Arabana people

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Performance of tritichinna ceremony of snake totem, Urabunna Tribe, Lake Eyre (pub. in The commonwealth of Australia; federal handbook, prepared in connection with the eighty-fourth meeting of the British association for the advancement of science, held in Australia, August, 1914 by George Handley Knibbs The commonwealth of Australia; federal handbook, prepared in connection with the eighty-fourth meeting of the British association for the advancement of science, held in Australia, August, 1914 (1914) (14770988874).jpg
Performance of tritichinna ceremony of snake totem, Urabunna Tribe, Lake Eyre (pub. in The commonwealth of Australia; federal handbook, prepared in connection with the eighty-fourth meeting of the British association for the advancement of science, held in Australia, August, 1914 by George Handley Knibbs

The Arabana, also known as the Ngarabana, are an Aboriginal Australian people of South Australia.

Contents

Name

The older tribal autonym was Ngarabana, which may have been misheard by white settlers as Arabana, the term now is generally accepted by new generations of the Ngarabana. [2]

Language

Arabana, like Wangganguru with which it shares a 90% overlap in vocabulary, is a member of the Karnic subgroup of the Pama-Nyungan language. [3]

Country

In Norman Tindale's estimation, the Arabana controlled some 19,500 square miles (51,000 km2) of tribal land. They were present at the Neales River to the west of Lake Eyre, and west as far as the Stuart Range; Macumba Creek. Southwards their lands extended to Coward Springs. Their terrain also took in Oodnadatta, Lora Creek [4] and Lake Cadibarrawirracanna. [2]

The neighbouring tribes were the Kokata to the west, with the frontier between the two marked by the scarp of the western tableland near Coober Pedy. To their east were the Wangkanguru. [2]

Native title

A native title claim was lodged with the National Native Title Tribunal on 16 January 1998 by Arabana elder Reg Dodd, on behalf of his people. In 2012, a Federal Court determination in the matter of Dodd v the State of South Australia gave the Arabana people native title to over 68,000 km2 (26,000 sq mi), including Anna Creek Station and other pastoral leases, along with Lake Eyre. The area also included Elliot Price Conservation Park, Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre National Park, and Wabma Kadarbu Mound Springs Conservation Park, along with the towns of Marree, William Creek, and Oodnadatta. The Tribunal found that the Arabana maintained strong and enduring connections to country, each other and their culture. [5] [6] [7] [8]

The Arabana Corporation are the native title holders of the land, [9]

In October 2025, it was alleged that the owners of Anna Creek Station had built illegal dams on rivers and waterholes on the property between 2017 and 2025, including a dam wall around 2 km (1.2 mi) long across Balta-Baltana Creek. The earthworks contravened the Aboriginal Heritage Act , the Natural Resources Management Act and the Landscape South Australia Act. [9]

Mythology

Several traditional stories are well documented, especially that regarding a man-eating buzzard and his eaglehawk mate. [10] The chief protagonists are three animals:

History of contact

The Arabana were interviewed at Old Peake Station [12] and Thantyiwanparda in the nearby gidgee scrub [13] by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen over a ten-day period [14] in August 1903 for a specific purpose. Their earlier work had argued that the truly "primitive" nature of the Arrernte was indicated by the fact that their totemic identities came from the spirit responsible for making individuals' mothers pregnant. James Frazer adopted this to buttress his theories on the development phases of "primitive societies". A Scottish amateur ethnographer Andrew Lang contested their interpretations of the Arrernte, arguing that they were not "primitive", a label he argued was more appropriate to their near neighbours the Arabana, who traced descent through the mother and linked their totemic system to exogamy. It was to address this challenge that accounted for Spencer and Gillen's return to Arabana lands. [13]

Today, cross-cultural research collaborations are building on Arabana traditional knowledge and colonial and pastoral experiences to develop new ways of approaching modelling climate change. [15]

Social organisation

The Arabana were divided into kin groups, whose respective territories were called wadlu.

Their moieties were named Mathari and Kararru. [16]

Alternative names

Source: Tindale 1974 , p. 210

Some words

Source: Gibson & Hercus 2018 , p. 207, n.37

Notes

    Citations

    1. ↑ Federal Handbook 1914.
    2. 1 2 3 4 Tindale 1974, p. 210.
    3. ↑ Shaw 1995, p. 23.
    4. ↑ geographic.org.
    5. ↑ "Native title granted over Lake Eyre". SBS News. 22 May 2012. Archived from the original on 31 October 2025. Retrieved 31 October 2025.
    6. ↑ "Arabana Aboriginal Corporation RNTBC". PBC. 16 January 1998. Archived from the original on 12 August 2025. Retrieved 31 October 2025.
    7. ↑ Hull, David. "Native Title Newsletter, December 2012, p=5-6" (PDF). Retrieved 31 October 2025– via Austlii.
    8. ↑ "Dodd v State of South Australia [2012] FCA 519".
    9. 1 2 MacLennan, Leah (29 October 2025). "Anna Creek Station owners charged for alleged illegal dams". ABC News. Archived from the original on 30 October 2025. Retrieved 31 October 2025.
    10. ↑ Spencer & Gillen 1912, pp. 24–28.
    11. ↑ Gibson & Hercus 2018, p. 193.
    12. ↑ Hercus 2011, p. 261.
    13. 1 2 Gibson & Hercus 2018, pp. 179–180.
    14. ↑ Gibson & Hercus 2018, p. 176.
    15. ↑ Nursey-Bray, Melissa; Palmer, Robert; Stuart, Aaron; Arbon, Veronica; Rigney, Lester-Irabinna (1 August 2020). "Scale, colonisation and adapting to climate change: Insights from the Arabana people, South Australia". Geoforum. 114: 138–150. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.05.021 . hdl: 11541.2/143210 . ISSN   0016-7185.
    16. ↑ Gibson & Hercus 2018, p. 186.

    Sources

    Further reading

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