Alawa Erotic

The Alawa are an Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory's Gulf country. Their land lies south of the Roper River, along the Hodgson River and its tributaries, inland from the southwestern corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is savanna and sandstone country, flooded and cut off in the wet season and hard and dry for the rest of the year. Most Alawa now live at Minyerri, on the former Hodgson Downs cattle station, and at Ngukurr, the old Roper River Mission, with family in Katherine and Darwin.

Alawa is a Marran language, closest to Marra and the now silent Warndarang. It belongs to the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of the Top End, structurally far from the family that covers most of the continent, and it sorts nouns into masculine and feminine. Only a handful of elders still speak it fully. The everyday language is Kriol, the English-based creole that took shape at the Roper River Mission in the early twentieth century, when children from many language groups were raised together in its dormitories. The linguist Margaret Sharpe worked with Alawa speakers from the 1960s, and an Alawa, Kriol and English dictionary came out of that work.

The mission exists because of what came before it. Cattle reached the Roper in the 1870s and 1880s, and the violence that followed was severe. In the early 1900s a pastoral company with enormous leases paid armed gangs to clear Aboriginal people off the country. The Anglican mission opened in 1908 and became a refuge for survivors from the Alawa and their neighbors. Alawa men and women then spent generations as the poorly paid or unpaid workforce of stations built on their own land. Hodgson Downs was eventually returned as Aboriginal freehold and is now held by an Alawa land trust.

Alawa society runs on a framework shared across the Roper region. Everyone belongs to one of four semi-moieties, Mambali, Murrungun, Guyal and Budal, inherited through the father, which tie people to particular tracts of country, Dreaming tracks and ceremonies. Rights come in pairs. You own your father's country, and you act as junggayi, a manager or guardian, for your mother's. Owners cannot properly run a ceremony or decide the fate of a site without their junggayi present, a check that shapes land council meetings and mining negotiations as much as ritual. Christianity, mostly Anglican, sits beside ceremony rather than replacing it.

Outside the region the name travels in two ways: as a northern suburb of Darwin, and through I, the Aboriginal, Douglas Lockwood's 1962 account of the life of Phillip Roberts, Waipuldanya, an Alawa man who trained as a medical assistant.