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Pitjantjatjara Erotic

Homeland

Western Desert of central Australia: the APY Lands in far northwest South Australia around the Mann, Tomkinson and Musgrave ranges, extending into the southwest Northern Territory and eastern Western Australia

Language

Pitjantjatjara, a dialect of the Western Desert Language (Pama-Nyungan, Wati subgroup); English widely spoken as a second language

Religion

Tjukurpa (traditional law and ancestral religion) alongside Christianity, mainly Uniting Church from the former Presbyterian mission at Ernabella

Subgroups

Anangu of the Western Desert cultural bloc; closely allied with Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra; Southern Pitjantjatjara communities at Yalata and Oak Valley

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Pitjantjatjara People

Pitjantjatjara people take their name from a single word. Across the Western Desert, neighboring groups speak closely related forms of one language and tell themselves apart by small differences in vocabulary, including the word for coming or going. Pitjantjatjara say pitjantja, so they are the ones "having pitjantja". Their eastern neighbors say yankunytja, so they are Yankunytjatjara. Both call themselves Anangu, simply "people", and share country, ceremony and family ties. That country is red sand, spinifex and mulga broken by the Mann, Tomkinson and Musgrave ranges. It lies in the far northwest of South Australia and spills over into the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Most families live in small communities such as Amata, Pipalyatjara and Pukatja, also known as Ernabella, or on outstations between them. Children still learn the language as their first tongue, which puts it among the healthiest Aboriginal languages in the country. Beneath daily life sits Tjukurpa. It is often translated as the Dreaming, but it is closer to law: the account of how ancestral beings made the land, which also sets out kinship duties, marriage rules and who is allowed to know what. Christianity came mainly through the Presbyterian mission at Ernabella, opened in 1937, and church and ceremony now sit side by side in many communities.

In the twentieth century, pressure came in from the edges of the desert. Drought, dingo scalp hunters and pastoral leases pulled families toward missions and ration points. In the 1950s the British atomic tests at Maralinga closed off a large stretch of the southern desert. The turning point came in 1981, when South Australia gave Anangu freehold title over more than 100,000 square kilometers, one of the landmark land rights settlements in Australia. Uluru, just over the Territory border, was handed back to its Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara traditional owners in 1985, and the climb closed for good in 2019. Some customs rarely reach outsiders. Girls and women tell stories by drawing in the sand with a bent wire or stick, a practice called milpatjunanyi, and smooth the ground clean between scenes. Some relatives by marriage avoid one another or use a special respectful way of speaking. Song cycles such as the Seven Sisters run across hundreds of kilometers of desert, linking Pitjantjatjara country to that of groups far away. Art has also long been a livelihood. Ernabella Arts grew out of a mission craft room in 1948 and is counted among the oldest continuously running Aboriginal art centers in Australia, while Tjanpi weavers turn desert grass into baskets and sculpture.

Related ethnic groups

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

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