The delicate hands of the fisherwoman at the moment the fish bites, or the flashing strike of the spearman’s arm express in a single moment a deep familiarity with place, environment, and activity. It is embodied knowledge, emerging out of observation, practice, experience, and the direct tuition of others. To accurately cast a line or throw a spear is to physically recall in an instant many similar moments of life in similar places in the past. They are acts of familiarity and acts of belonging.
In what follows, such familiarity and belonging is explored and represented in ways that the Dholupuyngu themselves would be unlikely to adopt: quantitative, detailed,
systematic, and precisely delineated in space and time. GPS points gathered from 12 months of hunting trips were fed into a GIS mapping program creating maps depicting patterns of human presence and movement on country. Such patterns demonstrate where people were and how often they were there, but they can also show much more,
revealing important aspects of social life right down to the personality of one individual. The ‘people flows’ of a previous chapter gave some sense of those whose activities generated these patterns, of their engagements with the country and with each other, and of the moments and continuities that make up a single day. Here, in contrast, particular moments are distilled from the context of the journey and the day, and are stripped of their descriptive richness down to a numerical point in space. Such points say nothing about whether they represent a day spent with a fishing line in the water, or a temporary halt on a journey to collect bush fruit, or even a few seconds on a boat in motion. But in relating these points to others on other journeys, patterns emerge, patterns that can tell stories. The moments of the previous hunting narrative were situated between the moments before and after them on a single day, but the moments here are situated between other moments on other days. Each moment represented a time where recording a point was both possible and useful; a movement in space, an event, an encounter, an arrival or departure, a place to hunt, and so on. Therefore the patterns within the maps provide both a counterpoint and a sequel to the previous account of ‘people flows’, for the points are represented as moments in place rather than moments in time. Such a systematic approach to hunting movements and general presence on country might not be useful everywhere, or even in most remote Aboriginal
communities, but in a place such as Yilpara, where subsistence hunting still plays a critical role people’s lives and diets,69 the patterns can be and are meaningful. Investigating presence, movement, and relationships to country in this way has more resonance for people beyond Blue Mud Bay than with those who live there. For Yolngu people, part of belonging to a place is knowing how to exist in it, and so the skill of a
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Similar to research conducted elsewhere in the NT (Altman 1987; Povinelli 1992), contemporary hunting at Yilpara focuses on meat, as store bought carbohydrates such as flour, rice, and breakfast cereals are cheap, easily transportable, and require far less labour to prepare than most bush sources. In contrast, store bought meat is not available from the Yilpara shop, and the nearest source is Nhulunbuy, 200km away by road, where it is expensive and of far lower quality than bush sources. To provide one simple example, during the main survey period, I did not see anyone eating lamb chops often a staple of larger remote Aboriginal communities. Yet mud crabs, which can sell for $35 or more per kilo in the fish markets of Southern Australia, were often used as bait for fishing.
83 fisherwoman may be, at least in one sense, an expression of ownership. But the broader non-indigenous public usually speaks of ownership in different terms and in a different language; a moment of physical skill is simply that, rather than an expression of all of the previous engagements underlying it. Yet this depth of interaction can be represented in other ways, ways that meaningfully contribute to legal, political and broader social debates about the use and ownership of country. One popular criticism of indigenous ownership is that areas controlled by indigenous people are not often ‘used’ sufficiently, where ‘use’ is defined as economic exploitation. In some ways it is a curious objection to arise from a system which allows someone to own land without ever setting foot on it, but ‘using the country’ still has a degree of power in popular discourses about
indigenous rights. One public domain in which the material in this chapter has appeared was the Federal Court of Australia, and Appendix 1 (pgs 8-9) describes, in terms
appropriate to that forum, the methodology behind this study of use.
However to say that the value of such an approach is exhausted by strategic
considerations is to greatly diminish what it has to contribute. The patterns in the maps can reveal very human characteristics about movement and presence, hunting and sociality, groups and individuals, and about how the hunting choices people make affect their engagements with the country. Gender, lineage, and personality differences
emerge as social life is revealed through dots on the map. The patterns here also demonstrate the importance of water, and particularly of saltwater, for so many of the points and routes are on the coast, either on the beach or on the water close to shore. The homeland of Yilpara is the origin of almost all of these journeys and is itself on the beach, further underlining the importance of the coast for sustenance, recreation, travel, and everyday life. The patterns in the maps are patterns of social life, but they are also patterns of relationships between people and the waters of Blue Mud Bay.
The opening chapter was a critique of Western mapping and its limitations in
representing a Yolngu vision of country and ownership. Yet ironically, I noted above that systematically representing use on maps can potentially augment such a claim to ownership. The vision that maps suggest was not undermined with a view to dispensing with them entirely, but rather that the particularity and idiosyncrasy of the perspective they provide be made explicit. Western maps are a powerful way of representing the world and knowledge about the world, yet powerful does not mean omniscient, and identifying their deficiencies was and is critical to the reformulation of coastal country being attempted here. Understanding maps as schematic rather than holistic is easier in this context where they are depicting patterns of human movement and their static quality is brought into sharper relief. In a computer age it is possible to represent journeys and movement in less static ways, but the representation would still be schematic, as the contrast between these maps and the turtle hunt narrative clearly conveys. Journeys can be charted through lines on maps, but some of the maps below contain a hundred or more journeys, and many of the routes are roads traversed again and again, with people stopping at different points. To turn each of these journeys into individual routes would not only be a laborious task, it would render the map illegible in ways that would be detrimental to the purposes of much of what follows, legibility is important. So for most of the maps below, the patterns are created by points, which become markers of stillness as well as movement- sometimes representing a boat in motion, sometimes fishers standing still for an entire day. Two maps provide a contrast to the pattern of the points, one at the beginning marks out the roads that people use on land, the other, final map, traces Yilpara hunting routes across land and sea,
84 The nature and the forms of hunting in contemporary life have changed significantly from pre-colonial times, but the concrete contribution bush hunting makes to
subsistence remains important at Yilpara. Quantitative assessments of hunting and resource use are still popular in certain branches of anthropology (Bird and Bliege Bird 1997) and indeed it has been one important strand of previous research amongst
Aboriginal people along the Northern Territory coastline (Altman 1987; McCarthy and MacArthur 1960; Meehan 1982; Povinelli 1992). McCarthy and McCarthur made the earliest studies in 1948, focussing on the time spent undertaking particular hunting activities. Of particular interest here is recent work by Povinelli, which built upon Altman’s approaches in an important paper which contained quantitative analyses of bush and store bought foods, but also explored the broader meanings of contemporary hunting.70 As should already be clear, this account does not prioritise the quantitative study of the amounts of resources obtained, nor the way those amounts articulate with the overall diet and economy. Instead the systematic orientation is a spatial one, examining how different people are present upon and engage with the country in everyday life, and how patterns in that data can reveal important characteristics of Yilpara social life.
What to Hunt- Food from the Country
Many different food resources are available from the country around Yilpara, but people do not seek them all. Like contemporary hunters elsewhere (Povinelli 1992: 174), people focus on meat, fish and shellfish that are tasty and/or easy to catch, with the bulk of carbohydrates coming from flour, rice, and noodles bought from the Yilpara store. Food from the sea is particularly important, not least because Yilpara itself is on the coast. Two exceptions to this emphasis on meat and on the sea are yams and bush fruits. Women, particularly middle aged and older women, gather yams in the dense thickets of vines and bushes growing behind the coastal dunes, whilst both children and adults eagerly gather bush fruits and berries when they are in season. A more detailed
description of food resources and techniques for obtaining them appears in Appendix 1 (pgs 19-37), but Map 5A provides a summary, showing the locations of some resources commonly targeted by hunters based at Yilpara, including some non-food resources such as spear shafts and art materials such as barks, and hollow logs. It does not include all of the foods available at those locations, only the most popular ones, and it is
Yilpara-centric, for it does not include resources gathered by people traveling to those same areas from other communities. Some coastal places on the map, such as the western side of Grindall Bay, are largely used for turtle hunting by people traveling from Yilpara, but are used in other ways by people from other homelands like Djarrakpi, Bararaitjpi, Dhurupitjpi and Gangan , who may hunt stingrays, catch fish, and gather oysters from that same area.
How to Get There- Roads, Cars and Boats
Cars, boats, and walking are all important in the rhythms and routines of everyday hunting. A critical sign in the contemporary landscape of the presence and passage of people are the roads and bush tracks made by these vehicles, but on the commercially
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Povinelli writes “foraging is a way of attending to, re-enacting, and ensuring the physical, and mythical reproduction of the environment, the human body, and the social group” (Povinelli 1992:172).
Waterbirds Freshwater Fish Mud Mussels Stingrays Trevally Stingrays Mudcrabs Parrotfish Mullet Parrotfish Oysters Yams Parrotfish Dugong Catfish Oysters Turtles Turtles
Turtles and Turtle Eggs Turtles
Turtles
Turtles
Oysters
Turtles and Turtle Eggs Turtles and Turtle Eggs
Turtles and Turtle Eggs Turtles Turtles Turtle Eggs Turtles Turtles Turtles Parrotfish Barramundi Stingrays Turtles Turtle Eggs Barks Hollow Logs Hollow Logs Barks Hollow Logs Mullet Sandcrabs Turtle Eggs Spear Shafts Spear Shafts Oysters Turtle 1cm=2.9km