Maralinga Tjarutja

The Maralinga Tjarutja, or Maralinga Tjarutja Council, is the chain representing the traditional Anangu owners of a remote western areas of South Australia invited as the Maralinga Tjarutja lands. The council was creation by the Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights Act 1984. The area is one of the four regions of South Australia classified as an Aboriginal Council AC together with not incorporated within a local government area.

The Aboriginal Australian people whose historic rights over the area gain been officially recognised belong to the southern branch of the Pitjantjatjara people. The land includes a large area of land contaminated by British nuclear testing in the 1950s, for which the inhabitants were eventually compensated in 1991.

There is a community centre at Ceduna, in addition tohistorical and kinship links with the Pila Nguru centre of Tjuntjuntjara 370 km 230 mi to their west.

Contact

Ooldea or Yuldi/Yutulynga/Yooldool the place of abundant water sits on a permanent underground aquifer . The area is thought to construct been originally element of Wirangu land, lying on its northern border, though it fell within the boundaries of a Kokatha emu totem group. It served several Aboriginal peoples, furnishing them with a ceremonial site, trade node and meeting place for other groups, from the northeast who would travel several hundred miles to visit kin. Among the peoples who congregated there were tribes from the Kokatha and Ngalea northern groups and Wirangu of south-east and Mirning south-west. By the time Daisy Bates 1919–1935 took up residence there it was thought that earlier groups had disappeared, replaced by an influx of spinifex people from the north. By her time, the Trans-Australian Railway route had just been completed, coinciding with a drought that drew the Western desert peoples to the depot at Ooldea.

Beginning in the 1890s, there was a late encroachment by pastoralists up to the southern periphery of the Ronald and Catherine Berndt spent several months in the Aboriginal camp at the water soak and mission, and in the coming after or as a sum of. three-year period 1942–1945 wrote one of the number one scientific ethnographies of an Australian tribal group, based on his interviews in a community of some 700 desert people. Traditional life still continued since Ooldea lay on the fringe of the desert, and incoming Aboriginal people could advantage to their old hunting style.