Arabana people

Performance of tritichinna ceremony of snake totem, Urabunna Tribe, Lake Eyre (pub. in The commonwealth of Australia; federal handbook, prepared in connection with the eighty-fourth meeting of the British association for the advancement of science, held in Australia, August, 1914 by George Handley Knibbs

The Arabana, also known as the Ngarabana, are an Aboriginal Australian people of South Australia.

Name

In the Arabana language, initial /ŋ/ underwent elision and this process continued into the 20th century (e.g. in 19th century wordlists, "yes" is given as ngarayi, but in 1994 the word was invariably pronounced arayi). Thus, the language's name used to be Ngarabana, rather than the current form Arabana.: 32 

Language

Arabana, like Wangganguru with which it shares a 90% overlap in vocabulary, is a member of the Karnic subgroup of the Pama-Nyungan language.

Country

In Norman Tindale's estimation, the Arabana controlled some 19,500 square miles (51,000 km2) of tribal land. They were present at the Neales River to the west of Lake Eyre, and west as far as the Stuart Range; Macumba Creek. Southwards their lands extended to Coward Springs. Their terrain also took in Oodnadatta, Lora Creek and Lake Cadibarrawirracanna.

The neighbouring tribes were the Kokata to the west, with the frontier between the two marked by the scarp of the western tableland near Coober Pedy. To their east were the Wangkanguru.

Culture

Mythology

Several traditional stories are well documented, especially that regarding a man-eating buzzard and his eaglehawk mate. The chief protagonists are three animals:

Social organisation

The Arabana were divided into kin groups, whose respective territories were called wadlu.

  • Jendakarangu (Coward Springs)
  • Peake tribe
  • Anna Creek tribe

Moieties

Like the surrounding tribes of the Lake Eyre Basin, the Arabana had two matrilineal moieties. Their moieties were named Mathari and Kararru, which had matrilineal totemic divisions called mardu 'flavour'. Due to population decline, only a few of the totemic divisions had survived:: 12 

Mathari Kararru
wadnhamara grub arkapa red ochre
thantani shag wakarla crow
karrawara eaglehawk warrukathi emu
kukurla golden bandicoot

Marrying within one's own moiety was prohibited, and considered to be like incest. However, in the 1940s, intramoiety marriages began to occur, and by 1990s the prohibition was largely ignored, and most young people did not not know their moiety or mardu.: 12 

History

Arabana people were impacted by pastoralism and infrastructure developments such as the Australian Overland Telegraph Line, completed in 1872, and the railway line linking Adelaide and Oodnadatta, opened in 1891.

The Arabana were interviewed at Old Peake Station and Thantyiwanparda in the nearby gidgee scrub by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen over a ten-day period in August 1903 for a specific purpose. Their earlier work had argued that the truly "primitive" nature of the Arrernte was indicated by the fact that their totemic identities came from the spirit responsible for making individuals' mothers pregnant. James Frazer adopted this to buttress his theories on the development phases of "primitive societies". A Scottish amateur ethnographer Andrew Lang contested their interpretations of the Arrernte, arguing that they were not "primitive", a label he argued was more appropriate to their near neighbours the Arabana, who traced descent through the mother and linked their totemic system to exogamy. It was to address this challenge that accounted for Spencer and Gillen's return to Arabana lands.

Modern

Most Arabana live away from their traditional land, in areas such as Adelaide, Port Augusta, Marree, Coober Pedy, Oodnadatta, Alice Springs and Darwin.

Today, cross-cultural research collaborations are building on Arabana traditional knowledge and colonial and pastoral experiences to develop new ways of approaching modelling climate change.

Native title

A native title claim was lodged with the National Native Title Tribunal on 16 January 1998 by Arabana elder Reg Dodd, on behalf of his people. In 2012, a Federal Court determination in the matter of Dodd v the State of South Australia gave the Arabana people native title to over 68,000 km2 (26,000 sq mi), including Anna Creek Station and other pastoral leases, along with Lake Eyre. The area also included Elliot Price Conservation Park, Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre National Park, and Wabma Kadarbu Mound Springs Conservation Park, along with the towns of Marree, William Creek, and Oodnadatta. The Tribunal found that the Arabana maintained strong and enduring connections to country, each other and their culture.

The Arabana Corporation are the native title holders of the land.

In October 2025, it was alleged that the owners of Anna Creek Station had built illegal dams on rivers and waterholes on the property between 2017 and 2025, including a dam wall around 2 km (1.2 mi) long across Balta-Baltana Creek. The earthworks contravened the Aboriginal Heritage Act, the Natural Resources Management Act and the Landscape South Australia Act.

Alternative names

Source: Tindale 1974, p. 210

Some words

Source: Gibson & Hercus 2018, p. 207, n.37