Martu

The Martu, also written Mardu, are Aboriginal Australians of the Western Desert whose country covers a vast stretch of the Great Sandy Desert and neighbouring desert country in the eastern Pilbara of Western Australia. Rather than a single old tribe, they are several desert peoples whose shared identity took shape in the twentieth century, and in 2002 they won native title over much of their land.

The peoples now called Martu spoke related languages of the Wati group, part of the Western Desert dialect chain within the Pama–Nyungan family. Their varieties are known together as Martu Wangka, "Martu speech", and many people speak more than one, often with English as well. The word martu simply means a person, "one of us", and since the 1980s it has become the usual name among people living at Jigalong, Wiluna, Punmu, Parnngurr and Kunawarritji. In 1974 Norman Tindale noted that the term had been used for several groups and marked fully initiated people rather than a tribe. On our maps the label is Mardu.

Martu country includes the Percival Lakes (Warla), the Rudall River (Karlamilyi), Lake Kumpupintil and the area around Telfer. Society is organised through four skin groups, or subsections, which set rules about marriage and kinship. Food was, and is, shared widely: whoever brings in meat gives it away, and generosity rather than possessions brings respect. Women hunt sand goannas with great success, burning patches of spinifex to expose burrows, while men pursue larger game such as wallaroos and bustards with lower success rates.

Fire is a careful craft. Burning in the cooler months, roughly April to October, keeps the country in a patchwork of regrowth stages, each with its own Martu name, encouraging seed grasses, wattle and bush tomatoes and reducing the risk of huge wildfires.

The Canning Stock Route, cut through the desert in 1906–07, was a harsh episode: Martu people were run down, chained and forced to lead surveyors to waterholes. A Royal Commission in 1908 cleared the surveyor in charge. Over the following decades many people moved, or were taken, to settlements, especially the mission at Jigalong. The rabbit-proof fence crossed Martu land, and the later film of that name follows three Martu girls who walked home to Jigalong after escaping a government settlement.

Some Martu lived entirely in the desert into the 1960s. In 1964, before missiles from Woomera were due to fall in the area, patrol officers searched for families still living there; after months of avoiding them, a group of about twenty women and children agreed to come in and were taken to Jigalong.

When the Jigalong mission closed in 1969, many Martu moved back towards their own country and set up communities at Punmu, Kunawarritji and Parnngurr. There they combined hunting and gathering with wages, welfare and art sales, using vehicles to reach hunting grounds. Painting grew through Martumili, an arts cooperative, and a large collaborative canvas from Parnngurr was shown as a projection on the sails of the Sydney Opera House in 2022.

In 2002, after nearly twenty years of struggle, the Martu were granted native title over much of their country, then the largest claim in Australia by area, though the Karlamilyi area was left out. Since 2023 Martu organisations have jointly managed the new Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara National Park.

Our maps draw Mardu country in 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815, with Pintupi lands to the east; both peoples, like the Pitjantjatjara further south-east, belong to the Western Desert cultural bloc. The outline is approximate, and the Martu identity itself is more recent than those map years. See also Australia.