Daii people

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The Daii or Dhay'yi are an indigenous Australian people of the Northern Territory.

Northern Territory federal territory of Australia

The Northern Territory is an Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. It shares borders with Western Australia to the west, South Australia to the south, and Queensland to the east. To the north, the territory looks out to the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Western New Guinea and other Indonesian islands. The NT covers 1,349,129 square kilometres (520,902 sq mi), making it the third-largest Australian federal division, and the 11th-largest country subdivision in the world. It is sparsely populated, with a population of only 246,700, making it the least-populous of Australia's eight states and major territories, with fewer than half as many people as Tasmania.

Contents

Name

The tribal ethnonym Daii is formed from the demonstrative pronoun for 'this'. [1]

Country

In Norman Tindale's estimation the Daii occupied 800 square miles (2,100 km2) of land, extending northwards from the shores of Blue Mud Bay as far as the Koolatong River. Their inland extension ran at least to Ngilipidji. [1]

Norman Tindale Australian biologist

Norman Barnett Tindale AO was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist.

Blue Mud Bay bight in Australia

Blue Mud Bay is a large, shallow, partly enclosed bay on the eastern coast of Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory of Australia, facing Groote Eylandt on the western side of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It lies 580 km east-south-east of Darwin in the Arnhem Coast bioregion. Its name was given to a landmark court ruling affirming that the Aboriginal traditional owners of much of the Northern Territory's coastline have exclusive rights over commercial and recreational fishing in tidal waters overlying their land.

Koolatong River river in Australia

The Koolatong River is a river in the Northern Territory, Australia.

Social organization

The Daii consisted of two clans, which formed the basis for marriage exchanges:-

A band society, sometimes called a camp or, in older usage, a horde, is the simplest form of human society. A band generally consists of a small kin group, no larger than an extended family or clan. The general consensus of modern anthropology sees the average number of members of a social band at the simplest level of foraging societies with generally a maximum size of 30 to 50 people.

The Dalwangu moiety was jiritja, the Djawark a dua moiety. [1]

In the anthropological study of kinship, a moiety is a descent group that coexists with only one other descent group within a society. In such cases, the community usually has unilineal descent, either patri- or matrilineal, so that any individual belongs to one of the two moiety groups by birth, and all marriages take place between members of opposite moieties. It is an exogamous clan system with only two clans.

Trade

The Daii's lands accessed the rich quartzite quarry at Ngilipidji, which provided stone for prized implements that could be traded. The local industry was, according to archaeologists, probably spurred by the rise of precolonial contacts with Asia's South Sulawesi Makassar voyagers. [2]

Quartzite hard, non-foliated metamorphic rock which was originally pure quartz sandstone

Quartzite is a hard, non-foliated metamorphic rock which was originally pure quartz sandstone. Sandstone is converted into quartzite through heating and pressure usually related to tectonic compression within orogenic belts. Pure quartzite is usually white to grey, though quartzites often occur in various shades of pink and red due to varying amounts of iron oxide (Fe2O3). Other colors, such as yellow, green, blue and orange, are due to other minerals.

Makassan contact with Australia

Trepangers from the Makassar region of Sulawesi began visiting the coast of northern Australia sometime around the middle of the 1700s, first in the Kimberley region, and some decades later in Arnhem Land, to collect and process trepang, a marine invertebrate sea cucumber prized for its culinary value generally and for its medicinal properties in Chinese markets. The term Makassan is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia, although some were from other islands in the Indonesian Archipelago, including Timor, Rote and Aru.

South Sulawesi Province in Indonesia

South Sulawesi is a province in the southern peninsula of Sulawesi. The Selayar Islands archipelago to the south of Sulawesi is also part of the province. The capital is Makassar. The province is bordered by Central Sulawesi and West Sulawesi to the north, the Gulf of Bone and Southeast Sulawesi to the east, Makassar Strait to the west, and Flores Sea to the south.

Alternative names

Notes

    Citations

    Sources

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