Bardi Erotic

The Bardi are saltwater people, and nearly everything that marks them as a group comes from reading the sea. Their country is the northern tip of the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia's Kimberley, north of Broome, where red cliffs meet white sand and the tides of King Sound can move through ten meters or more. Knowing when a reef will lie bare, which current runs to the next island, and when the turtles are fat is the core of Bardi knowledge. Their closest kin are the Jawi of Sunday Island and the Buccaneer Archipelago, and the two are now so intermarried that they usually act as one body, Bardi Jawi. Most live in three communities: One Arm Point (Ardyaloon), Djarindjin and Lombadina.

Bardi belongs to the small Nyulnyulan family, one of the Kimberley's non-Pama-Nyungan groups, with no demonstrable link to the languages that cover most of the continent. Jawi is close enough to count as a sister dialect. Only a handful of elders still speak Bardi fluently. Daily talk runs in Aboriginal English and Kriol, threaded with Bardi words for fish, tides, kin and seasons. The calendar itself is Bardi: six seasons rather than four, among them Lalin, the hot build-up before the rains, when turtles mate and hunters go out after them.

Outsiders arrived by boat. From the 1880s pearling luggers took Bardi men and women as divers and crew, often by force. Missions followed: a Protestant one on Sunday Island in 1899, a Catholic one at Lombadina in the 1910s. When the Sunday Island mission closed in the early 1960s its people were moved to Derby, a town on tidal mudflats far from their reefs. In 1972 they went home and built One Arm Point themselves. The Federal Court recognized Bardi Jawi native title in 2005 and widened it on appeal in 2010.

Most Bardi are Christian, and most also keep Law. Boys still go through initiation, and ilma, public song and dance cycles performed with handheld emblems of wood and colored thread, are still composed, often from songs said to arrive in dreams. Two older technologies deserve to be better known. The galwa is a raft of pegged mangrove logs, ridden on tidal currents between islands rather than paddled against them. Riji are pearl shells engraved with interlocking lines and rubbed with red ochre, worn by initiated men and once traded deep into the desert interior. Today Bardi Jawi rangers monitor turtle and dugong across an Indigenous Protected Area declared in 2013.