlpiri — name of people traditionally occupying northern part of
the Ngalia Basin, the Tanami Desert, Lander River, Hansen River
(see also Yapa), name of the language spoken by Warlpiri people
warlu — fire, firewood, hot, ashes, fireplace, hearth, cooking fire
warungka — deaf, forgetful, unable to understand or remember,
stupid, retarded, foolish, mindless, uncaring, feeble-minded; also
used for the very young and the very old: not fully knowledgeable
social persons
wirnpa — lightning
wiyarrpa —poor bugger, poor thing, sympathetic exclamation
165
Glossary
166
Notes
Chapter 1
1. Today, with a change in the Australian political climate, Yuendumu and
other places like it are no longer commonly referred to as ‘settlements’; the
new term of choice is ‘community’. This new term, although widely used
by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in everyday discourse, is
problematic in the context of this book, combining as it does the spatial with
a new ideology of ‘identity’ (see among others Hinkson 1999; Holcombe
1998; Rowse 1990, 1992; Trigger 1986, 1992). I retain use of the term
‘settlement’ to highlight Yuendumu’s origin as a government-instigated
endeavour concerned to bring about social transformation. This usage
allows me to distinguish between Yuendumu’s presence as a spatio-physical
entity and the people who live in it.
2. The connection between dwelling and being, with more specific
unidirectionality, is also found in Piaget (1951; 1954; 1956), who, in regard
to child development, emphasises children’s interaction with the spatiality
of the house as significant in their social and intellectual development of
motor, spatial, social and intellectual habitability.
3. The point about housing as a tool of social reform has also been made in
non-colonial contexts, especially as an attempt to ‘uplift’ the ‘lower classes’
in Western European countries (see for example Loefgren 1984; Kemeny
1992; Attfield 1999; Dolan 1999).
4. For more detailed accounts of Aboriginal housing policy, see (among others)
contributions in the volume edited by Heppell (1979a) and those in Read
(2000). For Yuendumu especially see Keys (2000), and for an ethnography
on Aboriginal perceptions of housing see Ross (1987).
5. This is not to say that the book stands in opposition to previous research
with Warlpiri people; indeed it is anchored within and heavily dependent
upon the large body of anthropological and other literature about Warlpiri
people. While I draw more extensively on some parts of this literature
167
Notes
168
Notes
12. The Yuendumu Cattle Company was transferred and became an Aboriginal
corporation, called Ngarliyikirlangu Cattle Company in 1979, and by the
mid-1990s had ceased operation.
13. The debate around welfare and Aboriginal entanglements with the state and
consequent dependency is extensive and on-going (see among many others
Altman and Sanders 1991; Altman and Smith 1992; Beckett 1985; Daly et
al. 2002; Martin 2001; Pearson 2000; Peterson and Sanders 1998; Sackett
1990; Sanders 1986, 2001).
14. Census data for remote Aboriginal settlements are notoriously unreliable
due to both high mobility and under-enumeration (see among others
Martin and Taylor 1995; Taylor 1996a, 1996b; Taylor and Bell 1996). This
is reflected in some of the Yuendumu population estimates made during the
main fieldwork period:
• The 1996 Australian Bureau of Statistics census gives 773 residents
for Yuendumu and its outstations, 137 of whom identified as non-
Indigenous (ABS 1998).
• The Health Centre Population Screening List for October 1997 gives a
total of 930 residents (Yuendumu Health Profile 1999).
• ATSIC’s Community Housing and Infrastructure Need Survey (CHINS)
indicates 875 usual residents (ATSIC 1999).
• The Territory Health Services surveys conducted in 1998 to 2000
found the following figures: In November 1998, of 818 persons living
at Yuendumu, 745 were Indigenous, and 73 were non-Indigenous. In
June 1999, of 721 persons living at Yuendumu, 640 were Indigenous,
and 81 non-Indigenous. And in August 2000, of 901 persons living at
Yuendumu, 795 were Indigenous and 106 were non-Indigenous.
15. The Warlpiri term ‘Kardiya’, supposedly from ‘kardirri’ for white or light
in colour (Hale 1990: 31), means Whitefella, referring to people of non-
Aboriginal origin generally (whether ‘white’ or not). The Warlpiri term
‘Yapa’ has a wide range of meanings. Its most general use centres on ‘human
being’ or ‘person’. Situationally, it carries more specific meanings. These
range from referring to black people in general (e.g. a comment frequently
made in connection with a World Vision ad filmed in Africa is: ‘Wiyarrpa
Yapa’ — ‘dear Blackfella’), or to refer to all Australian Aboriginal peoples (in
opposition to non-Indigenous Australians). In more localised contexts, it is
used to differentiate Warlpiri people (Yapa) from, for example, Pitjantjatjara
people (Anangu).
16. Reasons to move residence include: death-related taboos of former residences
(see also Musharbash 2008b), marriage, fights in former residence, and
availability of housing. Note that people may also have multiple residences
across a number of Camps (see Musharbash 2000 for examples).
17. The only other anthropologist paying close attention to these changes in
Camp composition is Dussart (1988, 2000: 41), who outlined six Camps,
albeit slightly different from the ones I found ten years later. See also Young
169
Notes
(1981: 66–9) for a description and map of Yuendumu’s Camps in the late
1970s, suggestive of future developments.
18. Other ‘suburbs’ where smaller numbers of non-Indigenous people reside are
East Camp, South Camp, and Inner West Camp.
Chapter 2
1. For a small selection of the anthropological literature on the socio-cultural
significance of dwellings, see Bourdier and Al Sayyad 1989; Burton 1997;
Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Cieraad 1999; Comaroff and Comaroff
1992; Cunningham 1973; Fox 1993; Kana 1980; Kuper 1980; Lawrence
and Low 1990; Loefgren 1984; Low and Lawrence 2003; Oliver 1975; Pine
1996; Rapoport 1969; Rybczynski 1987; Tambiah 1969; Uhl 1989.
2. I do not want to imply that life before sedentisation was static and
unchanging. What I am referring to is the period immediately preceding
contact, a period about which Warlpiri people reflect frequently. Moreover,
I believe that innovation took place in a number of domains, foremost
perhaps the ritual, but may have been less significant in regard to residential
arrangements, which are at issue here.
3. Another possible interpretation of east–west sleeping would link gender and
associated cardinal directions to sleeping orientation, meaning that women,
who are associated with the west, would be least accessible and, through the
sleeping orientation, least visible to single men in the east.
4. On the significance of threshold in Western-style houses, see Rosselin
(1999), who describes the complex social negotiations of entering Parisian
apartments without entrance halls, and Dolan (1999) on the erection
of porches and so forth upon purchase of previously rented houses in
Thatcherite England.
5. In the ritual context, the concentric circles relay Warlpiri ideas of the creation
of the cosmos through the deeds of ancestral beings (jukurrpa�) during
the creation period (jukurrpa), depicting their travels and the meanings
associated with this. Munn (1970) has described and analysed these notions
most elaborately in her paper on the transformation of subjects into objects
(and see critiques and discussions thereof in Dubinskas and Traweek 1984;
Morton 1987, 1989). Myers (esp. 1976; 1986a) has done excellent work
outlining the spiritual links between camp, country and people as expressed
by the term ‘ngurra’.
6. There are instances where concentric circles are used in sand stories, in
which case a number of concentric circles are connected by a line, with
the latter depicting a journey and each set of circles standing for an over-
night stop.
7. In the ensuing case studies of life in the camps of Yuendumu, I indicate the
presence or absence of a house if relevant.
170
Notes
171
Notes
uses the term ‘marlpa’ to denote more specifically ‘friend’. In this book it
carries the more general meaning of ‘sociality’ and ‘company’. Translating
‘marlpa’ as ‘friend’ causes analytical difficulties, since there already exists an
Aboriginal English term friend that at Yuendumu is reserved for relationships
with non-Indigenous people.
17. There is some overlap between such two-directional relationality — seeking
company for comfort and to provide comfort — and the responsibility of
‘holding and looking after’, which Myers (1986a) discussed in great depth
based on the Pinupi concept ‘kanyininpa’; see also Dussart (2000) for the
Warlpiri equivalent jinamardarni. ‘Holding and looking after’ captures not
only relations between people but also between people and country, and
ritual and spiritual matters, and is imparted from a senior position.
Chapter 3
1. Jilimi are social structures for men minimally during the day, and under
certain circumstances also at night.
2. Further, Meggitt says, ‘The circumcision ceremony is, among other things,
a public indication that a particular matriline will later provide the lad with
a wife. Other men, by acting as the boy’s jualbiri, those who decorate him
before the circumcision, guarantee that they will ensure that this matriline
honours its obligation’. (Meggitt 1962: 266).
Bell (1980b: 266) makes two corrections to this view, (1) that women
as well as men, are involved in these negotiations, and (2) that for women,
promised marriages are not ideal marriages so much as their first marriages.
3. A number of Aboriginal English terms are used to describe different kinds
of sexual relationships. (1) The terms boyfriend and girlfriend describe
a relationship different to a marriage mainly through its lack of co-
residentiality. Boyfriend/girlfriend relationships may be long-term and stable,
or short-lived, but generally entail a flow of goods from the boyfriend to
the girlfriend, continuing even after the relationship is over. (2) Running
around has the connotation of promiscuously looking for sex, and as a
term relates human sexual behaviour to that of dogs. Dogs, it is said at
Yuendumu, fornicate indiscriminately. They belong to people and have
subsection terms, or skinnames, but ‘they do not know’, i.e. they do not
behave according to the rules governing social behaviour the way humans
do/or should do. Thus, a person who is running around is somebody who is
looking for sex, regardless of with whom and under which circumstance.
4. All three kinds of marriages began with the girl’s or woman’s walk through
the camp to join the man.
5. Warlpiri people tend not to get married in civil or religious ceremonies (I
know of two exceptions, both involving a Warlpiri and a non-Indigenous
spouse, and living outside Warlpiri country). Living with each other in a
yupukarra, and public acceptance of this arrangement as constituting a
172
Notes
marriage, fulfil these requirements, even in the eyes of the Australian state.
When filling out forms, whether for welfare, taxation or other purposes,
Warlpiri people do not seem to be required to prove their marital status. And
it needs to be highlighted that a Warlpiri marriage substantially differs from
both a certified Australian marriage and a de facto relationship. Warlpiri
spouses are highly unlikely to share their financial arrangements, which is a
prerequisite for de facto relationships; and Warlpiri divorces do not require
courts and other administrative involvement.
6. Marriage is thus related to residentiality as well as to sexuality in particular
ways. Consider for example that, in local parlance, when a marriage ends
it is said to be finished, while the term to be divorced means to still have a
spouse, to still live with them, but to have ceased sexual relations. As one
woman put it: ‘I am divorced. My husband does not sleep close to me, I left
him, he drinks too much. He sleeps at home but we are not married. He
used to be strong, he had shiny eyes, he was stockman, always riding on that
horse, riding, riding, riding. Now, I don’t like him talking to me, it makes
me sick. He says: “Nungarrayi, how are you, I worry for you, sick woman,
wiyarrpa”. But I don’t like listening to him. He does not worry for me, he
just drinks.’
To be divorced means that sexual relations have ceased, while other aspects
of the marriage, such as co-residence, sharing of food, and care for children
and grandchildren, continue. Not living together any more constitutes the
end of a marriage.
7. The situation in regards to jangkayi is different. In the olden days, men moved
into jangkayi after initiation and stayed in them until marriage, which they
entered when significantly older then women. This means that most olden
days camps had jangkayi attached to them, while jilimi only existed when
women were widowed and until they re-married.
8. In the ideal case, in which children grow up in their parents’ yupukarra,
their mother provides the most immediate emotional support and, assisted
by others, especially her close female relatives, looks after the children’s
nutritional needs, upbringing and early childhood education (see amongst
others Hamilton 1981; Musharbash 2000). The father spends less time with
his children, but ideally is loving and caring throughout their upbringing.
Once children reach adolescence, their patriline becomes more involved
in their education, particularly as it relates to rights and responsibilities to
land, as expressed through ritual. Boys then are educated by their father, his
brothers and other male members of the patriline, and girls by their father’s
sisters, father’s mothers and other female members of the patriline.
9. If the children of a failed marriage have been weaned, then often their
patriline insists on taking over childcare and child-raising responsibilities,
meaning that such children often move in with their paternal grandmothers
rather than with their mothers. I know of a few maternal grandmothers who
173
Notes
took up such responsibilities, but often in these cases there did not exist a
‘proper’ marriage — the child was the result of running around, in which
case there were doubts about which patriline is his or hers.
10. To be able to observe all coming and going and other activity is a main
requirement for a living space. The house visually blocked the south yard
and thus hindered its usage. In fact, the only time I am aware of that a yunta
was put up there was when one of the jilimi residents was expected to die.
Surrounded by her sisters, this old woman spent her last days and nights in
an olden days-style yunta in the south yard.
11. The use of rooms is slowly changing. In 2007, for example, in two camps I
lived in the following occurred. In the first camp most rooms were allocated
to couples, who did, indeed, use them as bedrooms. In the second camp
most residents slept outside in summer (with the exception of a small
number of young men who used one bedroom on and off as a jangkayi),
while most nights in winter all residents slept inside, and two bedrooms
were used as yupukarra, one as jangkayi, and the fourth bedroom (with the
door open) and the living room as jilimi. Here I also came across an example
of occasional sleeping alone in one bedroom. This happened when only one
particular man was present in the jangkayi, however; on those nights that he
slept alone, the bedroom door was always open.
Chapter 4
1. Warlpiri people do not differentiate rights and responsibilities in terms of
the length of time a person stays in a camp, as do census takers for example,
who distinguish between ‘residents’ and visitors’. The Australian Bureau of
Statistics (ABS 1991; ABS 1996), for example, defines people who ‘usually
live in a particular dwelling’ as residents and those who are staying in the
same dwelling (overnight) but usually reside elsewhere as visitors (for an
example of following this usage in ethnography see Moisseeff 1999). This
distinction does not work at Yuendumu, where the boundaries between
visitor and resident are blurred indeed if defined like this. Warlpiri people
frequently change their ‘usual residence’ and/or often have a number
of ‘usual residences’. Accordingly, I call any person who sleeps in a camp
(independent of the length of their stay) a resident, and reserve the term
visiting for spending time in a camp during the day. This latter case is
supported also by local terminology, in which visiting when used as a verb
refers to daytime activities. Warlpiri people say, ‘Let’s go visit X in hospital’,
or ‘I went visiting Y’s camp for story time’. The noun visitor, on the other
hand, in Aboriginal English at Yuendumu refers to ‘strangers’, people one
does not know but who are in Yuendumu for some reason (e.g. people who
have travelled from afar to Yuendumu for initiation rituals).
2. I elaborate on practices of demand sharing in Chapters 7 and 9, and see also
Martin 1993; Myers 1982; Peterson 1993, 1997; Schwab 1995.
174
Notes
175
Notes
the previous problems. Neither did the casting of different household types
within an evolutionary framework do anything to enhance the concept.
6. During the first few weeks of fieldwork I felt bewildered by the flow of
people through the jilimi, and I was often not confident enough to ask for
the names of people I did not know. By and by I got to know most people
through the appropriate channels (asking in the morning when taking the
census would not have been appropriate), and after a while worked out
polite ways of inquiring about a person’s name when I did not know it.
7. It is likely that some individuals whose names I did not know were counted
several times if they stayed in the jilimi for more than one night or on a number
of occasions.
8. Annie moved into Nora’s room only a couple of months before I moved into
another camp with Polly and Celeste. Since I am not as familiar with Annie
as with the other four focal women, I focus more extensively on the latter.
9. Mt Theo is an outstation about 150 kilometres north-west of Yuendumu.
It is used to house kids who were caught petrol-sniffing at Yuendumu (see
Brady 1992 on petrol sniffing generally; Stojanowski n.d. on the Mt Theo
Programme). Since Jenna and her husband often lapsed into petrol-sniffing,
both spent substantial amounts of time there.
10. In the past, the newly-weds would have lived with the wife’s parents first
before moving to the husband’s country later (see Peterson 1978).
11. For example, Annie has a large number of sisters and half-sisters; however,
only two of them stay with her regularly, and much more often than do the
others. Moreover, while a handful of her sisters stay with her frequently, a
number of other sisters stay with her rarely or never. A similar point can
be made about the individuals staying with Polly, Celeste, Joy and Nora.
Each of these women has other people as closely related to them as the ones
staying with them regularly, who however stay with them less frequently or
not at all.
12. When I visited Yuendumu for the first time in 1994, as well as on subsequent
trips I made, Greta was based at this particular jilimi, and had moved
elsewhere fairly recently just before I began this census in 1998.
13. Joy, for example, was simultaneously a core resident in the jilimi and in her
divorced husband’s camp; Nora was a also regular resident at her close son
Hector’s camp, Celeste was an on-and-off resident Camilla’s camp, and Polly
a sporadic one in all sorts of camps.
14. Beckett (1988) and Birdsall (1988) comment on similar patterns among
Aboriginal people in the ‘settled’ parts of New South Wales and Western
Australia respectively. Beckett elaborates: ‘An Aborigine may go 200 miles
to a place where he is known, rather than 10 miles to a place where he is
176
Notes
not. Usually, being known means having kin who will receive him and act as
sponsors in the local community. The area within which he moves — his ‘beat’
as I shall call it — is defined by the distribution of kin’ (Beckett 1988: 119).
What Beckett calls ‘beats’ and Birdsall calls ‘runs’ and ‘lines’ are spatial
representations of the patterns of mobility within personal networks as I
have outlined them. Here, I have explored the same kind of mobility at a
micro-level within a settlement. Despite the fact that Beckett and Birdsall are
dealing with movement between towns, often many hundreds of kilometres
apart, there are clear isomorphisms here.
15. I specifically examine mobility through the camps and the settlement of
Yuendumu; of course this extends into and includes extensive inter-settlement
mobility (see Young and Doohan, 1989).
16. While the household in the Aboriginal context is generally understood
within a context of monetary budgeting, in other contexts it is more broadly
defined by a number of activities performed by the people who share a
dwelling, and here approaches substantial overlap with the ‘residential
group’.
Chapter 5
1. Literally: ‘Water will fall, won’t it?’ ‘No, northwards it is moving.’
2. ‘Kurdu-kurdu’, which literally means ‘children’, also builds the stem
for the verb ‘kurdu-kurdu-pinyi’, which means to form clouds, make
offspring, generate, form, spawn, and procreate — neatly alluding to the
interconnections between water and fertility. The other word I was given
for individual smaller storm clouds was ‘kunarlupu’, which the dictionary
translates as ‘hail’.
3. At Yuendumu, the term bad news is always and exclusively used as a euphemism
for death. Good news on the other hand is used for descriptions of newly
developed liaisons, especially in joking between cousins. ‘I heard the good
news’, for example, said by one female cousin to another thus means that
the first one has found out about a liaison the other is having. Note that good
news does not, as in some other Indigenous communities, refer to the bible;
this is called pipa, from ‘paper’, i.e. ‘book’.
4. Greta, Nora and Joy are all bringing up/looking after (some of ) their
sons’ children. The practice of children being grown up by their paternal
grandmothers when their parents’ marriage deteriorates does not only
benefit the grandchildren, (currently) without parental carers, but often is
an arrangement actively sought by older single women. They often form
close bonds with one particular son’s child (yaparla), replacing in care,
physical and emotional closeness and all other regards the mother–child
relationship.
177
Notes
Chapter 6
1. For more detail on the public–private distinction, see Myers (1976; 1979;
1986a; 1988b), who has elaborated, in great theoretical depth and with
admirable ethnographic insight, the notion of autonomy and relatedness
in everyday social relationships between people, and in an ontological sense
between people and jukurrpa.
2. There are other ways of learning and other things to be learned. For example,
the ability of telling who is walking behind you by the sound of their steps
is not knowledge acquired by sleeping next to a person, and so forth.
3. I slept outside the jilimi as frequently as Nora, Polly, Joy and Celeste, and
the 60 nights are thus not consecutive ones. Joy seemed absent less often
than the others because during much of the census time I was travelling with
her — i.e. when absent, we were both absent.
4. The table only registers those people who slept immediately next to any of
the four women, not the entire range of people that made up their yunta. As
yunta can be quite long, comprising up to ten or so people, to include all of
them would have impacted on clarity. Note also that there may be either one
or two immediate sleeping companions, depending on whether a woman
slept on the inside or the outside of a yunta.
5. As Nora’s yunta was often on the verandah (while mine was in the yard), and
as Toby and Ray both slept under Nora’s blankets, I was often unsure which
one of the two was the one lying next to Nora. As it makes no difference in
regards to my interpretation (nor did it matter to Nora, Ray and Toby), I use
Toby and Ray somewhat interchangeably here.
6. On the concepts of being boss for oneself and caring for others, see among
others Bell (1993), Dussart (2000), and Myers (1976, 1986a).
7. Meggitt somewhat dismissively called jilimi ‘hotbeds of gossip’ (1962:
236).
8. Nora’s rallying against being associated with the elderly might have been so
strong because that is exactly what happened. Soon after the move to ‘her’
house, Nora did start to be labelled warungka (see Musharbash forthcoming
for details).
9. As Nangala was blind and senile, she was not able to use the bathroom on
her own, or squat at the foot end of the yunta, and also frequently forgot to
ask people to help her. Her yitipi position is thus purely practical and has
nothing to do with seniority.
Chapter 7
1. Time zoning can also be used to analyse settlement space (as opposed to
individual camps). Time zoning in the settlement of Yuendumu means that
in certain spaces and during certain times different activities are performed,
and it is particularly useful in analysing the respective Yapa and Kardiya uses
178
Notes
179
Notes
180
Notes
Chapter 8
1. For a while Tamsin and her husband shared the derelict house with Adrian
and Stella.
2. It remains for future research to investigate the nature of the interrelationships
between these highly fluid everyday personal networks and the much more
enduring kin groups of the ritual domain (on the latter see Dussart 2000).
3. Due to the often short-lived nature of contemporary marriages, a child’s
main carers may be a close female relative other than their mother, most
often a yaparla (FM), but often a MZ or MM and their close sisters.
4. There is a significant difference between Darwin fringe camps and
Yuendumu in what this performance entails. In the former commensality
is essential and couples who ‘got no real kitchen anymore’ (Sansom 1988:
171) are denied their marital status, whereas in Yuendumu co-residence in a
yupukarra is crucial.
5. However, the violence of these outbursts, as well as the regularity with which
they occur, hint towards Tamsin’s frustrations about her biological mother’s
perceived lack of caring, which riles her so much precisely because she wants
it. Thus these outbursts which deny motherhood in fact confirm it.
6. The Aboriginal English term friend is restricted in its use for Kardiya friends
of Yapa, while Dussart (2004, 2000: 115–6) has also used the English term
friend as a translation for marlpa. As marlpa (as company) can be given to
anyone, and while there certainly is a difference between marlpa and good
marlpa, it seems to me that neither friend nor marlpa adequately captures
the reality of, for example, two sisters who are emotionally very close to each
other. Firth, in the preface to The Anthropology of Friendship has called this
phenomenon ‘kin-friends, a real category to be distinguished from simple
kin’ (Firth 1999: xiii). However, none of the contributors to the book took
up this issue, while all maintain that friendship is something qualitatively
different to kinship, and, along the lines of Samson’s quote, that kinship
studies have tended to overshadow research into friendship (see contributions
in Bell and Coleman 1999). I do not think that friendship covers the issue
particularly well at all, as it in turn diverts attention from a second issue,
namely that kin relations do not necessarily necessitate amicability.
7. This is not to say that Tamsin actually would enjoy time and space on her
own; knowing her well I also know that she in fact hates being alone.
8. Personal communication, Andrew Murchin and Nancy Napurrurla Oldfield,
May 1999.
9. Movement is also triggered by death, and people respond to it by moving
out of camps that become yarrkujuju and by defining their paths through
the settlement through places of avoidance (see also Musharbash 2008b).
181
Notes
Conclusion
1. It always struck me that one reason why Bourdieu’s term ‘habitus’ in English
just does not have the right ring to it (sounding stilted rather than ‘obvious’),
must be that in French habiter has the double meaning of ‘to live in (a
house)’ and ‘the familiar’ or ‘the habitual’; a connection which is mirrored
in the German terms for living inside houses (wohnen) and the familiar
(das Gewohnte, literally ‘the lived in’ but meaning normal, habitual, familiar,
regular).
2. Technically, all Warlpiri people living at Yuendumu if they have an income
(welfare or waged) are required to pay rent, independent of where they
live. That is, rent is collected per head, not per house, and independent of
whether a person lives in a house or a humpy, or how many people live in
one house.
3. As there are only a certain number of sites available for new houses at
Yuendumu, this choice is somewhat limited. Moreover, as there is often
a substantial waiting period between choosing a site and moving into the
completed house, problems may arise. For example, in 2004, Celeste chose
a site for ‘her’ house in East Camp, opposite Nora’s camp (ideally, she would
have liked to live in West Camp but was told there were no sites available
there). The house was built two years later, and in early 2007 she moved in.
However, in the meantime Nora’s camp had become deserted (yarrkujuju)
because of the death of one of Nora’s grandsons; and Celeste’s new house is
now surrounded by the houses of people she is not close to. This concerned
her so much that she considered not moving in, even though she had been
on the housing waiting list for more than eight years and it was highly
unlikely she would ever get to the top of the list again.
4. This is the only instance where I have drawn on a different translation. In
the 1993 edition it says, rather less clearly, ‘That range reveals itself to us
as soon as we recall that human being consists in dwelling and, indeed,
dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth’ (Heidegger 1993:
351).
182
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