Ngaatjatjarra people

The Ngaatjatjarra, also spelt Ngadadjara and Ngatatjara, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Western Desert in Western Australia, near the borders with the Northern Territory and South Australia. Their communities lie in the north-east of the Goldfields-Esperance region, chiefly at Warakurna, Wanarn, Tjukurla and Patjarr, with family members also living at Warburton, Kintore, Kiwirrkurra, Docker River (Kaltukatjara) and Mutitjulu.

The name means roughly "those who have ngaatja", ngaatja being their word for "this" or "here" and -tjarra a suffix meaning "having". It distinguishes them from their western neighbours, the Ngaanyatjarra, who say ngaanya for "this". Ngaatjatjarra is a dialect of the Western Desert language, highly mutually intelligible with Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Pintupi. Records also suggest a signed form of the language. The peoples who share this language form what anthropologists call the Western Desert cultural bloc, some forty groups across about 600,000 square kilometres, where human occupation goes back at least 25,000 years.

The anthropologist Norman Tindale estimated Ngaatjatjarra lands at about 30,000 square miles. At their heart were the Warburton Ranges and a permanent water source at Warupuju Spring. Their country extended east to the Blackstone Ranges and Mount Hinckley, north towards Hopkins Lake and the Carnegie Range, and west to the Alfred Marie Ranges. Tindale placed the Pitjantjatjara to their east, the Nakako and Mandjindja to the south and the Ngaanyatjarra to the west, with other groups to the north that later maps fold into the Pintupi and the Martu. For Tindale in the 1930s, Ngaatjatjarra people made a map of water lore showing how a great rainbow being gave rise to the desert's water sources.

Ngaatjatjarra people lived by moving between waterholes, gathering grass seeds that were ground into a paste and chewing a wild tobacco mixed with plant ash. Residence after marriage followed the father's side, and men inherited totemic links through the male line to places in the landscape associated with ancestral beings. Kinship is classificatory: a father's brother is also called father (mamu) and a mother's sister mother (ngunytju). Every person belongs to one of two generational moieties, and since the first half of the nineteenth century a system of four skin names has governed whom a person may marry. Young men passed through initiation ceremonies before reaching full adulthood.

European contact came late. Tindale recorded a Ngaatjatjarra family met by a University of Adelaide expedition in August 1935, and the Warburton Mission was founded in 1934. Across much of the Western Desert, sustained contact with outsiders remained rare until the 1960s. In the 1970s, crowding at Docker River and Warburton and new government support for outstations led families to establish Warakurna near the Giles weather station; it was incorporated in 1976 and had 268 residents at the 2016 census. Today the communities lie within the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku and the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, where a native title determination over about 187,700 square kilometres was consented to by the Federal Court in 2005.

Our 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815 maps draw an approximate Ngaatjatjarra territory under the label "Ngatatjara", in today's Australia. On the 1878 map the area falls within colonial Western Australia.