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Only 80 years ago, the Warlpiri were substantially settled into a few remote townships, effectively ending their classic hunter-gatherer way of life. They were largely expected to linger on the fringes of Australian society and probably to die out. Instead of going extinct or stubbornly resisting modern culture, they, like most, if not all, indigenous people but more suddenly than most, have survived to master many aspects of modernity, using those aspects to preserve and strengthen their identity and knowledge. This chapter examines four main areas of dramatic modern achievement among the Warlpiri – art, language and literacy, music, and communication technology and media – to document those achievements but also to consider the inadequacy of persistent dichotomies such as traditional/modern or local/translocal. The Warlpiri emerge as a dynamic, creative people, not at all the stereotype of a backward “primitive” culture but a modern indigenous people who, in cooperation with outside actors and institutions, seize contemporary opportunities and employ them in culturally distinct and culturally positive ways.
Australian Aboriginals are often seen as the quintessential indigenous people, untouched by the outside world until the invasion by English settlers starting in 1788. Unfortunately, with this status comes the dubious distinction of classification among the world’s most “primitive” people, consigned to Lewis Henry Morgan’s lowest living stage of cultural evolution: “middle savagery,” or hunter-gatherers who never invented the bow and arrow (no examples of putative “lower savagery” without even the knowledge of fire survived to Morgan’s day). Aboriginals were repeatedly referenced in early comparative sociology and anthropology as exemplars of the simplest form of culture, as in Durkheim’s epochal study of the elementary forms of religion. Many famous scholars, including Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, mined indigenous Australian cultures for insights into primitive social organization, kinship, and language.
As nomadic, naked, illiterate, foraging societies, it was also generally accepted that Australian Aboriginals were culturally and psychologically conservative, if not static, and incapable of adapting to the modern world. Stanley Porteus, in his 1931 The Psychology of a Primitive People and a 1933 paper, “Mentality of Australian Aboriginals,” declared them mentally slow, if not feeble-minded, suffering from “indolence, shiftlessness, and lack of foresight,” and predicted that they would not advance to the level of civilized (that is, European) humanity [1]. Others judged them unable to think in abstract terms or as being trapped in an irrational, mystical mindset. As recently as the 1980s, when I conducted fieldwork in Australia, white Australians continued to disparage them, like one fellow who told me that Aboriginals “don’t have culture and never did.”
Of all the remaining Aboriginal peoples, none is better known and more thoroughly studied than the Warlpiri, whose homeland lies in the Central Desert northwest of Alice Springs. Within a few years of being settled into townships (see below), Meggitt [2] was onsite doing ethnographic work, followed shortly by Munn [3] and a steady stream of anthropologists, linguists, and other researchers since. Around the same time (mid-twentieth century), it was generally assumed (if not sought) that they, like other Aboriginal peoples, would soon decline and disappear (spawning a policy known as “smoothing the dying pillow”), even as their children were removed from their families, becoming known as the Stolen Generations (see, for instance, https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/stolen-generations). Unexpectedly, in the 1970s, two developments augured a reversal of their purportedly imminent demise: first, a bilingual education policy enacted in 1972 that gave hope to the continuation of their languages and cultures, and second, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, which allowed Aboriginal peoples to claim ownership of their ancestral areas.
In the 50 years that have passed since those crucial steps, the Warlpiri have defied all expectations: rather than lying down to die or stagnating in their remote strongholds, they have energetically and, surprisingly successfully, grasped the modern world and adapted it to themselves. Therefore, this chapter will investigate several of the genres in which Warlpiri members have emerged as twenty-first-century indigenous people, including art, language and literacy, music, and communication technology and media. This is far from an exhaustive list of their domains of contemporary activity, nor are these domains completely discrete: media in particular (television, radio, print, and digital media) run through all of them, for instance. Nor is the claim here that the Warlpiri are utterly unique and unprecedented in their activities and accomplishments. For at least two decades, the Runa of Ecuador have christened themselves a pueblo milenario or millennial people, posting images and texts online and hosting an annual sports and cultural event called Pawkar Raymi [4]; the Kayapó of Amazonia acquired a movie camera and an airplane to protest dam construction in the 1980s, and indigenous people around the world have been absorbing and deploying foreign technologies and concepts as long as they have had contact with Western explorers and settlers. The accommodation of modern ideas and practices by and to Warlpiri culture has been remarkable, though, for its speed and its vivid contradiction of stereotypes of hunter-gatherer inertia. As we will argue in the conclusion below, it also undermines any simple binary of traditional/modern, local/global, and authentic/inauthentic – as the experiences of indigenous peoples today commonly do. Indeed, as we will see, many Warlpiri people explicitly see themselves as living “two-ways,” both modern and traditional, indigenous and translocal, which is not always comfortable but is always creative.
Methodologically, the present chapter is a synthesis of fieldwork and both qualitative and quantitative secondary sources covering a select but representative set of cultural activities. While, of course, Warlpiri people are involved in other activities, individually and collectively, and none are involved in all of the areas discussed here (and, granted, some are involved in none of them), the chapter features the most prominent and accomplished of these undertakings. The chapter will also note the leading role of women in many of these initiatives, in direct contrast to the stereotype of the subordinate indigenous woman, which is more a reflection of modern Western gender assumptions and biases than the realities of indigenous and non-Western societies.
Sustained contact between the Warlpiri, who occupied a large region of northwest Central Australia, and white colonists began only around a century ago, when gold prospectors penetrated the Tanami Desert in the early 1900s. When I lived among them in the 1980s, some elders could remember meeting their first Anglo-Australians as youths. Before contact, the Warlpiri were paradigmatic hunter-gatherers, traveling and camping in small family bands, hunting kangaroos and other game with spears and boomerangs, and practicing a religion based on the famous notion of the Dreaming or Dreamtime (jukrrupa in Warlpiri, with cognates in most or all Aboriginal religions and languages) that intimately tied them to the land and the ancestors. White invasion inevitably led to conflict, as with the Coniston massacre in 1928, and even before that time, drought had driven some bands out of the desert and onto the fringes of white cattle stations. A ration depot was established at Rock Hill Bore, followed by the founding of the settlement of Yuendumu in 1946 under the policy of “protection” of native peoples in rural communities supposedly far from modern influences. Yuendumu received one of the first four government Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory in 1950, but intratribal feuds – since the Warlpiri had never been concentrated and sedentary before – led to the opening of another settlement to the north, at Hooker Creek (Lajamanu today) in 1951.
At present, the Warlpiri comprise approximately 3,000 members, distributed across four main communities, the two largest being Yuendumu and Lajamanu (each with 600–800 residents) and the two smaller ones including Willowra and Nyirrpi (some 200–300); Alekarenge is sometimes also mentioned as a Warlpiri site. Other Warlpiri live in Aboriginal settlements around the Northern Territory, in Alice Springs, or in major cities such as, Adelaide and Darwin. Of course, a number (150 more or less in the case of Yuendumu) of non-yapa (yapa is the Warlpiri word for Aboriginal people, as opposed to kardiya or non-Aboriginals) also inhabit the settlements as administrators, clerks, teachers, nurses, and advisors (not to mention a parade of anthropologists and other researchers). (For a brief video introduction, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWFZxkOD5gQ.) In Browne’s words:
As the heart of contemporary Warlpiri life, Yuendumu has been described as a bustling desert settlement hosting three community stores, a clinic, an air strip, a post office, a Centrelink office (the Federal government social security service) and the Central Desert Regional Council hub, an Old People’s Program, and a Women’s Centre and safe house. Facilities for young people include a swimming pool, several playgrounds and a peace park, a learning center, a youth recreational center, and basketball courts and a football oval. A number of local organizations have been founded there including the highly acclaimed Warlukurlangu Art Centre, Pintupi, Anmatjere, Warlpiri (PAW) Media and Communications organization, the Warlpiri Youth Development Corporation (WYDAC) and the Mampu Maninja-kurlangu Jarlu Patu-ku aged care provider. Several churches exist alongside the established Baptist mission. The Granites Affected Areas Aboriginal Mining Corporation was set up in 1991 to fund and manage community development projects by affected areas funds from the Newmont Mining gold mine, situated in the Tanami Desert, 540 kilometers northwest of Alice Springs [5] p. 52).
We will return to several of these organizations and programs below.
Finally, while we may say that they have been sedentarized, like other Aboriginal groups, the Warlpiri maintain something of their mobile ways. Instead of sitting idly in the townships, they travel as much as possible into the bush for hunting and camping trips, to other communities for visits and “sorry business” (traditional funeral rituals) and other ceremonies, and to white-majority towns and cities for various kinds of business. Furthermore, employment opportunities in Warlpiri settlements are extremely limited, and few individuals have been integrated into the mainstream Australian economy. Indeed, their ongoing mobility makes full-time jobs or school attendance difficult – a constant complaint of white bosses and teachers. Although houses have been provided for much of the population, people continue to spend a lot of time outdoors, cooking and sleeping in the open.
The previous description does not sound like a recipe for active engagement with the modern world. It might seem, for instance, that too little time has passed for major cultural changes to occur: literally, the first generation of children born in the settlements could be elders today. It might also seem that “tradition” is too strong and modernity too recent for the latter to have gotten much of a hold on them: television only arrived in the 1980s, cellphones and computers in the 1990s, and most people maintain firm ties to their kin and to their ngurra (ancestral country). Yet, as the subsections of this section demonstrate, appearances can be deceiving, and it is worth remembering that many of the same technologies are no older in Western countries.
3.1 Art
If there is one thing for which Australian Aboriginals, like the Warlpiri, are known outside their territories and the country of Australia, it is their art, especially the highly recognizable style of “dot painting” (see Figure 1). Prior to contact, Warlpiri dot painting was generally applied to stone or wooden objects and to the human body for ceremonial purposes, using a palette of four colors (black, white, red, and yellow) made from ocher, charcoal, and occasionally blood. Images tended to depict sites in Warlpiri country and/or scenes from Dreaming mythical narratives. As such, the most sacred or powerful designs were secret, reserved for fully initiated men, although public versions of some designs were also available. Since designs often portrayed important places in Warlpiri ngurra, “ownership” and rights to paint and interpret them were ascribed to particular individuals affiliated with and ritually knowledgeable about those places.
Figure 1.
A coolamon or parraja (bark carrying dish) decorated with dot painting. Source: schomynv, public domain.
As part of his pioneering fieldwork at Hooker Creek/Lajamanu in 1953, Meggitt introduced elders to crayons for allegedly the first time, curious to learn what they would draw and to discover how they saw the world (although Hinkson asserts that the Warlpiri had been exposed to crayons and paper 20 years earlier [6] (p. 306). The result was 169 crayon drawings made by 21 men and three women, which were stored at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
By the 1930s, a Western Arrernte man from Hermannsburg Mission (Ntaria today), south of Warlpiri country, named Albert Namatjira became a celebrated Aboriginal painter in a modern style (see https://nga.gov.au/stories-ideas/albert-namatjira). It was in the early 1970s that men at Papunya, an Aboriginal settlement between Yuendumu and Ntaria to which some Warlpiri have attachment, fashioned dot paintings in acrylic on boards and school doors (see https://araluenartscentre.nt.gov.au/art-collections/papunya-school-collection), and Warlpiri artists soon followed suit. In 1982, elders painted traditional designs on the doors of the Yuendumu school (https://decolonizingthemuseum.blogspot.com/2022/04/yuendumu-doors-1982-paddy-jupurrurla.html), photographs of which were collected into a book. Françoise Dussart, who not only studied but also helped coordinate Warlpiri art, reports that painting with acrylic on canvas began at Yuendumu in 1983 and that within five years, “Central Desert Aboriginal acrylic art – ‘dot painting’ as it came to be known – captured the attention of critics, collectors, and scholars worldwide” [7] (p. 156). The first innovators were women, a pattern that we will see repeatedly as we proceed; it was not long before men joined the movement, recognizing the income potential of making and selling their art.
Acrylic paint, canvas, and the spectrum of colors suddenly available were all nontraditional, but Dussart notes that the subjects of these works tended to be what mattered the most, namely Dreaming places and stories. Furthermore, this decidedly modern activity was conducted in a decidedly traditional manner, for instance, observing norms of knowledge ownership practiced by kirda (owners) and kurdungurlu (managers), who customarily cooperated in ritual preparations and performances, and respecting the secret-sacred content of many of these images and related narratives. In a word, “the process of producing those early acrylics mirrored the ceremonial surveillance associated with ritual life” [7] (p. 158). It goes without saying, then, that while an individual’s name might be signed on the final product, the creation process was actually intensely collaborative and social, “predicated on the ritual rights and obligations of the painters and their close or classificatory kin associated with the Dreaming stories and countries represented” [p. 158]. This entailed prepainting discussions and negotiations about what could be represented and how, with constant oversight during the painting session.
As we would predict, there were also motivations beyond economic ones for this eager painting activity. The most obvious was the desire to create, and the pleasure derived from creating, Dreaming designs in a new medium. Another understandable motivation was the hope that young people would take an interest in traditional knowledge, ritual, and country, although this did not always happen. Even when it failed, however, one consequence was “a revivified legitimacy of both male and female seniority in matters of ritual and meta-ritual activity” [p. 160]. Additionally, we cannot overlook the strategic and political dimension of such work. Creating images, telling stories, and performing rituals have always been a means of demonstrating rights to territory and its attendant knowledge. Making art is making a claim – not only (but still importantly) transmitting key indigenous knowledge but also maintaining and asserting identity and aiming “to prove and demonstrate their sovereignty over the land” in a new artistic medium [8] (p. 245).
These attitudes and goals are illustrated in another essay by Dussart, in which she focuses on a single painting titled Karrku. This project, which involved the intersection of five different Dreaming tracks, required the input of multiple networks of kin. More importantly, the artists chose the site called Pikilyi near Nyirrpi as their prime subject at the critical moment of “their attempt to purchase the property of Mount Doreen – the very parcel of land that the canvas was to celebrate” [9] (p. 215). Reasonably, when the purchase became impossible and they were actually prohibited from the site by the kardiya owner, they were no longer interested in Pikilyi as the subject of the painting. Obviously and unfortunately, such assertions of sovereignty do not always prevail.
Another valuable point is that producing and selling acrylic paintings has not been a totally spontaneous and individual enterprise. Bosch explains that “art centers are the core structures of that cultural industry” [8] (p. 246), often orchestrated and overseen by kardiya researchers and art dealers and funded by outside sources. At Yuendumu, the vital institution is Warlukurlangu Artists of Yuendumu (https://warlu.com; see also https://www.facebook.com/warluart). Set up in 1985, its website describes it as “one of the oldest and most successful Aboriginal-owned art centers in Central Australia.” It adds that the revenue from art sales benefits other projects in the community, such as the Yuendumu Men’s Museum (see https://www.aboriginalartonline.com/regions/yuendumu-museum) which was inaugurated in 1971 to hold religious objects and is itself adorned with painted murals, the Dog Program to promote the wellness of the community’s dogs, and various human medical programs such as ear and eye health and dialysis. A similar institution exists at Lajamanu, called Warnayaka Art (https://warnayaka.com), which offers a venue for “Warlpiri artists to share their stories through painting, artefacts, and evolving contemporary practices.” The center’s website declares that its ultimate purpose is “to preserve and pass on cultural knowledge between generations” and that, “While materials may evolve, the purpose remains the same – to learn, maintain, and share culture.”
According to Biddle, another principal actor in the Warlpiri art scene, there are at least 40 Aboriginal art centers in the Central and Western Deserts and no fewer than 100 around the country [10]. Warlpiri and other Aboriginal artists also show and sell their works at galleries and museums in major Australian cities and internationally. In 1987, they united in the Association of Northern, Central, and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists, which was succeeded in 1992 by Desart (https://desart.com.au), bringing together Warlukurlangu, Warnayaka, and almost 30 other local Aboriginal art centers. Biddle devotes an entire chapter to Warnayaka Art in her book on Aboriginal “avant-garde” art and culture (which transcends acrylic painting and extends into other visual and digital arts, examined below) and recounts how several senior Lajamanu women attended a two-week workshop in Sydney in 2007 “to explore directly the possibilities of yawulyu (women’s ceremonial body designs, songs, dance) as the basis of an experimental aesthetic” [10] (pp. 140–141).
To be sure, not all Warlpiri or other yapa are painters, and indeed most participants in the initial acrylic movement have subsequently left it, frustrated by government policies and diminishing financial returns. While some remain dedicated to the task and pursue it in the former collaborative and ritually appropriate way, however,
In the last decade most Warlpiri painters have taken amore pragmatic (oratleastless spiritual) view of the enterprise– abandoning both the collaborative kin-based oversight that characterized the early years of production, as well as the rhetorical discourse that invoked the promise of intercultural appreciation. More and more of the painters are producing works divorced from the social networks that had once sanctioned the designs. There are afar greater number of individual painters at work– an independence entirely divorced from the structure of collaboration that informed the earlier years of practice[7] (p. 165).
Meanwhile, the crayon drawings collected by Meggitt were recently repatriated to the descendants of those 1950s artists. Hinkson was instrumental in this undertaking, beginning in 2011, which returned copies (not the originals) of the drawings. She recounts how some Warlpiri elders dismissed the pictures as “only for making white people happy,” not truly authentic yapa art, while others (and indeed some of those detractors after further reflection) acknowledged them as real depictions of serious “ritual themes” and “significant works of cultural creativity” [6] (p. 308). One contemporary viewer even speculated on what the prior artists had in mind, drawing images at Hooker Creek/Lajamanu but really thinking about their own ngurra at Yarripirlangu. Truly, the meanings of modern art forms, like traditional ones, are multiple and contested.
3.2 Language and literacy
For all indigenous peoples, and for many modern state-level nations, language survival and revival are fundamental issues. Loss of language is often perceived as – and often is – loss of identity; conversely, the endurance of language, through the group’s own efforts and/or through supportive policies and practices of authorities and institutions like schools, is frequently a focus of pride and respect.
It is well known that many indigenous languages have long since disappeared, and others are terminally endangered. The Warlpiri tongue, happily, is one of a dozen or fewer Aboriginal languages still spoken not only by elders but also by all generations, even if English is also heavily present in their communities, and many younger people especially speak a hybrid Warlpiri–English dialect. The perpetuation of Warlpiri is no accident: as mentioned above, bilingual education was promoted not long after the settlement period began, and Warlpiri members and their kardiya supporters have been extremely active in documenting and institutionalizing the language. Indeed, Warlpiri is probably the most researched and written-about Aboriginal language (and one of the most researched and written-about indigenous languages) thanks to seminal figures such as Kenneth Hale, Mary Laughren, and David Nash. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has housed a Warlpiri language lab for decades, which I used myself in the 1980s while at Boston University preparing for fieldwork. (For a stunningly extensive archive of resources on the Warlpiri language, see http://www.language-archives.org/language/wbp.)
When Yuendumu was first established in 1946 (as a ration station and Baptist mission), there was really no regard for Warlpiri-language education. As mentioned above, the Liberal National Government endorsed bilingual education for Aboriginal students in 1972, and Yuendumu was an early adopter of the approach in 1974 (one year after Hermannsburg/Ntaria), with Willowra and Lajamanu joining in 1976 or 1977 and 1982, respectively. Two challenges facing the objective were, of course, the lack of any written materials in Warlpiri and the complete absence of any written tradition or script in Warlpiri. The school at Yuendumu became the home of the Literacy Center, later renamed the Bilingual Resource Development Unit (BRDU) (https://brdu.com.au). As its present website informs, the function of the BRDU is “to assist with the production of Warlpiri teaching materials, like Warlpiri story books, readers, phonic charts, song books, and so forth.” The production of such materials progressed speedily: within six years, workers generated more than 100 publications (primarily short picture books), rising to more than 600 within another decade and over 700 at the time of Disbray and Martin’s 2018 study [11]. (See Figure 2. For a collection of Warlpiri language books, see https://territorystories.nt.gov.au/?date=31%2F12%2F1549-31%2F12%2F2025&language=warlpiri&query=warlpiri).
Figure 2.
A 1987 issue of junga yimi (true story), a bilingual newsletter from Yuendumu. Courtesy of the author.
A third challenge confronting bilingual education was a shortage of Warlpiri teachers. Most of the teachers at Yuendumu and other Warlpiri and Aboriginal schools are young kardiyas on short assignments, few, if any, fluent in the local tongue. The philosophy of local bilingual education was to have an Anglophone and a Warlpiri-phone in each classroom, dividing time between them, which Browne calls the “diglossic compartmentalization of Standard Australian English and Warlpiri according to timetable” [5] (p. 68). Training Warlpiri teachers or teacher’s assistants (few have the same professional credentials as their kardiya counterparts) involved, and continues to involve, a busy schedule of meetings, workshops, and training sessions.
Beyond simply creating reading materials, English-speaking and Warlpiri-speaking teachers had to design a curriculum for elementary and secondary students that incorporated not only indigenous language but also indigenous knowledge. Disbray and Martin recall that a series of workshops were held at Lajamanu in 1984 and 1985, inviting educators from all four Warlpiri settlements, along with elders and community members, to craft this long-term educational plan in multiple subject-areas such as math, social sciences, and (surprisingly) song writing, drafting a Pipa Nyampuju Nampapinkikirli manu Nyajangukurlu or “Bilingual Warlpiri-English Mathematics Book” [5] (p. 69). Meetings in 1988–1989 concentrated on high school-level language and curriculum, and these efforts culminated in the 1998 founding of the Warlpiri-patu-kurlangu Jaru [roughly Language/Story/News about the Warlpiri], an entity that was formally presented to the Australian government in 2011. In the interim, commencing in 2006, semiannual Jinta-Jarrimi (Becoming One) workshops have been convened to train yapa teachers and to continue the development of curriculum.
What emerged early on in the discussions was an educational vision termed the Warlpiri Theme Cycle (https://brdu.com.au/warlpiri-theme-cycle), characterized by Browne and Gibson Napaljarri as “a curriculum guide encompassing Warlpiri knowledges and pedagogy across 12 thematic units” [12] (p. 6). Since 1999, according to Disbray and Martin, the Warlpiri Theme Cycle, conspicuously constructed with the input of elders, consists of a three-year teaching plan on the 12 topics of water, trees and plants, possessions and artifacts, men’s and women’s ceremonies and “monsters,” the body, family and kin, (meat) animals, language and hand signs, stories and designs, history, country and home, and (plant) food [11]. A teacher from Lajamanu recounted how, “Old people told us what to put in the Warlpiri. We worked everytime [sic] with elders about what we should teach the kids, in different parts of the school. Jukurrpa [traditional law], jurnarrpa [introduced items], what food, everything, also literacy and Warlpiri maths” [11] (p. 31). Another teaching resource, not locally invented but employed in the local Walking Talking Texts program, is the Goanna Planner, which offers a learning model, worksheets, and other activities (see https://lpc.elcho.org/lpc-library and https://lpc.elcho.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Goanna-Planner-Worksheets_%E1%B9%88amurrananingalanawuy-Dhawu.pdf for Goanna Planner materials).
Clearly, one of the intentions of Warlpiri educators and advocates is the preservation of what they call Warlpiri pirrjirdi, or “strong Warlpiri language,” as opposed to weak or hybridized speech. The other, consistent with indigenous initiatives around the world, is the maintenance and transmission of indigenous knowledge and worldview, which can best, if not only, be accomplished in the indigenous vernacular. As not only observers like Browne but also Warlpiri people themselves appreciate, language is not just a means of being (that is, of identity-formation and perpetuation) but also of individual and collective wellbeing and collective self-determination [5] (p. 119).
Finally, one of the crowning achievements of Warlpiri language study and promotion is the Warlpiri Encyclopaedic Dictionary, well represented by its indigenous name Warlpiri yimi-kirli manu jaru-kurlu (Strong Warlpiri Words; see https://www.indigenous.gov.au/stories/warlpiri-encyclopaedic-dictionary-developed-generations-generations-to-come). Assembled by leading scholars of the Warlpiri language (Laughren, Hale, Nash, Jane Simpson, and Robert Hoogenraad) with abundant input from native Warlpiri speakers including Jeannie Egan Nungarrayi and Marlurrku Paddy Patrick Jangala, the treatise is lauded by reviewer Curran as not simply a list of words and definitions but an invaluable record “of traditional knowledge of the environment and cultural contexts in which Warlpiri people live. The dictionary entries contain example sentences provided by Warlpiri people that have been recorded by linguists, wildlife experts, teachers, anthropologists, and many others since the 1950s” [13] (p. 171).
Last but not least, Warlpiri people are rather keen on other populations learning their language too. For this purpose, they and their kardiya partners have put together an array of language-teaching tools, such as the lessons and lesson books on the BRDU website (https://brdu.com.au/learning-warlpiri), an audio-tape Learner’s Guide to Warlpiri (https://vdoc.pub/documents/a-learners-guide-to-warlpiri-tape-course-for-beginners-31q32gev3ob0), which I used myself in acquiring Warlpiri basics, and various dictionaries, courses, videos (see, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0GiNsIEGMo&t=241s), and websites at both the popular and scholarly levels.
3.3 Music
Lesser known or enjoyed outside of Aboriginal country than their art is indigenous Australian music, which tends not to appeal to Western tastes. Warlpiri music, in particular, consists entirely of singing and rhythmic clapping (usually with clap sticks or boomerangs); no other musical instruments are native to the society, not even the didgeridoo, which is actually a northern instrument. Nevertheless, music is intensely important to the Warlpiri and other Aboriginal peoples, as well as a great source of pleasure. Warlpiri and other Aboriginal music today, in addition to its traditional or precontact styles, takes two modern forms: recordings of traditional performances for public consumption and, of course, popular music genres such as rock, reggae, country, and rap.
Aboriginal people have been recording their singing in modern formats such as vinyl, cassette, and CD for decades, as in the five-LP set “Songs of from the Northern Territory” collected by Moyle in 1962-1963 and released in 1970 (see Figure 3). They have done this to preserve their cultural treasures and share them with the world. Still, in the foreword to Curran’s recent book on Warlpiri songs, elder Otto Jungarrayi Sims laments that, “Our stories and our songs haven’t been written down, they haven’t been documented”; he also reiterates, as with painting and print, that his people “can only share the outer layers, the top layers of meaning” because the deeper layers are secret-sacred [14] (p. x). Within these restrictions, Warlpiri and neighboring groups are fairly enthusiastic about capturing their traditional music for posterity. In fact, the society embarked on a “Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs” project from 2016 to 2021, resulting in a collaborative and substantially bilingual book which stresses that even the elders “are developing an insatiable hunger for access to archival documentation to trigger their memories and reactivate the knowledge required to maintain songs”; the text quotes Harry Jakamarra Nelson who says:
Figure 3.
The 5-LP set “songs from the northern territory.” Courtesy of the author.
I am telling the young people to sometimes go to watch the old videos and listen to the old recordings from the early days…. You young Warlpiri people, I’m telling you now, so you can go and listen to your grandfathers and your uncles singing. Women can listen to their aunties’ (father’s sisters) and their grandmothers’ (father’s mothers) songs. This is our Warlpiri law. There is so much recorded from long ago, on both women’s and men’s sides [15] (p. 31–32).
Parallel to this music documentation and preservation mission (and one reason why youths are admonished to attend to traditional performance and knowledge) is the explosive growth of modern popular music, mostly among younger folks. When I was in Yuendumu in the 1980s, some young men were already remarkably talented on guitar and other modern instruments, and several had formed bands. This desire to write and perform in modern styles – sung in a mixture of English and Warlpiri – has only increased over time, aided by organized programs like the hip-hop workshops chronicled by Dowsett: a three-week event dubbed Desert Rap was organized in Alice Springs in 1999, featuring yapa and non-yapa mentors, and Dowsett posits that since the early 2000s, “Indigenous hip-hop artists, many of whom co-facilitated the first hip-hop workshops, demonstrated an understanding of hip-hop as a new form of ceremony” [16] (p. 184).
Whether or not all contemporary Warlpiri musicians construe their activities as ceremony, there is no doubt that they use modern genres in distinctly Warlpiri ways to express their pride in being Warlpiri while addressing pressing social issues. Back in the 1980s, one of my yapa friends was composing a simple country-style song exhorting his peers to refrain from heavy drinking (the song was titled Pama Yampi or “Leave the Alcohol Alone,” pama literally meaning “sweet” and a common term for alcohol). One of the most famous of these acts is the Lajamanu Teenage Band, formed in 1993 and releasing a series of reggae/ska-influenced albums in 1995 (Echo Voices), 1997 (Vision), 2004 (Dreamtime Hero), and 2006 (Prisoner), by which time they were no longer teenagers. (To hear the tracks from Prisoner, including “Jamirdi/My Grandfather,” “Lajamanu,” “My Home Lajamanu,” and “Yarrungkanyi/Homelands,” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha2VTxm9N4c&list=OLAK5uy_lxKw9uOFORsPoUbT8IUjQti_z8braXScY). Other bands are equally or more passionate about their identity, culture, and country, such as:
Rising Wind Band (formed in 1989) and their song “Ngurra Warlaja” (ngurra, as we know, means “country,” and warlaja or warlalja denotes belongings, kin, family). To hear the tracks from their album Clear My Mind, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef7OffYArb4&list=PLWeUYhuNh82DLcHafCpy60YNiWQt8LZw1). Rising Wind Band also contributed some songs to the compilation Strong Culture (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhq7Jlrpf60&list=OLAK5uy_ksnTxnu9W7Jzv7nElEUTVSW7MSnhjVKkc&index=2).
Desert Wind Band, with their songs “Warlpiri Desert Dancer” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w_4Dh8aAmE) and “Wati Warlpiri” (Wati means “man”; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jpdsxXeer4)
North Tanami Band, for instance “Proud to be Warlpiri” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMiGlHQvWlY)
Blackstorm, for instance “Warlpiri Warriors” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKHCziSbCck)
Yatulu Yatulu, which Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) Music describes as “the hottest new band from that fertile ground of desert music – Lajamanu,” features such songs as “Tjukurrpa Tjukurrpa” (an alternate spelling of jukurrpa or Dreaming), which is “about a young man asking his elders to give him back his lost ‘tjukurrpa’, or Dreaming,” and “Mt Coniston Massacre,” a “ballad remembering one of the most recent massacres of Aboriginal people that happened in 1928 on Warlpiri country” (see https://www.caamamusic.com.au/artist/yatulu-yatulu).
Obviously and understandably, some of this music is angry, and not all of it is performed by youngsters, like some of the songs gathered on the cassette Rebel Voices from Black Australia (see Figure 4), including a plaintive version of “No More Boomerang” with the memorable line, “No more boomerang, no more spear/Now we all civilized, color bar and beer.”
Figure 4.
The audio cassette rebel voices from black Australia. Courtesy of the author.
Neither all Warlpiri popular music is political nor all of it is made by men. Warlpiri (and other Aboriginal) people, especially women, enjoy singing in choirs and, increasingly, on Christian themes in gospel style. Global Recordings Network hosts an assortment of music files on its website, including performances by the Yuendumu Church Choir and the Lajamanu Choir, as well as a “Singalong for Wapirra” (“father,” the common Warlpiri word for God) (see https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURSoBcThm8yW6V_dcXLurO8T6UfrZdwg).
Even so, Ottosson grants that contemporary Warlpiri music is an almost exclusively male domain that also takes these men into unprecedented physical and social spaces that are “inherently ambivalent and multilayered” [17] (p. xiii). Therefore, she follows them to such disparate sites as the recording studio of CAAMA, the bars and clubs of Alice Springs (where they brag about being “too rough” and “too much” for white crowds), a concert tour in Darwin, and a battle of the bands in their homeland during the Yuendumu Sports Weekend (see below). She concludes that these “‘mongrel’ forms of identifying … challenge privileged notions of worthy, ‘real,’ and ‘authentic’ Aboriginality” [p. 178].
3.4 Communication technology and media
All of the subjects dealt with so far – acrylic painting and crayon drawing, print literacy, and recorded music – are media in the strict sense. However, when we think of media today, we tend to mean legacy and cutting-edge communication technologies such as radio, television, video, and digital/online devices, platforms, and apps. One might expect that these ultramodern media would be the least accessible to recently-settled foraging peoples such as the Warlpiri. One would be wrong: of all contemporary nonindigenous resources, the most dynamic activities of the Warlpiri today, and for some decades, have transpired in this realm.
Prior to the 1980s, the Warlpiri were accustomed to televisual technologies such as film and videocassettes; movie nights (especially featuring martial arts films) were regularly held at Yuendumu and elsewhere. Broadcast television was not yet available in their remote country, nor was widespread telephone service. All of this began to change in the mid-1980s, when AUSSAT first beamed television and radio to the Central Desert. In 1987 (just as I was arriving for my second stay in the town), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Imparja TV reached Yuendumu. Imparja TV (from the Arrernte word for tracks or footprints; see https://www.imparja.com) was created that year, based in Alice Springs, as a TV and radio network for the Outback; despite its name and Aboriginal-inspired logo, its programming was and is predominantly white Australian and even American.
Warlpiri people were only briefly, if ever, passive recipients of kardiya content. The key figure in early Warlpiri content creation was Eric Michaels, whose 1986 work The Aboriginal Invention of Television documents the rise of Warlpiri-made television and video [18]. Working closely with a young indigenous man, Francis Jupurrula Kelly, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Warlpiri Media Association (WMA) in 1983 (for a short video on this history, see https://satellitedreaming.com/sources/the-aboriginal-invention-of-television-in-central-australia-1982-1986). In other words, residents of Yuendumu were making their own video content even before outside programming arrived in 1987. As Hinkson summarizes, most of these early video projects focused on
events taking place in the course of daily life in the township, and irrespective of the video camera’s presence: local sporting events, activities associated with the school and adult education, community meetings, “public” ceremonies. In time, video production provided motivation and rationale for trips “out bush,” and a series of country visits, hunting expeditions and oral histories were recorded [19] (p. 203).
Soon, Warlpiri videographers started recording artists at work, filming video messages for neighboring Aboriginal communities, and producing promotional material for WMA.
Warlpiri media production received additional support from the Broadcasting for Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS), which transferred video and radio equipment to remote settlements after 1988—equipment that could, among other things, interrupt mainstream broadcasts and insert other, local programming. The next key step was the introduction of the Tanami Network in 1991, a collaboration between Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Willowra, and Walungurru that facilitated video conferencing. Hinkson continues:
At the time Aboriginal representatives of the four townships voted in favor of launching their own video conferencing network, they also identified a number of programs they were keen for the facility to provide. Paramount among these were a secondary education program, which for the first time would allow children of the member communities to participate in secondary classes without leaving home; a prison links program linking the member communities with the Alice Springs and Darwin prisons; and links between the four member communities, who share close familial and ritual ties [19] (p. 209).
A survey of Tanami network usage in its initial years shows that secondary education and family/community meetings were among its early primary functions, which soon subsided in favor of legal hearings, commercial use, and telemedicine. Eventually, WMA allied with two other indigenous peoples to become Pintupi, Anmatjere, Warlpiri (PAW) Media and Communications (PAW Media; see https://pawmedia.com.au/home-feed).
Hinkson notes, with some disappointment, that Michaels and many others, including Warlpiri leaders, at first considered modern media to be a mortal threat to indigenous culture and identity. Undoubtedly, it did and does alter sociality and self-perception, with more time spent, for instance, sitting and watching TV and videos. Yet, complicating the boundary between traditional and modern, Warlpiri then and today exploit modern media for their own purposes and adapt it to their own cultural norms, as they do with painting and literacy. Buchtmann cites a litany of reasons why Warlpiri have largely accepted new media enthusiastically – not least because the hardware and money were available, but also because it allowed the continuation or restoration of traditional communication, could be assimilated “into existing cultural systems,” could be controlled and shut off if desirable, and offered employment opportunities. She adds, “Older people have adopted the use of new technology as it preserves culture by telling traditional stories and using language…. Elders in other remote communities, which have not previously used BRACS video, are now actively asking for cultural material to be recorded” [20] (pp. 68–69).
The variety and creativity of Warlpiri-produced media content are truly impressive. From merely documenting community activities (a noble enough goal), Warlpiri video makers have gone on to produce meaningful short films such as “Munga Wardingki Patu – Night Patrol” (about how women work to keep the peace and protect children), “Marluku Wirlinyu – the Kangaroo Hunters” (in which, according to IMDb, “A group of old Warlpiri men transport us back to a time of rarely heard history, and we follow their journey into the present”), and the humorous and sometimes self-deprecating “Bush Mechanics” series (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8WfjkgqK9A&t=1s), in one episode of which a mock-primitive Warlpiri man, played by Jupurrula Kelly, turns a dog into a car battery for a stranded kardiya motorist. They have also made “Sesame Street”-type learning videos for children (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWA9tPNjadw), a ten-part language series that incorporates various media formats from ordinary video to puppetry and also gives audiences a nice view of Warlpiri people, country, and lifeways (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_D3V4EKZSg&t=404s for the first episode), and entertaining shorts like “We are Warlpiri” in which Willowra children dance and sing, “We are Warlpiri, we are proud” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWA9tPNjadw).
Expanding on these last points, Kral and Schwab discuss how various contemporary media are utilized to encourage youth literacy beyond the school setting [21]. Executing a project called Lifespan Learning and Literacy for Young Adults in Remote Indigenous Communities and spanning all of Warlpiri country, they discover that libraries, youth programs, internet cafés, arts centers, and video studios serve as “learning spaces.” They also mention the Nganju Our Story archival database at Lajamanu and the Mt. Theo program Jaru Pirrjirdi (Strong Voices) Project, among others.
In the excitement about advanced digital technology, old-fashioned radio is often overlooked, but radio has played and continues to play a vital role in Warlpiri country. In fact, in an odd inversion of Western media history, radio actually came after video at Yuendumu due to “dwindling resources and support” for the latter [22] (p. 145). The comparative appeal for ordinary community members is easy to appreciate: radio requires less equipment and less advanced and complicated technology, hence less skill, money, and kardiya assistance to operate [23]. Radio staff could merely “walk into the studio, flick a switch to override the incoming signal, and start broadcasting material of their own selection, which will be immediately heard by people listening” [22] (p. 145). Interestingly, through the 1990s, community radio at Yuendumu was driven by a coterie of related women, led by Valerie Napaljarri Martin. In 2001, Warlpiri radio joined with their two neighbors to launch PAW Radio Network. Within a few years, the original team of women had moved on, leaving men essentially in charge, and in 2009, a project was initiated to construct a new, separate women’s studio.
Much of the airtime on PAW Radio Network is filled with music, including, and especially, Aboriginal-made music, and the station routinely takes call-in requests. Here too, as in other facets of Warlpiri modernity, radio is a collaborative, kin-based affair: up to half of the requests for specific songs come from the “family” of the DJs, who often dedicate their selections to other kin or friends, or DJs may themselves similarly dedicate a song, sometimes to a long list of relatives. This practice sheds further light on Warlpiri social organization, as these dedication lists identify not only, or usually, blood kin but volatile “residential groups whose constitution changes frequently” [22] (p. 150). Male DJs also comport themselves differently than females: women seldom talk on air and present a shy and modest persona, but men project and even invent much more individualistic personalities, including creating radio names and identities for themselves and adopting “a mainstream Western DJ style” [23] (p. 156).
No discussion of communication media would be complete without some mention of cellphones and their apps. After noting that buried broadband cables make sense to Warlpiri people in terms of the Dreaming tracks and songlines that have connected them for millennia, Vaarzon-Morel states that many younger residents of Willowra own cellphones, although there is no mobile service at that location. As with painting or radio, phone use is also social and collaborative: “relatives huddle in groups, sharing phones and exchanging photographs, music, games and messages, whilst going about their daily lives, playing cards, watching sport, and other activities” [24] (p. 248). Unfortunately, the devices enhance not only traditional pro-social behavior but also anti-social conduct. For instance, during a period of tension and conflict between 2004 and 2007, mobile phones escalated trouble. Young Warlpiri sometimes used an app called Divas Chat to bully and attack each other: in those troubled years, “some young Warlpiri created fake identities on Divas Chat to post slanderous messages and spread rumors, denigrating individuals of the opposite faction,” while others exploited a function called “Funny Face,” which allows text to be written over images, to post “photographs of deceased relatives [a cultural affront in its own right] of members of the opposite faction and defaced them with vitriolic comments” [p. 251–252].
3.5 Other intersections of Warlpiri indigeneity and modernity
The four domains discussed above are the most prominent and often conspicuously overlapping areas of Warlpiri encounter with and embrace of new cultural forms and practices. They are very far from being the only areas. In this final section, we briefly survey a number of other important and fascinating contemporary activities, which often embed and support the ones described already.
3.5.1 Community development
For decades, a certain amount of responsibility for running their own communities has been devolved onto Aboriginal peoples. Warlpiri individuals, for instance, are involved in town government (with the help of a kariyda town manager and other officials) and on boards of regional land councils. Some also work in various capacities in their communities. The Australian government’s Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) was introduced to Yuendumu in 1997, basically offering job opportunities in exchange for welfare payments (what some pejoratively dub “work for dole”). For a couple of years, 140 Yuendumu residents performed tasks in 20 different institutions or projects around the settlement, including the school, the media center, old-age care, child care, the store and mining store, the art center, revegetation, waste management, building, the women’s center and night patrol, and several others [25]. The CDEP model was terminated by the federal government in 2015.
More domestic is the Warlpiri Education and Training Trust (WETT; https://www.clc.org.au/wett). In 2005, community members and traditional owners of the Newmont Tanami gold mine (in the Kurra Aboriginal Corporation) agreed to commit mining royalties to programs benefiting families and youths in all four Warlpiri settlements, such as early childhood services, language and culture learning in schools, out-of-school literacy activities, out-of-state excursions and off-settlement boarding schools, and community learning centers. The original impetus once more came primarily from women, especially teachers. Stanley concludes that “Warlpiri people had achieved a high level of control and ownership of WETT” and that its efforts have generally been deemed successful, thanks to competent yapa leadership, trust between these local leaders and outsiders, good relations between stakeholders, what she calls “fit-for-purpose governance processes,” including indigenous language and organizational forms, and reflection and adaptation through biannual meetings, independent monitoring, and promotion via “community meetings, posters, DVDs, T-shirts, newsletters, and a painting depicting WETT’s history” [26] (p. 331).
A few other initiatives worthy of mention include the Warlpiri Aboriginal Charitable Trust (https://ngodetails.com/australia/northern-territory/warlpiri-aboriginal-charitable-trust) and the Warlpiri Youth Development Aboriginal Corporation (Mt Theo) (https://yuendumuorgs.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/warlpiri-youth-development-aboriginal-corporation-mt-theo), which itself features multiple outreaches such as youth diversionary services, at-risk/substance abuse programs, the Warra Warra Kanyi Counseling Service, and the Mt Theo Cultural Respite and Rehabilitation Outstation. Speaking of serving youth, a mixed yapa/kardiya team in 2017 began developing an app called Kurdiji (meaning “shield” or “protection”) to prevent youth suicide; the project’s website indicates that the app was finished in 2019, although I do not find it currently available (https://kurdijiapp.wordpress.com).
3.5.2 Cultural reclamation and recovery
In a very real way, virtually all of the diverse projects and media covered above – including print, music, and video/radio – have been in the cause of preserving and perpetuating Warlpiri culture and identity. Much other work has had that goal specifically in mind, such as collecting and publishing biographies, memories, and stories of Warlpiri individuals; some examples are Rockman Napaljarri and Cataldi’s Warlpiri Dreamings and Histories [27] and Vaarzon-Morel’s Warlpiri Women’s Voices: Our Lives Our History [28]. An oral history program called Yapa patu wangkami (“people are talking”) intends to archive information on pre-settlement history and culture, early settlement life, and present-day circumstances (see also https://ngurra.org/#/sc/1).
However, more recent ventures have explicitly sought to reclaim culture, often in explicitly material form. The simply-named Warlpiri Project (https://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/warlpiri-project; see also https://www.facebook.com/people/The-Warlpiri-Project/100095099776384) is a collaboration with the South Australian Museum (SAM) and several other institutions, starting in 2019, to “repatriate cultural heritage”; among its achievements are the return of sacred objects from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Collection and other SAM holdings; the recovery of objects, drawings, photographs, and journals from Munn’s 1950s fieldwork; and the reburial of an elder near Pikilyi who died in the 1960s and whose remains had been delivered to the University of Adelaide.
To reconnect with their ngurra, an “outstation” movement emerged in the 1980s, during which groups migrated out of Yuendumu and set up camps on their ancestral land. Few, if any, of these outstations survived very long for want of material support, but the desire to remain close to traditional country endures. Another kind of project is cultural mapping, like the workshops conducted at Willowra to document places and the indigenous knowledge associated with them (see https://www.winyama.com.au/news-room/participants-to-presenters-willowra-community-hosts-mapping-workshops).
3.5.3 Yuendumu sports weekend
Yuendumu has hosted an annual sporting event during the first week of August since 1959, featuring a few traditional skills like spear-throwing and fire-making but mostly modern games, including softball, basketball, Australian rules football, racing, and tug-of-war. Some Warlpiri gave the event the cheeky name of “Bush Olympics,” complete with winners’ podiums and medals (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLZqJQn4WCE for a short video on the 60th annual carnival in 2019). During that time, Yuendumu also formed its own successful football team, the Magpies (see https://aboriginalartandculture.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/aboriginal-rules-yuendumu-magpies).
3.5.4 Christianity
With missionaries present in Warlpiri country since the inception of settlements, if not before, many Warlpiri today identify as Christians, with a more or less complete and accurate understanding of the faith. At Yuendumu, Baptist is the main denomination, but at least since the 1980s, Pentecostal and evangelical sects have also risen and fallen in the area. Many residents, especially women, particularly value Christianity for the singing, but folks also attend local and regional Christian gatherings and conferences.
In fact, the Aboriginal engagement with Western religion reveals much about the mechanism by which they relate to all cultural innovations and introductions. Far from being a closed and inert cultural and religious worldview, Warlpiri and Aboriginal peoples have always been open to new knowledge and revelation. Traditionally, the Dreaming may have been eternal and complete, but no one claimed to possess all of its secrets. Knowledge (songs, designs, stories, or entire ritual cycles) could be revealed to individuals in dreams and become part of the “traditional” religion. Furthermore, the Warlpiri and their neighbors regularly exchanged religious knowledge, formally transferring ownership or control of rituals between societies. When the Warlpiri encountered Christianity, they treated it as yet another source of knowledge, integrating it into their repertoire rather than replacing their pre-contact beliefs and knowledge.
One particularly interesting outcome of this convergence of knowledge is the invention of purlapas (public, non-secret-sacred ceremonies) with Christian themes. Locals initiated an Easter purlapa by the 1970s, dancing and singing Christian stories in a blend of traditional and Christian symbolism (see Figure 5). Most contemporary Warlpiri, thus, do not see any contradiction between their Christianity and their traditional Dreaming religious knowledge and activity.
Figure 5.
A scene from the Warlpiri Easter Purlapa, 1978. Courtesy of Ludo Kuipers, www.ozoutback.com.au
3.5.5 Milpirri
One of the most exciting multimedia events in contemporary Warlpiri society is Milpirri, an “experimental Warlpiri ceremony” that “combines vernacular hip-hop, rap, and break dancing with Jardi warnpa [a traditional Dreaming ritual], Yawulyu [women’s ritual], and other public versions of traditional ceremony” [29] (pp. 27–28). Held every other year since 2005 at Lajamanu and devised in conjunction with Tracks Dance Company, Milpirri (Warlpiri for “rain cloud”) in ancient times was a Dreaming ritual of “dances, songlines, paintings, body paintings, and performances” that conveyed mythical narratives and values [30] (p. 53).
Like Warlpiri pre-contact religion, briefly characterized above, and Warlpiri culture in general, Milpirri is not a static and rote occasion. Rather, as Biddle describes it, it is different every time: “new traditions, new revelations, emerge in country, in place, in intercultural collaboration…. It relies on experimental participatory experience and encounter to reveal Warlpiri heritage for the future” [10] (p. 5). This is why Biddle selects it to epitomize Warlpiri “avant-garde.” Yet, in Jampijinpa Patrick’s words, it is “a bridge that connects the ancient Warlpiri values and heritage with the modern world” [30] (p. 59). Alongside Biddle, he concludes that Milpirri – and by extension, each formation of Warlpiri modernity – “uniquely ‘equips’ Warlpiri … for the demands of today” by breathing new life into venerable traditions [29] (p. 28). (For a 75-minute video of Milpirri 2018, see https://vimeo.com/305387298.)
Warlpiri people have mastered many other facets of modern culture: they drive cars, repair cars, hunt with rifles, and participate in numerous mundane modern practices. Nor are the Warlpiri today exceptional in the annals of indigenous peoples; every indigenous group somewhere engages in some version of each of the projects and programs examined in this chapter, some decades or centuries earlier. A few have accomplished things that the Warlpiri have not, like the Cherokee invention of their own writing system or the transformation of the Bafokeng kingdom in Africa into a corporation. What is extraordinary about the Warlpiri is how many such activities and enterprises are accomplished by such a small group of people (again, a mere 3,000) and how soon after their first major confrontation with outside modernity; someone who was a child at the time of resettlement at Yuendumu could be alive and in their 80s today.
Many observers would be stunned that a traditional hunter-gatherer society could so quickly and creatively engage with modernity. We should not exaggerate this encounter as a panacea: Warlpiri society has many problems today, not least its economic and political dependence on the kardiya federal government, along with local challenges of unemployment, juvenile delinquency, substance abuse, crime, and interpersonal violence. Certainly, many, if not most, Australian Aboriginal peoples have succumbed to the negative forces of modernity, with many destroyed and extinct.
The Warlpiri, for various reasons, have survived and, to an extent, thrived. They also, perhaps better than us moderns ourselves, understand what this survival depends on and looks like. They refer to it as “doing things two ways,” which means, in the words of Lajamanu media worker Maxwell Tasman:
You can learn both ways, you can learn kartiya [sic] way, learn technologies, computer all that stuff with media, reading all the numbers, lights, reading books … And learning yapa side, even the birds, and plants, yeah even the season, looking at both ways.
It brings two ways together [21] (p. 35).
In other words, Tasman and many, if not all, Warlpiri – and presumably other Aboriginal and indigenous people – understand that “traditional” and “modern,” “local” and “translocal,” “indigenous” and “non-indigenous,” or “authentic” and “inauthentic” are not incommensurable opposites but are intertwined processes, the latter of each pair potentially serving and advancing the former, even as the former is refracted by the latter. Today, the Warlpiri are not traditional or modern but both; they are a prime illustration of the idea of multiple modernities [31]. And today – and in the past, for as long as it has existed – Warlpiri culture and identity is not static and inflexible. It is, and has always been, as the best possible word for it, alive, which implies always metabolizing new influences and resources, albeit faster and more diversely now than before. But Tasman realizes, and kardiya scholars would do well to realize, that modern, nontraditional, and translocal can be as beneficial as detrimental to traditional, local, and indigenous: in the end, Tasman grants, “From knowing this media I’m starting to know these old people and knowing what they got … and knowing all that stuff what you learn from both ways.”
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Written By
Jack David Eller
Submitted: 18 March 2026Reviewed: 15 May 2026Published: 24 June 2026
Open access peer-reviewed chapter
