Bindibu expedition

Last updated

Gibson Desert, one of the places that the Bindibu Expedition visited Gibson Desert and moon from Alfred & Marie Range.jpg
Gibson Desert, one of the places that the Bindibu Expedition visited

The Bindibu expedition was a series of three field trips mounted by anthropologist Donald Thomson to meet with and learn from Pintupi Indigenous Australians between 1957 and 1965.

Contents

Thomson travelled to the Great Sandy Desert and Gibson Desert – the Western Desert – one of the most inhospitable parts of the country, to meet with these people still living as they had done for many thousands of years.

The Pintupi (Bindibu) were the last Aboriginal group to make contact with Europeans over the period 1956 to 1984. Many Pintupi people still remember this experience. For many, Thomson was the first white man they had ever seen.

In this research he concentrated on the Aborigines' hunting and gathering practices. He provided a collection of Pintupi material including photographs, notes and films, which now form part of invaluable museum collections.

Just before he left the people, they gave him an invaluable lesson on desert water, including an important "map" to assist its location. White people had long been puzzled as to how Aborigines could possibly find water in this harsh environment. Many desert explorers had captured Aborigines and used force and brutality to gain this vital knowledge – see for example, the history of the Canning Stock Route. Thomson writes:

Just before we left, the old men recited to me the names of more than fifty waters – wells, rockholes and claypans ... this, in an area that the early explorers believed to be almost waterless, and where all but a few were, in 1957, still unknown to the white man. And on the eve of our going, Tjappanongo (Tjapanangka) produced spear-throwers, on the backs of which were designs deeply incised, more or less geometric in form. Sometimes with a stick, or with his finger, he would point to each well or rock hole in turn and recite its name, waiting for me to repeat it after him. Each time, the group of old men listened intently and grunted in approval – "Eh!" – or repeated the name again and listened once more. This process continued with the name of each water until they were satisfied with my pronunciation, when they would pass on to the next.

I realized that here was the most important discovery of the expedition – that what Tjappanongo and the old men had shown me was really a map, highly conventionalized, like the works on a "message" or "letter" stick of the Aborigines, of the waters of the vast terrain over which the Bindibu hunted.

Satellite image of the Great Sandy Desert Great Sandy Desert, Australia.jpg
Satellite image of the Great Sandy Desert
Donald Thomson

As well as writing in scholarly, anthropological journals, Thomson often filed articles back to many mainstream publications, such as The Australian Women's Weekly , about his findings in the Outback with the world's oldest surviving culture. He was often criticised for this for being low-brow. However, he defended his actions, realising the appeal and fascination of the ordinary Australian with the first Australians and their apparently simple, yet necessarily sophisticated, survival skills.

Thomson said of the Bindibu:

[They] have adapted themselves to that bitter environment so that they laugh deeply and grow the fattest babies in the world.

Donald Thomson, Bindibu Country [1]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology</span> Ritual and traditional history of the Indigenous peoples of Australia

Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology is the sacred spirituality represented in the stories performed by Aboriginal Australians within each of the language groups across Australia in their ceremonies. Aboriginal spirituality includes the Dreamtime, songlines, and Aboriginal oral literature.

In Australian Aboriginal mythology, the Wati kutjara are two young lizard-men who, in the Dreaming, travelled all over the Western Desert. In English, their songline is often called the Two Men Dreaming. The Wati kutjara are ubiquitous in the mythology of the Western Desert; Their journey extends for thousands of kilometres, stretching from the Kimberley to South Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John McDouall Stuart</span> Scottish explorer

John McDouall Stuart, often referred to as simply "McDouall Stuart", was a Scottish explorer and one of the most accomplished of all Australia's inland explorers.

Kintore is a remote settlement in the Kintore Range of the Northern Territory of Australia about 530 km (330 mi) west of Alice Springs and 40 km (25 mi) from the border with Western Australia. It is also known as Walungurru, Walangkura, and Walangura.

The Caledon Bay crisis, refers to a series of killings at Caledon Bay in the Northern Territory of Australia during 1932–34, referred to in the press of the day as Caledon Bay murder(s). Five Japanese trepang fishers were killed by Aboriginal Australians of the Yolngu people. A police officer investigating the deaths, Albert McColl, was subsequently killed. Shortly afterwards, two white men went missing on Woodah Island. With some of the white community alarmed by these events, a punitive expedition was proposed by Northern Territory Police to "teach the blacks a lesson".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Thomson</span> Australian anthropologist and ornithologist (1901–1970)

Donald Finlay Fergusson Thomson, OBE was an Australian anthropologist and ornithologist who was largely responsible for turning the Caledon Bay crisis into a "decisive moment in the history of Aboriginal-European relations". He is remembered as a friend of the Yolngu people, and as a champion of understanding, by non-Indigenous Australians, of the culture and society of Indigenous Australians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Papunya</span> Town in the Northern Territory, Australia

Papunya is a small Indigenous Australian community roughly 240 kilometres (150 mi) northwest of Alice Springs (Mparntwe) in the Northern Territory, Australia. It is known as an important centre for Contemporary Indigenous Australian art, in particular the style created by the Papunya Tula artists in the 1970s, referred to colloquially as dot painting. Its population in 2016 was 404.

The Pintupi are an Australian Aboriginal group who are part of the Western Desert cultural group and whose traditional land is in the area west of Lake Macdonald and Lake Mackay in Western Australia. These people moved into the Aboriginal communities of Papunya and Haasts Bluff in the west of the Northern Territory in the 1940s–1980s. The last Pintupi to leave their traditional lifestyle in the desert, in 1984, are a group known as the Pintupi Nine, also sometimes called the "lost tribe".

Timmy Payungka was an Aboriginal Australian artist, a Pintupi man who worked at the Papunya Tula school of painting. He was born at Parayirpilynga, near Wilkinkarra in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coolamon (vessel)</span> Australian Aboriginal carrying vessel

Coolamon is an anglicised NSW Aboriginal word used to describe an Australian Aboriginal carrying vessel.

A soakage, or soak, is a source of water in Australian deserts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western Desert cultural bloc</span> Aboriginal Australian cultural region in Central Australia

The Western Desert cultural bloc or just Western Desert is a cultural region in central Australia covering about 600,000 square kilometres (230,000 sq mi), including the Gibson Desert, the Great Victoria Desert, the Great Sandy and Little Sandy Deserts in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. The Western Desert cultural bloc can be said to stretch from the Nullarbor in the south to the Kimberley in the north, and from the Percival Lakes in the west through to the Pintupi lands in the Northern Territory.

<i>Walkabout</i> (magazine) Former Australian illustrated magazine

Walkabout was an Australian illustrated magazine published from 1934 to 1974 combining cultural, geographic, and scientific content with travel literature. Initially a travel magazine, in its forty-year run it featured a popular mix of articles by travellers, officials, residents, journalists, naturalists, anthropologists and novelists, illustrated by Australian photojournalists. Its title derived "from the supposed 'racial characteristic of the Australian Aboriginal who is always on the move'."

The Pintupi Nine were a group of nine Pintupi people who remained unaware of European colonisation of Australia and lived a traditional desert-dwelling life in Australia's Gibson Desert until 1984, when they made contact with their relatives near Kiwirrkurra. They are sometimes also referred to as "the lost tribe". The group were hailed as "the last nomads" in the international press when they left their nomadic life in October 1984.

The Tingari (Tingarri) cycle in Australian Aboriginal mythology embodies a vast network of Aboriginal Dreaming (tjukurpa) songlines that traverse the Western Desert region of Australia. Locations and events associated with the Tingari cycle are frequently the subject of Aboriginal Art from the region.

Ngoia Pollard Napaltjarri is a Walpiri-speaking Indigenous artist from Australia's Western Desert region. Ngoia Pollard married Jack Tjampitjinpa, who became an artist working with the Papunya Tula company, and they had five children.

This article refers to the works of poets and novelists and specialised writers who have written about the Australian outback from first-hand experience. These works frequently address race relations in Australia, often from a personal point of view, with Australian Aboriginal people used as a theme or subject.

Thomas Tjapaltjarri is an Australian Aboriginal artist. He and his brothers Warlimpirrnga and Walala have become well known as the Tjapaltjarri Brothers. Tjapaltjarri and his family became known as the last group of Aborigines to come into contact with modern, European society. They came out of the desert in 1984, and became known as "the last nomads".

The Ngaatjatjarra are an Indigenous Australian people of Western Australia, with communities located in the north eastern part of the Goldfields-Esperance region.

David Corke is an Australian documentary film maker, naturalist and educational author. He filmed first-encounter between Europeans and the aboriginal Pintupi people, and was the first person to film the birth of a red kangaroo.

References

  1. Thompson, D, Bindibu Country, Melbourne, Thomas Nelson, ISBN   0-17-005049-1 p. 4