Pintupi

The Pintupi (also spelled Pintubi) are an Australian Aboriginal people located in the country’s Gibson Desert region. For centuries, the Pintupi survived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the harsh, arid terrain of the desert. Because of their remote homelands and nomadic lifestyle, they were among the last of Australia's Indigenous peoples to abandon their traditional nomadic lifestyles and adopt Western-style customs. The Pintupi gained international fame in 1984 when a family known as the Pintupi Nine became the last known Indigenous residents of Australia to come into contact with Westerners. The Pintupi are known as talented artists and hunters. In the twenty-first century, many Pintupi rely on government assistance and have struggled with ailments including obesity and renal failure due to their new Western-style diets.

Background

Traditionally, the Pintupi lived in a vast tract of land along the border of the Australian states of the Northern Territory and Western Australia. According to some estimates, their total lands encompassed an area of more than 8,000 square miles (21,000 square kilometers). Their homelands include some of the harshest terrain in Australia. Rainfall averages less than 10 inches (25.4 centimeters) per year. Temperature can rise to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) during the day, while dropping to below 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) at night. Vegetation is rare, forcing area inhabits to rely on longstanding cultural memory to find sources of life-giving moisture.

Historically, the Pintupi were largely restricted in their contact with other Aboriginal groups. By the early 1900s, White people began to settle in areas around traditional Pintupi lands. The Pintupi were drawn to the edges of these new settlements by the promise of easily obtained water and food. When the Australian government decided to use the Western Desert for missile tests, they tried to round up the remaining Aboriginal people in the area and place them into camps. Having been comparatively isolated and sharing only limited cultural traditions with other regional groups, the Pintupi resisted settling with such peoples as the Aranda, Luritja, and Walpiri. However, the Australian government began a program to force Aboriginal populations to adopt permanently settled lifestyles, particularly after a series of droughts in the region. As part of this initiative, they pushed these various groups into larger mixed communities. The Pintupi struggled against resettlement and ultimately established their own small communities that had only limited interaction with other area Aboriginal populations.

Overview

Government-formed communities like Papunya, where the Pintupi had been resettled, brought together a diverse mixture of peoples with little in common other than a general Aboriginal ancestry and geographical proximity. Communities like Papunya tended to be densely populated, which, when combined with their differing cultural traditions, led to increased tensions among the various Aboriginal groups. In addition, exposure to new diseases led to heightened rates of illness and death for resettled Aboriginal populations.

By the 1970s, frustrations with government mandates led the Pintupi to establish their own independent village called Yayayi. This was an early manifestation of the Aboriginal outstation or homelands movement of the 1970s. The goals of the outstation movement were to provide Aboriginal people with greater self-determination, which for many meant leaving government outposts and forming small villages on ancestral lands.

The new community at Yayayi enjoyed greater freedom of choice and expression, although there were concerns among some activists and governmental officials about the ability of the Pintupi to govern themselves. They established the Papunya Tula Artists at Yayayi, a collective artists group. Ultimately, the experiment at Yayayi was unsuccessful. By 1980, most Pintupi returned to government-established communities at nearby Kintore and Kiwirrkurra where boreholes provided regular sources of fresh water—an option not available at Yayayi. Other groups settled into small, scattered groups of extended families living independently throughout the region.

By the 1960s, most Pintupi had been absorbed into the Australian nation. However, a small extended family of nine that had been missed during the government roundups remained in the southern stretches of the Great Sandy Desert. They lived exactly as their ancestors had for generations. Typically, they did not wear clothes due to the extreme heat. They traveled barefoot across the sandy earth, moving from watering hole to watering hole, hunting kangaroos and emus when available and lizards and insects when they were not. While they wondered what had happened to the remainder of their tribe, they continued to move across their ancestral lands. By 1984, the group—known as the Tjapaltjarri clan—consisted of ten people: a father, his two wives, and their seven children. When Kiwirrkurra was established in the 1980s, it brought the Pintupi back closer to where they had formerly roamed and to where the Tjapaltjarri clan was located. Their relatives had often wondered what became of them, but they had had no contact with them for twenty years.

When the father died suddenly in 1984, possibly from eating expired food he found at a miner’s camp, the remainder of the group saw smoke and approached a camp where other Pintupi were living. The initial encounter frightened both sides, and they fled. Ultimately, the established Pintupi recognized that they were probably lost relatives and began to seek them out. Fortunately for the Tjapaltjarri, the group was composed of close relatives who spoke the same language, which reduced much of the tension in the initial encounter. Within a few days, the group was introduced to the world as “the lost tribe,” a name that upset the Tjapaltjarri family because they had not viewed themselves as lost. However, six of the seven—one brother would return to the desert within two years—found the comforts of the modern world irresistible and elected to stay. Most of the family became sought-after artists known for paintings done in the Western Desert style of Aboriginal art.

The Pintupi followed many of the customs associated with hunter-gatherers. Labor was divided by gender, with women preparing food and the men responsible for hunting. However, the Pintupi have different traditions regarding marriage, birth, puberty, and death from other local Aboriginal groups. In particular, they have a complex kinship system in which a person’s last name determines their suitability for marriage to someone else in the tribe. Men use names starting with “tj” while women use “na.” Young adults are matched by their last names rather than by compatibility, with their children taking on a predetermined last name that combines elements from the parental names. These names then establish suitable matches in the next generation. It is believed that this method of pairing helps prevent inbreeding within the small Pintupi community.

Bibliography

Butcher, Indy. “Migration of the Pintupi Tribe.” Story Maps, 11 Apr. 2024, storymaps.com/stories/1b572448233149ccb95e9a9e75c540e5. Accessed 21 Jan. 2025.

Hansen, K., and L. Hansen. Pintupi Kinship. Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1974.

Mahony, Alana. “The Day the Pintupi Nine entered the Modern World.” BBC, 23 Dec. 2014, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591. Accessed 21 Jan. 2025.

Myers, Fred R. "Emotions and the Self: A Theory of Personhood and Political Order among the Pintupi Aborigines." Ethos, vol. 7, no. 4, 1979, pp. 343-70.

Myers, Fred R. "History, Memory, and the Politics of Self-Determination at an Early Outstation." Experiments in Self-Determination: Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia, edited by Nicholas Peterson and Fred Myers, Australian National University Press, 2016, pp. 81-103.

Myers, Fred R. Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Settlement, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986.

“The Pintupi Tribe.” The Gibson Desert, thegibsondesert.weebly.com/the-pintupi-tribe.html. Accessed 21 Jan. 2025.

Scholes, Luke. “Land, Loss and Identity: Art of a Great Pintupi Lineage.” National Gallery of Victoria, 2 Jan. 2013, www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/land-loss-and-identity-art-of-a-great-pintupi-lineage. Accessed 21 Jan. 2025.