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Arrernte Erotic

Homeland

Central Australia around Alice Springs and the MacDonnell Ranges, Northern Territory, Australia.

Language

Arrernte, including Eastern, Central, Western Arrarnta and Pertame varieties (Arandic, Pama-Nyungan)

Religion

Altyerre, the ancestral law and Dreaming tradition, held alongside Lutheran Christianity introduced at Hermannsburg.

Subgroups

One of the Arandic peoples, alongside Anmatyerre, Alyawarre and Kaytetye; internal branches include Eastern, Central (Mparntwe), Western Arrarnta and Pertame (Southern) Arrernte.

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Arrernte People

The Arrernte hold the country around Alice Springs, which they call Mparntwe, along with the ranges and river channels that run out from it across Central Australia. This is arid land but not empty land: the MacDonnell Ranges break it into gaps and gorges that hold water when everything else has dried, and Arrernte country is mapped by those places rather than by lines on a survey. Identity here is inherited two ways at once. A person is apmereke-artweye for their father's estate, holding it, and kwertengerle for their mother's, which means being responsible for watching how someone else looks after it. Nobody is sole owner of anything. Every stretch of country has people standing on both sides of it, checking each other.

Their language is Arrernte, the core of the small Arandic group inside the Pama-Nyungan family, and it is one of the stronger Aboriginal languages left in Australia, with several thousand speakers across the Eastern, Central, Western Arrarnta and Pertame varieties. Linguists have argued for decades about the Arandic sound system, which appears to run on syllables that end rather than begin with a consonant, and which uses pre-stopped nasals that are rare almost everywhere else. The written form now in general use was worked out in Alice Springs in the 1970s.

The Arrernte have the strange distinction of being among the most written-about people on earth without having asked for any of it. Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen published their Arrernte fieldwork in 1899, and within a generation Durkheim, Freud and Frazer had all built theories of religion on top of it, mostly wrongly. Lutheran missionaries reached Hermannsburg, west of town, in 1877 and stayed. That mission is where Albert Namatjira learned watercolor and painted the ranges in a way that forced white Australia to look at the desert properly, and where he was granted citizenship in 1957 while his own relatives were not. Ceremonial life continues, much of it restricted, and the sacred objects that early collectors carried off, T.G.H. Strehlow's holdings above all, are still being fought over. Alice Springs is an Arrernte town with a large non-Arrernte population living in it, and the caterpillar ancestors whose bodies are the hills around it did not stop being there when the town arrived.

Related ethnic groups

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

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Noongar