The Pila Nguru, often referred to in English as the Spinifex people, are an Aboriginal Australian people of Western Australia, whose lands extend to the border with South Australia and to the north of the Nullarbor Plain. The centre of their homeland is in the Great Victoria Desert, at Tjuntjunjarra, some east of Kalgoorlie, perhaps the remotest community in Australia. Their country is sometimes referred to as Spinifex country. The Pila Nguru were the last Australian people to have dropped the complete trappings of their traditional lifestyle.
They maintain in large part their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle within the territory, over which their claims to native title in Australia and associated collective rights were recognised by a 28 November 2000 Federal Court decision. In 1997, an art project was started in which Indigenous paintings became part of the title claim. In 2005, a major exhibit of their works in London brought the artists widespread attention.
Language
Spinifex people speak south western dialects of the Wati language division of the Pama–Nyungan languages. The name Pila Nguru is an abbreviation of Anaṉgu tjuta pila nguru ("people-land-spinifex-from", or people from the land of the spinifex) and reflects an identity rooted in a sense of tenure of territory rather than a strictly linguistic classification.
Ecology and lifestyle
The contemporary centre is found on the southern edge of the Spinifex homelands. The arid desert which forms the environment where the Pila Nguru live has tree varieties like mulga, western myall and casuarina as well as varieties of cassia, sandalwood and spinifex. Spinifex grasses (porcupine/hummock grasses) dominated communities over 22% of the traditional Australian landmass, and the arid desert areas contain some 35 species. The variety called "soft spinifex" or in pidgin English, bush araldite, is Triodia pungens, prized for its cementing qualities. The general term in Western desert languages for the plant is tjanpi, the plain where it grows is pila, the plant itself, in the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara languages was tjapura, while the Spinifex resin extracted from it is called kiti.
Spinifex grasses were worked to produce cakes of resin that had four basic uses: (a) as a waterproofer, by caulking any wooden object employed for carry around water; (b) as a putty to fill holes or fissures in work materials; (c) as an adhesive to bind materials when making tools, weaponry and ceremonial objects; and (d) as a basic stuff for moulding beads, figurines and other assorted objects. These resin products are commodities also, used as gifts and as important tradewares between tribes.
The grasses were cut with stone halfway down the stem. The gathered grass was flailed with a stick to obtain spinifex dust, which then was winnowed and "yandied", yandi referring to a luandja, a softwood winnowing dish for grass seed: the cleaned seeds were then tipped into another type of dish, called ivirra, worked further with a particular rocking movement and shaking and then heated over stone to yield around 8 cubic metres yielding 600 grams.
The resin, thus extracted from varieties of triodia was a key ingredient for binding the stone blades to native hafted adzes, which were of two types, tula and burren, the former, the type used by spinifex people, using the distal edge, the other the lateral edge, for working materials. The materials for the tula adze were obtained by knapping tula flakes to form "slugs" or blades, the tool being then employed for woodwork, to hollow out yandis or fashion boomerangs and spears.
The only artificial dwelling was a wiltja or windbreak.
History
In evaluating the Pila Nguru claim to native title in 2001, the Federal Court of Australia's Chief Justice Michael Black stated that archaeological evidence indicated a nomadic presence in the Western desert dating back some 20,000 years. There was rapid demographic expansion over most of Australia during the Holocene climatic optimum (9,000–6,000, extending through much of the arid zones. According to Scott Cane the residual debris of artifact use peppering the desert landscape is extremely dense, attesting to a very long period of habitation.