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Some Wood and Stone Implements of the Bindibu Tribe of Central Western Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2014

Donald F. Thomson
Donald F. Thomson
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Melbourne
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Extract

In 1956–57 the remote and almost unexplored desert terrain that stretches for hundreds of miles north and west of Lake Mackay—a great salt morass that lies across the border between Northern Territory and Western Australia—was in the grip of a severe drought which had lasted for more than a year. This great tract of spinifex desert and red sand hills that extends westward to the Canning Desert was named the Great Sandy Desert by Colonel Warburton in 1873.

During 1956 and again in the following year, reports had been coming in sporadically through Alice Springs of the existence of primitive nomadic aborigines far out in the sands beyond Lake Mackay. Some of these nomads were said to have come in to Mt. Doreen Station, which lies 225 miles to the west of Alice Springs on the fringe of the desert, but no accurate information was available.

Having experienced tropical areas of high rainfall with their regular hunting and food-gathering cycle, I had always wanted to work in the arid interior of Australia, where the rainfall is not only extremely low but unpredictable. I had hoped to live and to hunt with a nomadic people of the desert and semi-desert, and to study the background ecology, the adaptation of these people to this arid terrain, and especially their hunting and food gathering, and so to understand the effect of these factors on the territorial grouping and on the social and ceremonial life of the aborigines as I had come to know it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society , Volume 30 , December 1964 , pp. 400 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1964

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References

page 400 note 1 Brief references were made by Warburton, Peter E. in his Journey across the Western interior of Australia (1875)Google Scholar and by Carnegie, David W. in his Spinifex and Sand (1898)Google Scholar. More recently Michael Terry, who made a brief prospecting journey with camels as far west as Red Cliff Pound, north-west of Lake Mackay, mentioned that he had seen natives in his paper, ‘Explorations near the border of Western Australia’, published in the Geographical Journal for 1934, pp. 498–510Google Scholar.

page 402 note 1 Mai', the generic name for all and any vegetable food; Kuka, a prefix for all and any animal or flesh food.

page 402 note 2 Thomson, Donald F., ‘The Bindibu Expedition’, Geogr. J., vol. 128 (1962), Parts 1–3Google Scholar.

page 404 note 1 The people with whom we worked at Labbi-Labbi Rock Hole on the first expedition all called themselves Bindibu, with emphasis on the middle syllable ‘di’, and this was recorded several times on tape at the time. A group of desert-dwelling people from around the south and east of Lake Mackay, most of whom were concentrated many years ago at Haasts Bluff, have long been known as Pintubi. These people undoubtedly shared much of the culture that I have recorded and studied in an uncontaminated form in 1957, and may be of the same stock. But the geographical barrier that separated them from the groups of the remote desert around Lake Hazlett and on the north-west side of Lake Mackay would preclude the possibility of any actual contact between them under tribal conditions. On the second expedition in 1963, desert people then living to the west and south-west of Lake Mackay were known as Pintibi, with a slight stress on the final syllable, ‘bi’.

page 405 note 1 The author has already published a full account of this expedition in Geogr. J., vol. 128 (1962)Google Scholar; and specialized topics have been dealt with under ‘A Bark Sandal from the Desert of Central Western Australia’, Man., LX (1960)Google Scholar, no. 228 and ‘A Narcotic from Nicotiana ingulba, used by the Desert Bindibu’, Man., LXI (1961), no. 2Google Scholar.

page 406 note 1 As an example of this I have stressed the use of the Acacia (wattle) A. monticola, called kauwarrpa by the Bindibu and also by the Pitjantjatjara in the Walter James Range. It is used only to make the small and necessarily tough hook called mukulba of the spear-thrower, and more rarely, the barb of the spear.

page 416 note 1 Fungi, detected by cracks in the hard surface sand, were harvested in quantity by the Bindibu at Labbi-Labbi in 1957. These proved to be true truffles (Tuberales) and have since been described by Associate-Professor Ethel McLennan of the Dept. of Botany, University of Melbourne, as constituting a new species and genus. McLennan, Ethel I., ‘The Tuberales of Australia’, Proc. Roy. Soc. Vict., vol. 74 (1961), Part 2, no. 11Google Scholar.

page 418 note 1 Mulvaney, D. J., ‘The Stone Age of Australia’, PPS, XXVII (1961), p. 84Google Scholar.