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Kunwinjku Erotic

Homeland

Western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia, centered on Gunbalanya (Oenpelli), the Arnhem Land plateau and outstations between Kakadu and the Maningrida region

Language

Kunwinjku, a dialect of Bininj Kunwok (Gunwinyguan family); English widely used as a second language

Religion

Christianity, largely Anglican, alongside Aboriginal ceremonial law and sacred site beliefs

Subgroups

Part of the Bininj Kunwok dialect groups (Kunwinjku, Kuninjku, Kune, Mayali, Kundjeyhmi, Kundedjnjenghmi); organized into patrilineal clans, Duwa and Yirridja moieties and skin groups

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Kunwinjku People

Ask a Kunwinjku speaker what they are and the first answer is often Bininj, the western Arnhem Land word for a person, and more specifically for an Aboriginal person as opposed to a Balanda, a white one. Kunwinjku, spelled Gunwinggu in older anthropology, names a way of speaking before it names a people, and identity here runs through language, clan and country all at once. That country is the sandstone plateau and river floodplains of western Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Territory. It reaches from Gunbalanya, the old Oenpelli, east across the escarpment toward the Liverpool and Mann rivers and south to the edge of Kakadu.

Kunwinjku is one dialect of Bininj Kunwok, a chain that also includes Kuninjku, Kune, Mayali, Kundjeyhmi and Kundedjnjenghmi. It belongs to the Gunwinyguan family, outside the Pama Nyungan group that covers most of the continent. In this part of Australia the next community over may speak a language from a completely unrelated family. Kunwinjku can pack a whole sentence into a single verb, and children still learn it as a first language, which few Aboriginal languages can claim. Over the twentieth century it also spread west and became the everyday language of Gunbalanya, as speakers of smaller neighboring languages switched to it.

Social life runs on patrilineal clans, two moieties and a system of skin names, marked na for men and ngal for women. The system tells everyone how they are related to everyone else and who should keep a respectful distance from whom, and a special careful way of speaking is still used around certain relatives by marriage. The Church Missionary Society opened an Anglican mission at Oenpelli in 1925. Christianity has since settled in alongside the older law instead of erasing it.

Outsiders mostly know Kunwinjku people through their painting. Rock shelters across the plateau hold images made over thousands of years, among them the thin mimih spirits said to have taught people to hunt and paint, and Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent who shaped the country and punishes people who break its rules. Bark painters carried that tradition onto portable surfaces with rarrk, fine crosshatching in ochre. Artists working through Injalak at Gunbalanya and the Maningrida region have taken the style into major galleries, and hollow log coffins called lorrkkon are still painted. Since the 1970s many families have moved back to small outstations on their own clan estates. Ranger groups based there now use traditional early dry season burning as a paid land management program.

Related ethnic groups

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

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