CHAPTER 5
In the jilimi: immediacy
As it gets dark, people in the camps of Yuendumu start making arrangements for the night. Fires are lit, bedding is taken outside (or down from the trees and shade roofs where it was stored during the day) and is laid out on the ground forming yunta (rows for sleeping). Who sleeps where and next to who changes, often on a nightly basis. The constant shifts and continual movement of yunta location, both within the yard of the jilimi and at other camps at Yuendumu, and the perpetual changes in the social composition of people sleeping within each yunta, are negotiated with little or no discussion while the yunta are set up (though the socio-spatial ordering may be discussed retrospectively).
Warlpiri sleeping arrangements are an excellent example of Moore’s (1986) proposal to read (domestic) space as a text and to read physical activities and movement through it as revealing and reinforcing social meaning. To transplant that metaphor to the Warlpiri context, one could say that Warlpiri people inscribe domestic space as text with the positioning of their bodies each night, and every night a new text is produced. What is constant is that each night new ‘texts’ of sleeping arrangements appear across the Yapa camps of Yuendumu; what changes, nightly, is the composition of these ‘texts’. Sleeping arrangements are neither static, durable, nor planned ahead; instead, they embody people’s summaries of that day’s occurrences. As responses to the events of the day, the ever-changing nightly sleeping arrangements in Yapa camps are an expression of immediacy, one of the three core values underpinning the Warlpiri series of building–dwelling–thinking.
I take sleeping arrangements as a way of working towards a conceptualisation of the particular Warlpiri form that immediacy takes at Yuendumu: to get a sense of its nature, how it is engendered by people’s actions and how in return it shapes their lives. I do this by discussing how sleeping arrangements ‘materialise’, paying particular attention to those aspects verbally discussed (where to arrange yunta), and those tacitly understood (who sleeps in which yunta), detailing the latter through case studies of actual sleeping arrangements as they happened in our jilimi.
Verbal negotiations about sleeping arrangements
In the jilimi, as is true in other camps, there is a strong preference for sleeping outside if at all possible. Unless circumstances make it necessary, the four rooms of the jilimi’s house are not used for sleeping. That leaves the long verandah and the yard space for putting up yunta. Where to put them is discussed every night (sometimes briefly, sometimes at great length). These explicit verbal discussions are about the influences of the weather, supernatural forces and other practical concerns to do with sleeping location, and illustrate how the nightly arrangements are made in response to immediate circumstances. The primary aim, today, is to decide whether to sleep inside or outside (of houses, or, in the case of the jilimi, in the rooms, on the verandah or in the yard), and if sleeping outside, where in the yard are the choicest places that night.
Weather is a major influence impacting on such discussions and decisions. Some other Yuendumu camps are located in or next to better built and equipped houses than our jilimi, and in those the weather may impact differently on the decision whether to sleep inside or outside. People living in camps that have houses with air-conditioning in working order sleep inside more frequently on hot summer nights, and people in camps with houses that have heating in working order in turn sleep inside in winter more often. However, the greater number of houses occupied by Warlpiri people at Yuendumu lack either or both, and decisions are made in the same way as described here. Most weather-related discussions are made either in terms of ‘rain’ or ‘wind’.
Yuendumu experiences three different types of rain. Torrential rainstorms, although occurring rarely, can happen at any time. They can flood Yuendumu and its environs for up to a week, during which everybody who can shelters inside — without discussion.
The second type of rain, mostly occurring in summer, is more usual and consists of numbers of isolated individual rain clouds bringing highly localised rain. Sometimes it is possible to stand in Yuendumu and with a sweeping 360° view to spot up to eight different rain clouds in different directions raining in the distance. Some of them may pass over one or another of Yuendumu’s Camps and may or may not bring rain, others will sweep by in the distance. If these kinds of rain clouds are in the sky, lengthy discussions always ensue at the time of putting up yunta. People present offer their reading of clouds, wind, and the probability of rain. The paths of all visible rain clouds will be projected, usually declaring that they will pass by Yuendumu but not directly over it: ‘Ngapa kapu wantimi, mayi?’ — ‘Lawa, yatijarra yanirra.’1 ‘It will rain, won’t it?’ — ‘No, the clouds are moving north.’
These discussions are accompanied by gestures the jilimi’s residents make to ‘shoo’ the rain clouds away. Only if it is raining heavily at the time, or clearly going to rain soon, are yunta put up on the verandah and/ or in the rooms. Most often, however, it is decided that it will not rain, and yunta are put up outside in the yard. Moving back onto the verandah due to rain in the middle of the night is by no means uncommon. When it does start raining at night, moving onto the verandah is postponed for as long as possible. If the rain starts as a drizzle, the move inside is only made when blankets become soaked. And even after a middle-of-the-night move back onto the verandah because of rain, when the rain stops, it is common for people to move back into the yard — and back again onto the verandah during the next shower.
The third kind of rain consists of large thunderstorms. These brew in a spectacular fashion, painting the sky in dark and violent colours. These storms roll in from all sides, depending on season and prevailing winds, with a large front of blackness to the east or west, and smaller individual black clouds to the north and south. These are called kurdu-kurdu, the children of the storm.2 Thunder is called kumparri and lightning wirnpa. Taking shelter, by sleeping on the verandah or in the rooms, during thunderstorms is important, not only because of the rain. During a thunderstorm one cannot cook, especially meat, for fear of being struck by lightning. ‘Wirnpa smells meat, it looks for fire and will kill you,’ people often say. During thunderstorms, if at all possible, people sleep inside.
Similarly, discussions about whether to sleep inside or outside take place depending on the presence of certain types of wind. Yuendumu experiences severe winds, particularly during seasonal changes from hot 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 typology of jarnpa). Warlpiri people describe them as human-like beings covered in red ochre, and fear them greatly, as they bewitch innocent victims, making them sick, or even killing them. Jarnpa announce their presence by a whistling peculiar to them; alternatively, their presence is heralded by the singing of a particular bird. It sounds like pakaka pakaka and if the pitch and speed with which the bird sings increase, people know jarnpa are close. They yell at the bird ‘Yantarra!’ — ‘go away!’ — in the hope that the jarnpa will follow the bird away from people. Warlpiri people claim that they cannot see jarnpa, they are invisible to them; however people from further afield and Kardiya are thought to be able to spot them. If jarnpa are sighted or heard, the rumour will spread through Yuendumu with speed. If they are detected near a camp, people may well abandon it, and people in camps close by will make sure they are more sheltered at night than usual. This procedure of sheltering is repeated inside the camp. People who sleep yitipi (on the outside of a yunta) are positioned to protect those on the inside, and when jarnpa are around, only senior and knowledgeable people choose to sleep yitipi; most people preferring to be located kulkurru (inside). Concern about jarnpa is regularly pronounced during windy time, as the winds make jarnpa tracks (as well as all other tracks) unreadable and jarnpa whistling inaudible (see also Keys 1999: 197). This is a time, then, when people feel much less safe than usual and look for safe shelter, often sleeping inside (of buildings) and seeking the inside of rows of swags (making for less but longer yunta).
Apart from issues to do with weather or jarnpa, the only other explicit verbal statements involved in putting up yunta have to do with practical concerns. For example, people may request help when carrying a particularly heavy mattress, or when laying out a large groundsheet when it is windy. They may have verbal exchanges when requesting the use of a bed, if one is present, and how to position it, as often happens when people are in pain or ill. There are comments about a yunta being too long and suggestions it be broken up into two, and criticism is voiced about yunta too haphazardly arranged and deviating from ‘proper’ orientation. Lastly, the placement of old and frail people, and of those who are considered warungka (not knowing), is matter-of-factly and verbally decided by others. ‘Put that old Nangala there, next to Nakamarra and not too close to the fire’, or, ‘Leave that Nungarrayi on the verandah, she can sleep there with Napaljarri’ are examples of such comments. Newcomers to the jilimi, too, may be given verbal advice. ‘Don’t sleep too close to the western fence, we saw a snake track there this morning’, or, ‘Stay away from the eastern side, that septic tank is smelly’. Apart from that, however, the orchestration of nightly sleeping arrangements happens by means of tacit understandings and without explicit verbal mediation.
Explicit verbal discussions about sleeping arrangements are about practical concerns, and in their own way illustrate the element of immediacy in the nightly arrangements of yunta. In Moore’s terms (1986), they are not (so much) about the composition of the text (the social, emotional, and personal aspects of who sleeps in which yunta) but where the text within the space of the camp (and in relation to the house if present) is arranged. During more than three years of sleeping in the camps of Yuendumu, I have recorded fewer than twenty nights without any changes in the placing of yunta.
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 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.
Looking at the notebooks of jilimi sleeping arrangement maps now, they remind me of the flip books I used to play with when a child. One can imagine, when flipping through the notebooks’ pages, how these maps display a ‘moving image’ of the social composition of the jilimi, with its yunta continually expanding and contracting over time. In a manner comparable to time-lapse photography, they portray individuals arriving for their first night in the jilimi, staying, and then leaving. They show people moving through the space of the camp, sleeping in one yunta for a few nights, and then perhaps in another; next to this person first, and then next to somebody else. They show images of people within the camp moving closer together night after night, or moving away from each other. In other words, the maps show spatial representations of lived social experience. If one were to fill the maps with daily activity, with gossip, with the developments of relationships and with the fights that took place, they would start to approach quite closely some of the core aspects of contemporary everyday life at Yuendumu. By discussing a number of these maps here, I explore the relationship between the jilimi as a socio-spatial entity and the production and reproduction of Warlpiri sociality. I present the maps for my first nights in the jilimi, and then discuss further examples of such sleeping maps from the jilimi to illustrate how immediacy as a core value of the Warlpiri everyday is embodied in the ever-changing sleeping arrangements.
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 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.
Figure 12: Sleeping arrangements for the night of 29 november 1998
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, 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, 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
Figure 13: Sleeping arrangements for the night of 1 December 1998
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 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.
Greta and Mabel
Greta is the woman mentioned previously as a former ‘owner’ of one of the jilimi’s rooms, or, according to her, the whole house. At this stage, she had two other main residences, one where she shared a house with a Kardiya woman and looked after the house during the woman’s long and frequent absences, and the other with her sister Mabel, in a camp not far away from the jilimi. When Mabel became ill and moved into the jilimi, Greta moved with her to look after her. During my first night in the jilimi described above, Mabel was in the jilimi without Greta and slept next to Polly. Then Greta returned, and as the next few nights were very cold and all residents made up one single yunta on the verandah, Greta and Mabel took up a position on the extreme western end. Once sleeping in the yard became possible again, the first night Greta and Mabel slept in the same yunta with the old ladies who before had slept on the verandah. The next night Mabel, Greta and her grand-daughter made up a yunta of their own, positioned north and west of the other yunta present in the jilimi. The next six nights they shared a yunta with Nora and her grandsons, and the following nights slept next to Celeste and me. A few nights later, in turn, they shared a yunta with Joy, and later slept in a yunta with Polly again.
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.
Joy and Yasmine
The second example of a retrospective reading of the sleeping arrangements of the early months in the jilimi involves my first mother Joy and myself, and is rather less amiable. By the time we moved into the jilimi, our relationship had become increasingly fraught. We were both frustrated, and there were occasional minor outbursts on both our parts. Joy’s decision to move into the jilimi and ask Celeste to help look after me initially meant that some of the strain was taken off Joy, while at the same time she did not have to worry about ‘losing’ me and access to my resources. After all, for years Celeste had generously helped Joy look after her old and frail mother, Nangala, and that arrangement worked just fine for all three of them. The first weeks in the jilimi, I, the only one who needed directions when putting up yunta, was directed to put up my swag either next to Joy or next to Celeste. More often than not, the other would put up her swag on the other side. Joy and whoever was staying with her, and Celeste and whoever was staying with her would form one large yunta, connected by me in the middle. These sleeping arrangements reflected exactly the arrangements agreed upon 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 |
However, in spite of Joy’s hope that our relationship would improve through our move to the jilimi, relations between Joy and me steadily deteriorated. I continued to call her ngati (Mum); she continued to call me her daughter; and others continued to refer to me as ‘belonging to Joy’. I also continued to share my resources with Joy as much as possible. However, as I became more independent and my own personal networks expanded, there was a greater circle of people with whom I shared money, food, and the Toyota, and as a result, Joy’s share increasingly shrank. Joy was tremendously hurt whenever I rejected one of her requests, and this happened more and more frequently. In turn, I became more and more irritated with her frequent demands, which I read as attempts to control me. As time progressed, I slept more often next to Celeste and less often next to Joy. At the time, I was not at all conscious of the analogy between sleeping arrangements and the state of social relations. However, looking through those notebooks of sleeping arrangements now, one can see Joy and me slowly, from one night to the next, creating increasing distance between us in our sleeping arrangements, and so foreshadowing the turn our relationship was taking. Indeed, with one exception, after the first 60 nights I never slept in a yunta with Joy again. Our ceasing to sleep next to each other was a spatial indicator of the decline of amicable relations.
In May 1999 Celeste was away for a course at Batchelor College and Joy made one last attempt to repair our relationship. During Celeste’s absence, two Kardiya women disseminated rumours that I had written scandalous reports about Yapa camps in Alice Springs newspapers. My relations to the people I was working with deteriorated because of these rumours, and I spent much time and effort assuring people that they were untrue. To my immense gratitude, Joy took an instrumental role in helping me and rallying for support. However, because Joy had taken on the responsibility of ‘looking after’ me in this instance, this gave her license to ask for something in return. And when Stella, Josephine and Tamsin asked me whether I would sleep with them in Celeste’s room that night, Joy said, ‘That’s too loud’, and suggested I sleep in her room on her bed. After what she had done for me that day, I could not refuse, even though I was aware of what her invitation implied. It was her attempt to convince me that I was better off with her (who could offer me the comfort of a quiet room, her own bed to sleep on, and her superior and just proven skills of looking after me) rather than with Celeste. I ended up sleeping in Joy’s room for five nights until Celeste returned. Each night, Joy tried to talk me into moving out of the jilimi. As Nora was on the top of the Council list as the first person to receive one of the newly built houses, Joy suggested, I should move with Nora and her until Joy’s house was ready. I had no intention of moving with either Joy or Nora and I kept repeating this — and our five nights together were vexing and frustrating for both of us. This shows clearly in the maps of our sleeping arrangements for these nights (see Figure 14). While life in the jilimi and for its other residents followed its usual paths, during those five nights it was as though Joy and I were trapped in her room, arguing and not being able to come to an agreement acceptable to both of us. And although we slept in the same room, in the sleeping arrangements for these nights it seems almost as if we were dancing around each other. While in that small room we never slept next to each other, but as far away from each other as possible. Shortly after these events, Joy and I had our ‘big fight’, and Joy ‘dis-adopted’ me, as described previously.
The reason for describing this case study in such detail is that it illustrates so well the opposite of Mabel and Greta’s sleeping arrangements, described in the previous case study. Their movement from one yunta to the next reflected the creation of social and personal intimacy, expressing Mabel and Greta’s desire for and achievement of harmonious relations with all jilimi residents. Joy’s and my movements away from each other, on the other hand, were spatial expressions of our increasingly discordant relationship, demonstrating on a nightly basis the waning of our intimacy.
Figure 14: Sleeping arrangements in Joy’s room for the nights of 3–7 May 1999.
Reading sleeping arrangements
When Yapa recount events, no matter whether they involved camping out bush on a hunting trip or sleeping next to the road on the way to another settlement, in an Alice Springs motel room, or in the jilimi, they supplement them with sand drawings. In these drawings, the sleeping position of every person present is indicated by a vertical line 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.
Sleeping arrangements change on a nightly basis as an immediate response to the physicality of that actual night. They also inevitably change because of social mobility. Most importantly, they change because as texts in Moore’s sense they reflect Warlpiri practices of engaging with domestic space, and the underlying principle of this is that a camp is formed as a result of the happenings of the day. Reading consecutive maps of sleeping arrangements over time shows how the space comprising a camp is constantly being reformulated, and how the negotiations, divisions, invasions, withdrawals, uses and appropriations of this physical space can be read as analogous to those of social relations. These processes are subtle, implicit, and tacit. Greta, for example, did not move her and Mabel’s bedding from yunta to yunta in a calculated and deliberate manner, it was simply the right thing to do. Similarly, at no time did I think that I had to (or wanted to) increase spatial distance between Joy and myself; the fact that I slept more and more often next to Celeste was more an automatic result of us spending the day together. The order that unfolds nightly in Warlpiri camps is tacitly achieved, it is never verbally negotiated, or, for all that I could find out, consciously decided upon. Yet, although creation of this order is always undertaken tacitly, its meanings do get actively read, and all participants understand how sleeping arrangements illustrate how relations are negotiated, manifested, created, transformed, broken, and reinvented.
As the day comes to a close, people stop in camps and within them in yunta in a manner that reflects where they should be. Sleeping arrangements at Yuendumu are not about group identity, rather they are an expression of the current state of interpersonal relations, of how people present related to each other on that day. Yunta thus understood are an expression of immediacy — they are physical manifestations of how people experience and react to the here and now rather than a continuation of the immediate past or a perceived future. People do not sleep next to people because they did so the night before, nor do they plan to sleep next to a particular person, on, say next Tuesday. The storing of bedding inside in the morning wipes the slate clean of the affairs of the previous twenty-four hours. The new day will begin and whatever it will bring is going to be reflected in the sleeping arrangements of the coming night — when people place themselves where they feel comfortable. As each day differs from the next, so each night there are new arrangements in the social composition of the yunta in the camps of Yuendumu.