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Traditional Aboriginal Learning How I Learned as a Pitjantjatjara Child

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2015

Nganyintja Ilyatjari
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Extract

As a child I lived at a place called Angatja. My father, mother, grandmother, older brothers, aunts, and uncles taught me there and I learned from them. My mother taught me about her bush foods. She collected the plant foods and prepared them and I learned by watching her. I learned also from my father. He taught about meat foods, cooking the meat, making spears, joining parts of the spears tightly with sinew and going out hunting for meat. My mother would take me out with her. We two went out together to collect small animals and plant foods, hitting sand goannas, and sometimes collecting bush honey. I watched her and gathered some foods and when we all came together in camp we ate the meat and plant foods. My mother gathered various plant foods, native millet seeds, pigweed, roots which grew in the rocks and other seeds. These foods were available in autumn. Other foods were found on trees in spring. These fruits included mistletoe berries, mulga apples, native plums and quandongs. Also the native fig trees grew on small rocky hills.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 6 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

(1) The above recolletions of childhood learning were related by Mrs Nganyintja Ilyatjari and recorded by Bill Edwards on the 27th September, 1982 at Angatja. The tape has been transcribed and translated by Bill Edwards. An earlier draft of the translation made in 1986 was published in Learning and Other Things: Sources for a Social History of Education in South Australia, Edited by Bernard Hyams, Lynne Trethewey, Brian Condon, Malcolm Vick and Denis Grundy, South Australian Government Printer, 1988. This revised translation was completed in August, 1990. Nganyintja was born in the late 1920s in her father’s country near the eastern end of the Mann Ranges in the Far North-West of South Australia. After the establishment of Ernabella Mission in the Musgrave Ranges in 1937 her family moved there and she was one of the first children to attend the Ernabella School when it opened in 1940. She later became an assistant teacher at the school. She married Charlie Ilyatjara in 1950 and they had seven children. When Amata government station was established in 1961 near the western end of the Musgrave Ranges they moved there to be nearer her country. Since the late 1970s they have spent much of their time establishing a small homeland community at Angatja, in the area where she lived as a small child. There she seeks to teach young people some of the skills and stories she learned as a child and welcomes small groups of tourists who are invited to share in this learning experience.

(2) Nfanyintja is referring here to the story telling method used by Pitjantjatjara women and girls and called by them milpatjunanyi. A woman or older girl cleared an area of sand or soil in front of her and as she told a story to younger women or girls sitting around her she held a stick in one hand and beat the ground with a rhythmical action while drawing symbols in the sand with the other hand to represent the people and places of the story. Sometimes leaves were placed on the ground to represent the characters of the story. Through these stories children learned about relationships and behaviours.