Mythologies of the Arunta Tribes
The Eastern and Central Arrernte people live in Central Australia, their traditional land including the area of Alice Springs and East MacDonnell Ranges. They are also referred to as Aranda, Arrarnta, Arunta, and other similar spellings. Their neighbours are the Southern Arrernte, Luritja, Anmatyerr, Alyawarr and Western Arrernte peoples. There are five dialects of the Arrernte language: South-eastern, Central, Northern, Eastern and North-eastern. Arrernte country is rich with mountain ranges, waterholes, and gorges; as a result the Arrernte people set aside 'conservation areas' in which various species are protected. Arrernte people maintain a strong presence in Alice Springs, and have formed the Arrernte Council of Central Australia, as well playing a major role in the Aboriginal organisations in Alice Springs. Many Arrernte people also live in communities outside of Alice Springs and on outstations. There are roughly 1800 speakers of Eastern and Central Arrernte, making it the largest spoken language in the Arandic family, and one of the largest speaking populations of any Australian language. It is taught in schools, heard in local media and local government.
CHURINGA is the name given by the Arunta natives to certain sacred objects which, on penalty of death or very severe punishment, such as blinding by means of a fire-stick, are never allowed to be seen by women or uninitiated men. The term is applied, as we shall see later, to various objects associated with the totems, but of these the greater number belong to that class of rounded, oval or elongate, flattened stones and slabs of wood of very various sizes, to the smaller ones of which the name of bull-roarer is commonly applied. The importance and use of these in various ceremonies such as those attendant upon initiation of the young men, was first shown in Australia by Messrs. Howitt and Fison, and since then they have been repeatedly referred to by other writers. Amongst the aborigines of the Centre, as indeed everywhere else where they are found, considerable mystery is attached to their use–a mystery which has probably had a large part of its origin in the desire of the men to impress the women of the tribe with an idea of the supremacy and superior power of the male sex. From time immemorial myths and superstitions have grown up around them, until now it is difficult to say how far each individual believes in what, if the expression may be allowed, he must know to be more or less of a fraud, but in which he implicitly thinks that the other natives believe.
The Arunta are a group of Australian Aborigines who have many customs and reasons for why they do what they do. Their customs reflect their society because everything they do has a reason. Some customs may have come about because of the environment, the natural resources, or possibly just beliefs. There are several customs about family and kinship. An Arunta camp usually has one to two families. The Arunta live in such small groups so they do not have to worry about hunting a lot of food for big camps. If their camp were attacked, it would be a lot easier to look after a small amount of people and belongings. It may be more efficient to hunt in larger groups, because you have more of a chance to find animals. If the Arunta men were staying away from camp hunting for several days, it would be easier to care for five or six men instead of twenty. It would also be easier to be able to come home with only a little meat and still be able to find the whole camp. An Arunta family is usually by itself, but each family belongs to a clan. The clan is made up of several families, who hunt and live separately. Nevertheless, the members of the clan are all related. This is kinship. The Arunta clans have to marry outside their own clan so the clans will mix. The clans have no other social connections so this is very important. Without this custom, the clans would not be friendly with each other and wars would probably happen often. There are no forms of government or authority, so the older men of the society make decisions for the society. They have no way of giving reasons for their decisions, so they are guides more than they are leaders. Kinship is very important here because if a serious crime erupts, such as murder, families will take revenge on families.
The Arrernte – also referred to as Aranda, Arrarnta, Arunta, and other similar spellings – are the original Indigenous inhabitants of the Arrernte lands in the Central Australia region of the Northern Territory. Their lands cover some 120,000 square km, including the township of Alice Springs (Mparntwe) at its centre, as far as Wallack Rock Hole to the east, Watarrka (Kings Canyon) to the west, and as far as the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Arrernte languages are a closely related group of languages spoken by various sub-tribes. The language group is comprised of five Arrernte dialects (Western Arrernte, Mparnttwe Arrente, Eastern Arrente, Anmatyerre, and Alyawarre), plus two distinct languages (Kaytetye and Southern Arernte). Mparnttwe Arrente, spoken in the Alice Springs area and others, is the most widely spoken of the group and one of the most common Indigenous languages spoken in Australia, with 1,910 speakers recorded in the 2016 Australian census. For the Arrernte, their language goes to the core of who they are, including their cultural identity, their belief systems and their social order. Speakers do not just share the Arrernte group of languages but also an understanding of the way the world is organised and how it came to be that way. This all encompassing and enduring world view is known as Altyerre: the creation of the world and the things in it, and its external existence (often termed “The Dreaming” in English).
Aranda refers first of all to a language group. There have been at least eleven dialects in this group, each spoken by a different cultural bloc living in the desert areas of central Australia. The most northerly of these groups, the Anmatjera, Kaititj, Iliaura (or Alyawarra), Jaroinga, and Andakerebina, are not usually known as Aranda, even though they are Aranda speakers. Aranda is a postcontact denomination, now commonly accepted. It normally refers only to the following groups, some of which have died out by now or lost their distinct identities: Western Aranda, Northern Aranda, Eastern Aranda, Central Aranda, Upper Southern Aranda (or Pertame), and Lower Southern Aranda (or Alenyentharrpe). Arandic groups have been distributed throughout the area of the Northern Territory, Queensland, and South Australia between 132° and 139° S and 20° and 27° E. They have mainly occupied the relatively well-watered Mountainous areas of this desert region, although several groups, particularly around the northern, eastern, and southern fringes of the Aranda-speaking area, have very extensive sandhill regions within their territories. Aborigines have lived in central Australia for at least 20,000 years, although few details of their history are known. The Aranda were nomadic hunters and gatherers when Whites first came to Central Australia in the 1860s, but from the 1870s onward they steadily moved into a more sedentary (though still mobile) way of life on missions, pastoral stations, and government settlements. Relations between Aranda groups and between Aranda groups and their neighbors (mostly Western Desert people) have varied from friendship, alliance, and intermarriage, on the one hand, to enmity and hostility on the other. Relations with European interests have also varied greatly over the years, ranging from guerrilla warfare and cattle stealing to enforced or voluntary settlement and work on missions and cattle stations. European attitudes and practices towards Aranda people have also varied greatly—from tolerance to bigotry, from laissez-faire to paternalism, and from protectionism to murder. Since World War II, when development in central Australia greatly increased, the Aranda have lived through the official government policy of assimilation. They are now experiencing the effects of the relatively new policy of self-determination, which has caused their lives to be increasingly affected by Aboriginal bureaucracies.
Arunta is, or rather was, one of the largest tribes in Central Australia, and still occupies a tract of country extending from the Macumba River on the south to seventy miles north of the Macdonnell Ranges, a total distance of about 400 miles. Thirty years ago, when first we studied it, its members must have numbered at least 2000, now they cannot be more than 300 or 400. The nature of the country that the tribe occupies is very varied. The southern part forms the Lower Steppe lands, which rise gradually from an elevation of only seventy feet above sea level at the Macumba River, to 2000 feet in the north, where they fringe the southern margin of the Macdonnell Ranges. The Higher Steppe lands include a series of great ridges known as the Macdonnell, James, Waterhouse, Kirchauff, Gill, Levi and Strangway Ranges, that run east and west for between 300 and 400 miles, with here and there bold peaks and cliffs rising to a height of nearly 5000 feet. The northern ridges of the Macdonnell Ranges dip beneath the Burt Plains that stretch far away to the north, falling gradually from a level Of 3000 feet at their southern margin, to one of only 700 at Newcastle Waters, which fon-ns the centre of an enormous inland basin, bounded on the south by the central Ranges and on the north and east by the highlands that mark a division between a relatively narrow strip of coastal country and the great plains of the interior. The main water-courses, the Finke, Todd, Hugh, Ellery and Palmer Rivers, with their tributaries, take their rise amongst the jumbled hills on the northern side of the mainRanges and, flowing through deep and often narrow gorges and gaps, find their way to the south, and meander slowly across the Lower Steppe lands until they are lost amongst the sandy flats, or, perhaps, reach the great depressed area centring in the salt bed of Lake Eyre, below sea level. Away to the south and west of the Steppe lands lies a vast area of true desert region, crossed by no river courses, but with mile after mile of monotonous sand-hills covered with porcupine grass, or with long stretches of country where thick belts of almost impenetrable mulga scrub stretch across. We may first of all briefly outline the nature of the country occupied by the Arunta tribe. At the present day the trans- continental railway line, after running northwards close by the southern edge of Lake Eyre, lands the traveller at a small township called Oodnadatta, which is the present northern terminus of the line, and lies about 680 miles to the north of Adelaide. Beyond this, transit, in the early days of which we write, was by horse or camel; and across the centre of the continent ran a track following closely the course of the single wire that then served to maintain the only telegraphic com- munication between Australia and Europe. From Oodnadatta to Charlotte Waters stretches a long succession of gibber I plains, where, mile after mile, the ground is covered with brown and purple stones, often set close together, as if they formed a tessellated pavement stretching away to the horizon. They are formed by the disintegration of a thin stratum of rock, called Desert Sandstone, that forms the horizontal capping of low terraced hills, from which every here and there a dry water-course, fringed with a thin belt of mulga trees, comes down on to the plain, across which it meanders for a few miles and then dies away. The only streams of any importance in this part of the country are the Alberga, Stevenson and Hamilton, which run across from the west and unite to form the Macumba River, which in times of flood empties itself into Lake Eyre. It is only very rarely that the rainfall is sufficient to fill the beds of 1. Gibber is an aboriginal word meaning a rock or stone. The word is probably defived originally from a Queensland dialect, but is now used by white men in many parts. Gibber-gunyah is an aboriginal cave dwelling or rock-shelter.
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