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Alyawarre Erotic

Homeland

Sandover and Plenty river country northeast of Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia, reaching toward the Queensland border; communities include Ampilatwatja, Alpurrurulam (Lake Nash) and Utopia

Language

Alyawarr (Arandic, Pama-Nyungan); English widely spoken as an additional language

Religion

Christianity alongside traditional Aboriginal religion and Dreaming law

Subgroups

Arandic-speaking peoples of Central Australia, closely related to the Anmatyerr and Arrernte

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Alyawarre People

The Alyawarre (Alyawarr, in the spelling the community itself uses) are a Central Australian desert people held together by three things: a language that is still the everyday tongue at home, a country they know site by site, and a kinship system that tells every person how to stand toward every other. Their land follows the Sandover and Plenty rivers northeast of Alice Springs and runs out toward the Queensland border. It is spinifex, mulga and creek beds that carry water only after rain. Most Alyawarr today live at Ampilatwatja, at Alpurrurulam on Lake Nash, on the outstations of Utopia, and in towns such as Tennant Creek, Alice Springs and Mount Isa.

Alyawarr belongs to the Arandic branch of the Pama-Nyungan family, and its closest relatives are Anmatyerr and the Arrernte varieties to the west and south. Long ago the Arandic languages dropped many of the consonants that once began their words, so they sound quite different from Warumungu to the north or Warlpiri further west. Unusually for Australia, Alyawarr is still a first language for children in its heartland, and many adults also speak a neighboring Aboriginal language alongside English.

Daily life runs on an eight-part skin name system. A person's skin name, held from birth, sets out whom they may marry, which relatives call for restraint, and which ceremonial duties are theirs. Responsibility for a sacred place is split between those who hold it through their father's line and those who look after it through their mother's, and ceremony needs both present. Christianity has a real following, but it has settled in beside the Dreaming law that binds songs and stories to particular sites rather than pushing that law aside.

Cattle stations spread over Alyawarr country from the late 1800s, and generations of Alyawarr worked on them, often for rations rather than wages. In the 1970s Alyawarr camps became a much-cited case for archaeologists studying how hunter-gatherers use and leave behind a living space. The turn came late in that decade, when Utopia station passed back to its Alyawarr and Anmatyerr owners and families spread out to small outstations on their own land. Utopia went on to international fame, first for women's batik and then for acrylic painting, and health researchers later linked its spread-out outstation life to better outcomes than expected. The argument over who decides how people live on their own country is not settled. In 2009 residents of Ampilatwatja walked out of their township and set up a protest camp against the federal Intervention.

Related ethnic groups

Groups that share Alyawarre's homeland, region, language, or religious tradition. These are likely candidates for comparative phenotype reference.

Arrernte