Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia
Yasmine Musharbash
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0855756616
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Focusing on an isolated community in central Australia, this highly-readable examination presents insights into the cultural underpinnings of indigenous daily life through evocative narratives revolving around five Warlpiri women. The seemingly contradictory realities of a distant hunter-gatherer past and current life in a first-world nation-state are addressed as this refreshing study answers questions about the specifics of camps, sleeping arrangements, public and private boundaries, and how indigenous people in praxis relate to each other. This analysis illuminates the personal, utilizing rich vignettes and narrative portraits to expand understandings of indigenous Australia.
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institutions). During the early days, Yuendumu had at its centre a gardened area adjacent to the houses of the Missionary and the Superintendent. Known as the Park, this area became flanked by an increasing number of Kardiya staff residences and buildings for Yuendumu’s growing number of institutions (the school, the store, the soup kitchen, the clinic, and so forth). The residential arrangements for Yapa were located at some distance from the Park. Hinkson quotes two Yuendumu men describing
times in a day that I bothered him, and to this day most generously splashes red ink over everything I give him to read. Thank you very, very much for looking after me proper. NOTE ON SPELLING AND ORTHOGRAPHY I follow the Warlpiri spelling as taught by the Institute for Aboriginal Development, Alice Springs, and at Yuendumu School, based on the orthography developed by Kenneth Hale (for more information see Hale 1990). Warlpiri words are italicised on the first occasion that they are used.
analytical terms anthropologists commonly apply in similar contexts. For example, how can it be possible to find a social unit at Yuendumu that can be defined as ‘a household’ when people move so much? The constant flux in the social composition of people who sleep in any one camp does not at all lend itself to trying to draw boundaries around units. Yet many people who work in Aboriginal Australia use the term. It is habitually applied within the post-contact, on-going colonial and post-colonial
interaction, for Warlpiri social relations depend on such networks. Mobility is a taken-for-granted aspect of life; in order to create and maintain the conditions for one’s own mobility one needs to accommodate the mobility of others.14 Thus, in order to truly understand mobility at Yuendumu, we must also take a step back and look at mobility not only as a practice but also as the value that it so obviously is. It shapes people’s everyday experiences and their lives. Why should this be the case?
soft drink, these are the things she sometimes tries to demand from Celeste and especially from Basil. ‘Can I get a playstation, get me a playstation.’ They are also the things she would declare Chloe or Rory would never get her. They are items much more expensive than anything Tamsin can afford on her own — they are not something she is in a position to give, they are something that she wants. Wanting them in her fantasy house, owning them on her own terms, thus also expresses a frustration with
