Barngarla Erotic

The Barngarla are the Aboriginal people of eastern Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. Their country runs down the western side of Spencer Gulf, from around Port Augusta and Whyalla toward Port Lincoln, and inland across what is now wheat country but was once mallee scrub and saltbush plain. Older records spell the name Parnkalla or Pangkala. What makes them a people is country and law: one language, Dreaming stories tied to particular places, and a kinship system that the Lutheran missionary Clamor Schürmann described in the 1840s. He recorded two halves, Mattiri and Karraru, and people were expected to marry across that line, not within it.

Barngarla belongs to the Thura-Yura branch of the Pama-Nyungan family. That puts it in a small group with Kaurna on the Adelaide Plains, Narungga on Yorke Peninsula, Nukunu across the gulf and Adnyamathanha in the Flinders Ranges. Colonization hit hard and fast after Port Lincoln was settled in 1839. Pastoral runs took the water and the hunting grounds, frontier violence followed, and later policies of removal and assimilation pushed the language out of daily life over the twentieth century. It survived on paper because Schürmann, working at Port Lincoln, published a Vocabulary of the Parnkalla Language in 1844. Since the early 2010s, Barngarla people have worked with the linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann of the University of Adelaide to bring the language back. They have held workshops in Port Augusta, Whyalla and Port Lincoln, turning a missionary's word list into something families speak and sing again.

The last decade has also been a fight over land. In 2015 the Federal Court recognized Barngarla native title over roughly 44,500 square kilometers of Eyre Peninsula, the result of a claim first lodged in the 1990s. Then the federal government picked a farm near Kimba, on Barngarla country, for a national radioactive waste facility. Barngarla people were shut out of the local community ballot because they did not live in the council district. They ran their own vote, rejected the plan and went to court. In 2023 the Federal Court set the site decision aside, and the government chose not to appeal. Most Barngarla now live in the Spencer Gulf towns and in Adelaide. For many of them, the language work and the land cases are one cause: showing, in court and at home, that the country still has its people.