Nakako

The Nakako are Aboriginal Australians of the Western Desert, whose Country lies south and south-west of the Blackstone Ranges, near the border of Western Australia and South Australia. They were among the last desert peoples to meet European outsiders, in the 1950s and 1960s, and almost everything written about them comes from the anthropologist Norman Tindale's work in those years.

In his 1974 catalogue of Aboriginal groups, Tindale placed the Nakako south and south-west of the Blackstone Ranges, near today's Papulankutja (Blackstone) community, and at the Bell Rock Range. He estimated their territory at about 19,000 square miles, roughly 49,400 square kilometres. The Pitjantjatjara called them Nangakopitja, and other recorded forms of the name are Nakaku, Nangako and Wanudjara.

The Woomera patrol officer Walter MacDougall first came across a Nakako group around 1953. They were then not seen again by outsiders until 1961. In 1957, smoke seen on the horizon and old tracks suggested that a group was moving along the western edge of Pitjantjatjara country, and a patrol tried without success to follow them south of the Blyth Range; the area had not been crossed by an expedition since the Elder Expedition of 1892. In 1965 the group was identified as Nakako.

In November 1963 Nakako people camped at Mount Davies and at Mamutjara, south of the Blackstone Ranges, where a University of Adelaide party including Tindale studied them, returning in 1966. A 1963 count of one Bell Rock Range group recorded 28 people of all ages, from children to elders in their sixties. During the 1966 visit Nakako people made crayon drawings, recorded by Tindale, of places and song cycles, now held by the South Australian Museum.

Tindale described wooden spears with up to three hooked barbs carved into the solid shaft. Stone knives, flaked on both faces, reached the Nakako by trade from the north, through peoples such as the Kokatja, Walmadjari and Mangala, and often arrived worn and blunt. Circumcision was practised. Like their Pitjantjatjara neighbours, the Nakako used two generational terms, one for "our people" and one for "the others", which shifted according to the speaker's own generation.

Nakako is a dialect of the Western Desert language, the large chain of related dialects that spans parts of Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Little research has been done on it. The Mobile Language Team at the University of Adelaide has said it is pursuing further work and seeking to contact Nakako people and others who know the language.

Our maps draw a Nakako territory in 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815; the outline is approximate, and the map years are not dates in the people's history. Nearby peoples on our maps include the Ngaanyatjarra, and the region today lies in Australia.