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Ngarrindjeri Erotic

Homeland

Lower Murray River, Lakes Alexandrina and Albert, the Coorong and eastern Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia, Australia

Language

Ngarrindjeri (Pama-Nyungan), being actively revived; English is the everyday language

Religion

Christianity, largely a legacy of the Point McLeay mission, alongside ancestral beliefs centered on Ngurunderi and ngatji totems

Subgroups

Aboriginal Australian confederation of lakalinyeri clans, including the Jarildekald (Yaraldi), Tanganekald, Meintangk and Ramindjeri

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Ngarrindjeri People

The Ngarrindjeri are the people of the place where Australia's longest river runs out. Their country takes in the lower Murray, the broad freshwater Lakes Alexandrina and Albert, the long salt lagoon of the Coorong and the eastern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia. Water defines them more than any line on a map does. Ngarrindjeri speak of Ruwe, a word that holds country, waters and all living things together as one body, and they talk about the health of the river as the health of the people. When the Millennium Drought dropped the lakes and left the southern Coorong saltier than the sea, Ngarrindjeri leaders pushed hard for water to be sent downstream. The name covers a confederation, not one original tribe. The Jarildekald, Tanganekald, Meintangk, Ramindjeri and their neighbors spoke related dialects and were organized into lakalinyeri, clans that each held their own stretch of country. Each clan had its ngatji, birds, fish and animals treated as friends and kin. That closeness hardened into a single identity after disease and dispossession left the survivors gathered at Point McLeay. The mission there opened on the shore of Lake Alexandrina in 1859, and the place is now the Ngarrindjeri community of Raukkan. The mission made Christianity the common faith, but it never displaced Ngurunderi. He is the ancestor who chased a great Murray cod down the river, carving its bends, and later crossed to Kangaroo Island on his way into the spirit world.

The language belongs to the huge Pama-Nyungan family but is distinct from Kaurna, spoken on the Adelaide Plains to the northwest. It fell out of everyday use over the twentieth century and is now being rebuilt through dictionaries, classes and song. Coiled basketry in freshwater sedge was revived in the 1980s by a small circle of women weavers. It is now taught widely and has become one of the best-known Ngarrindjeri art forms. Raukkan also produced David Unaipon, a preacher, inventor and writer whose portrait is on the Australian fifty-dollar note. The hardest modern test came in the 1990s over a bridge to Hindmarsh Island, which Ngarrindjeri call Kumarangk. A group of Ngarrindjeri women said the waters there held secret women's knowledge. A state royal commission declared the claim fabricated and the community split over it. Years later a federal judge declined to find that it had been made up. The bridge opened in 2001, and the case is still a reference point whenever restricted sacred knowledge meets a courtroom.

Related ethnic groups

Groups that share Ngarrindjeri's homeland, region, language, or religious tradition — likely candidates for comparative phenotype reference.

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