ASIANOVERLAND.NET SYDNEY TO LONDON DAY 363/8: PORT AUGUSTA, SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Port August has been a major crossroad for Aboriginal trading routes for tens of thousands of years. To the east is Mungo National Park, including Mungo Man and Mungo Woman, at least 41,000 years old, and to the north was Lake Eyre and Lake Carpentaria. Both were permanent lakes before and during the last ice age about 13,000 years ago.

Port Augusta is part of the Barngarla Aboriginal country: its original Barngarla name is Goordnada.  

Marine species include sharks, whales, sunfish, swordfish and turtles.

The Barngarla are an Aboriginal people of the Port Lincoln, Whyalla and Port Augusta areas, and are the traditional owners of much of Eyre Peninsula.

The Barngarla practised circumcision.

A practice known as "singing to the sharks" was an important ritual in Barngarla culture. The performance consisted of men lining the cliffs of bays in the Eyre peninsula and singing out, while their chants were accompanied by women dancing on the beach. The aim was to enlist sharks and dolphins in driving shoals of fish towards the shore where fishers in the shallows could make their catch.

Before British colonisation, the Barngarla were under pressure from the Kokatha, who were on the move southwards, forcing the Barngarla to retreat from their traditional northern boundaries. One effect was to cut off their access to certain woods used in spear-making, so they foraged as far as Tumby Bay to get supplies of whipstick mallee ash.

In 1992 the High Court of Australia decided in Mabo:

"the common law of this country recognizes a form of native title which, in the cases where it has not been extinguished, reflects the entitlement of the indigenous inhabitants, in accordance with their laws or customs, to their traditional lands and that, subject to the effect of some particular Crown leases, the land entitlement of the Murray Islanders in accordance with their laws or customs is preserved, as native title, under the law of Queensland."

http://www.austlii.edu.au/.../au/cases/cth/HCA/1992/23.html

On 22 January 2015 the Barngarla people were granted native title over much of Eyre Peninsula, and on 24 September 2021 were granted native title over the city of Port Augusta.

The Barngarla have a distinctive language called Parnkalla:

• gadalyili, goonya, walgara "shark"
• ngami "mother"
• babi "father"
• goordnidi "native dog"
• wilga "domesticated dog"

Barngarla have four grammatical numbers: singular, dual, plural and superplural:

• wárraidya "emu" (singular)
• wárraidyalbili "two emus" (dual)
• wárraidyarri "emus" (plural)
• wárraidyailyarranha "a lot of emus", "heaps of emus" (superplural)

Port Augusta is a natural harbour named after Augusta Sophia, Lady Young, the wife of the Governor of South Australia, Sir Henry Edward Fox Young. Lady Young was the daughter of Charles Marryat Snr., who had been a slaveholder in the British West Indies.

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