Nangiomeri

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The Nangiomeri, or Nanggumiri, [1] were an indigenous Australian people who lived in the area of the Daly River in 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

Language

Nangiomeri is one of the Southern Daly River languages, and considered a dialect of Ngan'gityemerri/Ngaan'giwumerri. [2]

Southern Daly languages

The Southern Daly languages are a proposed family of two distantly related Australian aboriginal languages. They are:

Country

Their traditional grounds lie to the east of those of the Maramanandji and Murrinh-Patha, [3] extending some 1,000 square miles (2,600 km2), south of the central sector of the Daly river, to the south of the Mulluk-Mulluk and Madngella. They ran along the Flora River up to its junction with the Daly. [1]

Murrinh-Patha

The Murrinh-Patha, or Murinbata, are an indigenous Australian people of the Northern Territory

The Mulluk-Mulluk, otherwise known as the Malak-Malak, are an indigenous Australian people of the Northern Territory, Australia.

History

Securing food for aboriginal nomads was always a dicey business, and the attraction of areas where Europeans settled, as places where, through kinship with indigenous people employed there, one could obtain surer supplies of food, tobacco and sugar, exercised a powerful influence on tribal shifts in Australia. Around the 1900s, taken in by Bush Telegraph rumours of marvels to be seen at a new gold mine, which had begun to operate at sv:Fletchers Gully Mine southwards in what is now the Victoria Daly Region they moved there together with the Wagiman, and never looked back to return to their homeland. [4] According to Johannes Falkenberg, one horde of the tribe, known as the Ngargaminjin, assimilated with the Murrinh-Partha after the coming of white colonization. [1]

Bush Telegraph was a radio program on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National network, broadcast weekdays (Monday-Friday) at 11-12am, presenting stories from rural and regional Australia. The show ended on Friday, December 19, 2014.

Victoria Daly Region Local government area in the Northern Territory, Australia

The Victoria Daly Regional Council is a local government area in the Northern Territory of Australia. The shire covers an area of 153,287 square kilometres (59,184 sq mi) and had a population of approximately 2,800 at the 2016 Census.

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.

Society and kinship

The Nangiomeri and their allies the Mulluk-Mulluk were bitter enemies of the -Marringar and Marrithiyal tribes, though ceremonial obligations required them to cooperate in crucial ritual circumstances, such as the Dingiri style circumcision initiatory rite, Dingiri being a mythical hunter who sang himself into stone. [5] Their kinship is based on the eight-subsection principle. [6]

Marri Ngarr is a moribund Australian aboriginal language spoken along the northwest coast of the Northern Territory.

The Marrithiyal, also written Marithiel, are an indigenous Australian people whose traditional territory lay 30 to 50 miles south of the Daly River in the Northern Territory. They were sometimes known derogatively as Berringen(Berinken/Brinken), a term used by the Mulluk-Mulluk to refer to 'aliens'/strangers'.

Mythology

The Dreamtime figure of the rainbow serpent figures prominently among Daly River tribes, such as the Wagiman and the Marrithiyal for his role in stealing one of the wives of the flying fox, and suffering the consequences. In the Nangiomeri version, as with the Murrinh-Patha, the rainbow serpent is bisexual. [7]

Dreamtime sacred era in Australian Aboriginal mythology

Dreamtime is a term devised by early anthropologists to refer to a religio-cultural worldview attributed to Australian Aboriginal beliefs. It was originally used by Francis Gillen, quickly adopted by his colleague Baldwin Spencer and thereafter popularised by A. P. Elkin, who, however, later revised his views. The Dreaming is used to represent Aboriginal concepts of "time out of time" or "everywhen", during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. These figures were often distinct from "gods" as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped, but only revered. The concept of the dreamtime has subsequently become widely adopted beyond its original Australian context and is now part of global popular culture.

Wagiman language Indigenous Australian language

Wagiman is a near-extinct indigenous Australian language spoken by fewer than 10 Wagiman people in and around Pine Creek, in the Katherine Region of the Northern Territory.

<i>Pteropus</i> Genus of large bats

Pteropus is a genus of bats which are among the largest in the world. They are commonly known as fruit bats or flying foxes, among other colloquial names. They live in the tropics and subtropics of Asia, Australia, East Africa, and some oceanic islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. There are at least 60 extant species in the genus.

Durmugan

The Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner made the tribe famous by dedicating a paper to one particular member of the tribe, Durmugan, whom he first encountered while following a tribe he was living with, who he noticed had begun to adorn themselves in war-paint, to a full-scale battle, with over 100 warriors arranged in battle lines and hurling spears at each other. As he observed, his attention was drawn to one tall strikingly built skirmisher on the other side who displayed exemplary courage and prowess and stood out from the others. He was a Nangiomeri, who introduced himself once hostilities had ceased, and Stanner realized that he was in front of a man whom Europeans in the area called 'Smiler' with a repute for being 'the most murderous black in the region. [8] Stanner interprets Durmugan's distinctive and powerful character in terms of an initiation he managed to undergo, despite his deracinated past, on the Victoria River, around the time of WW1. For those round Daly River the key myth of Angamunggi (the All-Father, Rainbow Serpent) had died off, as he was thought, in the midst of the rapid changes in their world, -the loss of land, disappearance of game and proliferation of deadly diseases- to have abandoned them. He was replaced by an emergent Kunapipi cult, an All-Mother represented by the bull-roarer Karwadi, which had been adopted from the earlier belief system. It was the stimulus of this new native messianic cult that, in Stanner's view, fired men like Durmugan to lead the lives they did. [9]

Stanner's long memoir of Durmugan soon became famous, with its insightful tale of the relationship between a native informant and his anthropologist interpreter. Robert Manne has called it 'the finest essay by an Australian' he had ever come across. [10] [11]

His name indicated a Murrinh-Patha connection, being a variant on a place-name, Dirmugam, in the latter Nangor clan's territory. His only equal, and, in dance, superior was a Murrinh-Patha warrior and trickster called Tjimari, whose story was given lustre after he madew friends with the Australian poet Roland Robinson. [12]

Alternative names

Notes

    Citations

    1. 1 2 3 4 Tindale 1974, p. 232.
    2. ↑ Grimes 2003, p. 416.
    3. ↑ Stanner 2011, p. 21.
    4. ↑ Stanner 2011, p. 31.
    5. ↑ Stanner 2011, p. 22.
    6. ↑ Stanner 2011, p. 33.
    7. ↑ Maddock 1978, p. 6.
    8. ↑ Stanner 2011, pp. 19–56,21.
    9. ↑ Stanner 2011, p. 34.
    10. ↑ Manne 2011, p. 4.
    11. ↑ Hinkson 2010, p. 81.
    12. ↑ Stanner 2011, pp. 23–24.

    Sources

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