Warumungu

Tennant Creek, in the middle of the Northern Territory, is the main town of Warumungu country. The Warumungu, also written Warramunga, are Aboriginal people whose lands were cut through by the Overland Telegraph, pastoral leases and a gold rush, and who after a decade-long legal fight won back part of their country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their language is still learned by children.

Warumungu is related to the Warlpiri language of the Warlpiri and builds its verbs with tense suffixes. Like many surviving Aboriginal languages it is changing quickly, and younger speakers use noticeably different word forms from their elders. Estimates of its strength vary: one count found 320 speakers in 2016 and some people have shifted to Kriol, but the Warumungu themselves put the number of speakers at about 700 and rising, and children still acquire it. The Warumungu also have a highly developed sign language.

Norman Tindale estimated Warumungu lands at about 21,300 square miles, from Mount Grayling at Renner Springs in the north to the headwaters of the Gosse River in the south, east to around Alroy and Rockhampton Downs, and west to the sand plains beyond Tennant Creek. The creek's permanent waterholes were traditional refuges in drought. Their great creator being, Wollunqua, is the Warumungu form of the Rainbow Serpent found in many Aboriginal creation stories.

Explorers in the 1870s described a thriving people. The telegraph station at Tennant Creek drew about 100 people to nearby camps by the 1890s, many during the droughts of 1891–1893, some receiving rations or working at the station. In 1892 an area of dry country east of the station was set aside as a Warumungu reserve. Further south, conflict at the Barrow Creek telegraph station in the 1870s brought reprisal raids that killed many people from the Kaytetye, Warumungu, Anmatyerre, Alyawarre and Warlpiri nations. Pastoral leases spread over Warumungu country from the 1880s, and people were pushed onto stations, where men worked as stockmen and drovers and women as domestic workers, usually paid only in rations. By 1915, according to one account, the people were near starvation.

A gold rush in the 1930s changed the region again. In 1934 the reserve was revoked to open it to mining, and the new town of Tennant Creek was founded about 7 miles south of the telegraph station; Aboriginal people were barred from it until the 1960s. Warumungu and Alyawarre people also worked at the wolfram mines found at Hatches Creek in 1913, and at neighbouring Kurundi Station Aboriginal workers struck and walked off in 1977. One account sums up the period as repeated forced removal, continuing into the 1960s, to suit pastoral and mining interests.

In the 1970s, the era of federal self-determination policy, Aboriginal people moved back into Tennant Creek from cattle stations and the Warrabri settlement, and despite local opposition set up their own housing body, health service and an office of the Central Land Council. In 1978 the Central Land Council lodged a land claim for the Warumungu under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act; it was resisted by the Northern Territory government and reached the High Court. A ruling came in 1988, and by 1993 most of the claimed land, ten parcels totalling about 3,090 square kilometres, had been handed back.

Our maps from 1600 to 1815 (1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815) draw an approximate Warumungu territory around Tennant Creek, beside the Warlmanpa, Jingili and Mudburra and the Kaytetye (labelled Kaytej) and Alyawarre to the south and south-east. See also Aboriginal Australians and Australia.