Ngardi

The Ngardi, also spelled Ngarti, are Aboriginal Australians from the Tanami Desert region, on both sides of the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia in Australia. Their country is sandhill and mulga desert, and Ngardi people have lived alongside speakers of other languages in communities such as Balgo in Western Australia and Lajamanu in the Northern Territory.

According to the anthropologist Norman Tindale, writing in 1974, Ngardi territory covered roughly 65,000 square kilometres of sandhill country west of the Tanami track. He placed it from Chilla Well, the Granites and the Gardiner Range westward across the border to Ima Ima, with Ngardi people present at Sturt Creek and at Balgo Hill, and southward through mulga scrub to places north of Lake Mackay. The catalogue in which Tindale published these boundaries notes that much of its data has since been revised.

Whether the Ngardi form a separate people has itself been debated. The linguist Arthur Capell treated the name as referring to a branch of the Warlpiri, while Tindale held that they were distinct. Tindale recorded many other names for them, some used by neighbouring peoples: Kolo among the Pintupi, Kukuruba and Waiangari among the Ngalia, and Waringari, which he listed as a pejorative Warlpiri term. Panara was a general name for peoples, the Ngardi among them, who winnowed grass seed for food.

The Ngardi language belongs to the large Pama–Nyungan family, but its closer relationships are uncertain. Capell considered it, Warlpiri and Warlmanpa to be dialects of one language. Later linguists have placed it with Warlpiri in the Yapa group, in the closely related Ngumbin group, or, in Claire Bowern's 2011 list, among the Wati languages of the Western Desert. It was once confused with the neighbouring Bunara language, but the two now have separate codes in the national AUSTLANG database. Ngardi is considered moribund: the 2016 census recorded three speakers.

In 1939 German Pallottine Catholic missionaries arrived in the region, and the present site of Balgo was chosen in 1942. The community brought together speakers of several desert languages. Today its residents include Ngardi, Kukatja, Djaru, Warlpiri, Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Pintupi and Ngaatjatjarra people, and the Kukatja dialect of the Western Desert language serves as the common tongue. Balgo's art centre, Warlayirti Artists, founded in 1987, represents more than 300 artists from Balgo and nearby communities.

On 21 August 1980, 90 claimants lodged a land claim for about 2,340 square kilometres on behalf of the Warlpiri, Kukatja and Ngarti peoples as traditional owners under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, through the Central Land Council. The claimed land lay where the three languages meet. In his recommendation of 1985, Justice William Kearney found that the whole area should go to a Land Trust for the Aboriginal people who held traditional entitlement to it.

Our 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815 maps draw a territory labelled "Ngarti". The outline is approximate, and Ngardi connection to this country reaches far beyond those dates.