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Anmatyerre Erotic

Homeland

Central Australia north of Alice Springs, around Ti Tree, Laramba, Yuelamu and the Utopia homelands, Northern Territory, Australia

Language

Anmatyerr, in eastern and western varieties (Arandic, Pama-Nyungan); English, with many also speaking Warlpiri or Alyawarr

Religion

Altyerr (Dreaming) law and ceremony, alongside Christianity

Subgroups

Eastern and Western Anmatyerr; one of the Arandic peoples, with Arrernte, Alyawarr and Kaytetye

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Anmatyerre People

The Anmatyerre are the people whose country straddles the Stuart Highway north of Alice Springs. It is a stretch of mulga, spinifex and sandy creek beds that most drivers cross without asking whose land it is. To Anmatyerre families it is a close-packed map of named places. Each place is tied to Altyerr, the Dreaming, and to the people responsible for its songs and designs. Their home communities include Ti Tree, Laramba and Yuelamu, along with the Utopia homelands they share with Alyawarr neighbors. Their language, Anmatyerr, belongs to the Arandic branch of the Pama-Nyungan family. It is close kin to Arrernte to the south and Alyawarr to the east, and more distant from Kaytetye to the north. It has eastern and western varieties. On the western side many people move between Anmatyerr and Warlpiri without a second thought, the result of generations of intermarriage and shared ceremony. Kinship does much of the organizing. A system of eight skin names places everyone in relation to everyone else and shapes who marries whom, who speaks to whom and who does what at a ceremony. Rights in country pass through the father's line, while people connected through the mother act as managers who make sure things are done correctly. Women still hold awelye, their own ceremony of song and ochre designs painted onto the body. It is taken as serious business and not put on as a show.

Lasting contact came with the Overland Telegraph Line in the 1870s and the cattle stations that followed it. In 1928 a dingo trapper was killed, and the police reprisals now known as the Coniston massacre killed dozens of Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye people. For much of the twentieth century Anmatyerre men and women worked on stations such as Napperby and Utopia, on land they never stopped treating as their own. Utopia eventually went back to its Anmatyerre and Alyawarr owners through an early Northern Territory land claim. Families there spread out onto small outstations instead of gathering in one town, which kept people close to their own country. Most of the wider world knows the Anmatyerre through their painting. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri were central figures in the Papunya painting movement of the 1970s. At Utopia, women who had started with batik moved to canvas in the late 1980s. Emily Kame Kngwarreye took up canvas in her late seventies and became one of the most celebrated Australian artists of her time. She painted from the yam country and ceremonial designs she had known all her life.

Related ethnic groups

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

Arrernte