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 than on others, this literature as a whole underpins my analyses. I refer the interested reader to David Nash’s websites collating and updating Warlpiri references: for non-linguistic references (in the main anthropological) see www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/aust/wlp/wlp-eth-ref.html; and for linguistic references see www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/aust/wlp/wlp-lx-ref.html.

6. The period of ancestral creation called jukurrpa, and its entanglements with the present, are not part of this account. For excellent discussions of Warlpiri time concepts in this regard see Dussart (2000) and Munn (1970, 1992).

7. Note that most Warlpiri nouns take the same form in the singular and the plural, i.e. one jilimi, five jilimi. At Yuendumu a shift seems to be occurring currently from the former term ‘jilimi’ to ‘yarlukuru’, which is imported from further south. I decided to retain the use of the term ‘jilimi’, as it is more prominent in the literature (on the two terms, see also Keys 1999: 16–18).

8. At Yuendumu, the term ‘Toyota’ designates any kind of four-wheel-drive vehicle, the favoured choice of transport. All roads connecting Yuendumu to surrounding settlements, outstations, hunting grounds and sacred sites are rough ‘dirt’ tracks, often badly corrugated, and are much more comfortably negotiated by large four-wheel-drive vehicles. Moreover, during heavy summer rains these tracks are frequently flooded and become inaccessible to normal vehicles. Equally important is the fact that Toyotas are roomier and allow more people to travel. Access to vehicle transportation was much coveted, and while having a Toyota was not exactly a condition of allowing me to do fieldwork, it was strongly encouraged.

9. In all cases pseudonyms are used.

10. Age also plays a role in the classification of kinship. For example, all other women of the same skinname of approximately the same age are considered sisters, while those much younger are brother’s son’s daughters, and those much older, father’s father’s sisters.

11. Others before me have discussed and described different aspects of the history of Yuendumu in detail; here I concentrate only on the developments central to the particular concerns of this book. For more on Yuendumu’s history, see among others Hinkson (1999: 17–20), Keys (1999: 59–62), Meggitt (1962: 28–9), Middleton and Francis (1976: 10–15), Rowse (1998), Steer (1996) and Young (1981: 56–123). Historical accounts of pre-settlement events are included in, amongst others, Elias (2001) and Watts and Fisher (2000). Also pertinent in this context is Olive Pink’s pre-settlement material. She was the first anthropologist to work with Warlpiri people, based for intermittent periods from 1933 to 1945 in the Tanami Desert, first at Yunmaji, then at Jila, and later close to the Granites goldfields and at Thompson’s Rockhole. Unfortunately most of her Warlpiri material was never published (see Marcus 1993 for the underlying reasons for this, and Marcus 2001 for an evocative portrait of Olive Pink’s relations with Warlpiri people).

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 (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 overnight 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.

8. Keys (2000) argues that at Yuendumu houses are conceptually associated with yupukarra as this Warlpiri residential composition equates most closely the Western nuclear family with which in mind most houses were erected. I am not convinced this represents Warlpiri views and practice accurately.

9. The extent of outside living seems to be changing slowly. By 2007, there seemed to be fewer Yapa sleeping outside than, say, ten years ago, especially in winter. One main reason seems to be better maintenance and repair services, ensuring that heating is available inside houses and people rely less on fires for warmth in winter.

10. Yapa-occupied houses tend to have much less furniture in them than houses occupied by non-Indigenous people, as well as fewer decorative items, although this is slowly changing.

11. Typically, further storage space is found in trees and shade structures surrounding a camp and/or house; this is where axes, shovels, rakes, spears, boomerangs, and the like are kept. If there are shade structures with a roof, or the roof of the house itself is reachable, items are stored there as well, particularly kangaroo meat so that it is out of reach of the dogs. If there is a house, firewood is piled up on or next to the verandah, to keep it dry should it rain — otherwise it is left in a pile not too far from where people sleep.

Food is hardly ever stored in kitchens, except for perishable goods, which may be stored in the fridge if there is one. Rather than storing food, people often go shopping for each meal and consume it immediately, or keep their food close to their person where they can see it, for example on a low wall, in the branches of a tree or on the roof of a shade structure. However, many people keep a small cache of ‘emergency food’ (mostly tinned items) hidden somewhere among their possessions.

12. Even if a house has a fence, the fact remains that for yarlu to be meaningful space, there actually needs to be people present (meaning, a camp needs to be in existence) as a fence surrounding a deserted house does not designate yarlu space.

13. On ‘drunken fights’, see among others Martin (1993) and Sackett (1977).

14. Today further private space is found in suitcases stored in rooms, lockable cupboards, and so forth.

15. I know of and have written about two exceptions (Musharbash n.d.), one being an old widower who established his own camp after his wife’s death, where he sleeps alone. His choice to live on his own has powerful connotations. It is a statement about the loneliness he feels, and it constitutes a strong appeal to his kin to look after him and care for him. The other example is of an old woman without any immediate family. Her choice to sleep on her own is an expression of her ‘loneliness’ not only in Yuendumu but ‘in the world’.

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.

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 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.

3. Sansom’s (1978, 1980, 1982, 1988) work on this issue is expansive.

4. To provide one last example. The Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), which positions itself in between the public policy arena and the ethnographic domain, since its earliest publications in 1991 has been occupied with the term ‘household’ and its use in respect to Indigenous Australia. In particular, CAEPR has been concerned with and criticised the household definitions used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (see among others Finlayson and Auld 1999; Martin and Taylor 1995; Musharbash 2000, Smith 1991, 1992; Smith and Daly 1996).

The 1991 ABS definition reads: ‘A household is a group of people who reside and eat together (in a single dwelling) […] as a single unit in the sense that they have common housekeeping arrangements, i.e. they have some common provision for food and other essentials for living (ABS 1991: 60).

The 1996 ABS definition reads: ‘A household is defined as a group of two or more related or unrelated people who usually reside in the same dwelling, who regard themselves as a household, and who make common provisions for food and other essentials’ (ABS 1996: glossary).

CAEPR heavily criticised the ABS definitions for ignoring the realities of Aboriginal circumstances:

(1) High mobility creates enormous fluctuations in ‘the people who reside and eat together’, i.e. there is no stable social unit constituted by residing and eating together.

(2) ‘Common housekeeping arrangements’ exist across dwelling boundaries and may exclude people within one dwelling.

(3) ‘Usual residence in the same dwelling’ excludes the Aboriginal practice of having a number of ‘home bases’.

CAEPR’s criticism is focussed on the realities in Aboriginal Australia of the compositional complexity of residents within any one dwelling, on the sharing of resources across dwellings, and on the high mobility of residents through dwellings. Curiously, though, despite the problems perceived in relation to the concept, most CAEPR publications continued to use the term household as a basic unit for analysis and comparison (see Rowse 2002 for a similar critique).

5. Nevertheless, only five years later a landmark work on households was published. In this study Netting, Wilk, and Arnould strongly emphasise the term’s usefulness for cross-cultural comparison. Households to them are ‘task-oriented residence units’ (1984: xx), and previous confusions associated with the term are to be dispersed by introducing ‘morphology and activity’ as subcategories of analysis. Morphology refers to the structural composition of household personnel, and activity to what household members do. They present five types of activities to be used in analysis: production, distribution, transmission, reproduction and co-residence. Needless to say, the renaming of ‘function’ into ‘activity’ did not solve any of 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.

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.

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 and presences in different places and at different times in the settlement (thus adding an important dimension to the analysis of what is often called ‘the interface’ or ‘third space’: see for example Hinkson 1999; Hinkson and Smith 2005; Holcombe 1998; Merlan 1998; Rowse 1992; Trigger 1992). Weekday business hours are distinctly marked by a concentrated visible presence of Kardiya, especially around the Park. It is during this time that resident Kardiya leave their houses, mainly for work. Moreover, this is the time when ‘Government Kardiya’ and contractors come into the settlement ‘from Alice Springs and Canberra’. Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. the roads of Yuendumu are busy with ‘Government Toyotas’, each bearing the name of the organisation the driver works for on their sides: Central Land Council, Centrelink, Telecom, Territory Health Services (THS), NT Government, and whoever else has business to conduct in Yuendumu. The immediate end of the business day is marked by an even greater presence of Kardiya vehicles on the roads of Yuendumu, as they run their last errands and then drive home, or leave the settlement. A little while after that, the settlement has an entirely different feel to it: through Kardiya absence, Yapa become the prominent presence. Now they are visible walking and driving around, cruising, ‘singing out’ to people in a camp they drive by, stopping for a chat, congregating in groups discussing news. After 5 p.m. on weekdays, all day on weekends, and particularly during the long summer holidays when most Kardiya leave, Yuendumu is quite simply a different place.

2. For a comparative description of the daily cycle in houses and camps at Halls Creek, see Ross (1987, Chapter 4).

3. Most camps are attached to houses and these often have kitchens. However most are ill-equipped, stoves are more often than not broken, and cooking Warlpiri-style is more easily done on fires.

4. Men sometimes prepare their own meat, or have it cooked for them by their wives, mothers, or grandmothers — depending on where they are eating and who is present.

5. Camps are rarely empty of people. Empty camps are considered ‘spooky’, especially since nobody is present to watch over what is going on and people have no idea who or what entered the camp during their absence. Camps are only ever empty when all or most residents travel to another community, or when they are abandoned because a death occurred.

6. Damper is a simple flat bread made of self-raising flour and hot water, baked on hot ashes or on a wire over a small fire. On how to make damper, see White (1997).

7. Generally margarine is used; however it is called ‘butter’.

8. Residents in the jilimi may also go elsewhere to request food, of course. For example, once when Polly and Celeste wanted jam and were not getting along with Joy who had some, they went to Camilla’s camp to ask her for some.

9. Occasionally, all-male camping groups make so-called Johnny cakes, fried damper (personal communication N. Peterson).

10. In time, I entered into similar arrangements as Pearl and Bertha did, buying flour and receiving damper from the woman I gave the flour to.

11. The arrangements for Big Shop contributions to mortuary rituals change with different store managers and elected committees; sometimes they are ‘donations’ at other times ‘loans’. Unfortunately, I was not able to obtain precise data on these transactions.

12. Sansom (1982) argues along similar lines for an emergent matrifocality as an element of the Aboriginal commonality. But see Finlayson (1991) for a critique of matrifocality and its commonly assumed implications based on ethnographic research at Kuranda, northern Queensland.

13. Damper production is of course also a reminder of colonialism and its effects and how some of these, such as houses and damper, have become central to daily life.

14. There is a second, interrelated, kind of cruising practiced at Yuendumu by children and teenagers at night. After dark, often until very late at night, they cruise around an area bordering on the western end of the Park, between the basketball court in the north and the Youth Centre in the south. Flocks of children and teenagers walk up and down that strip in groups of varying compositions, somewhat determined by age, gender, kin and co-residency, but fairly fluid. They stroll up and down, checking each other out, all the while imbuing that space at that time with their distinctive presence.

15. Gambling in Aboriginal settlements has been discussed in more detail by Harris (1991), Martin (1993: Chapter 3) and especially Altman (1987) among others. And on a comparative note see Riches (1975). Martin (1993: 129–34) lists the rules for some of the games most often played at Aurukun, which are similar to those of the games played at Yuendumu, although the names differ.

16. Wayililinynpa is an outstation and the country surrounding it about 60 kilometres south of Yuendumu (see Figure 1, Central Australia, for location).

17. Warlu is the Warlpiri word for both fire and firewood, and also encompasses a number of related meanings such as hot, ashes, fireplace, hearth, cooking fire and so on.

18. On generosity and ‘demand sharing’ see also Martin (1993) and Myers (1982, 1986a, 1986b,1988a).

19. It is not unusual for Yuendumu residents to receive welfare cheques in neighbouring settlements, I have described this practice in more detail elsewhere (Musharbash 2000: 59–60).

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).

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).