Warlpiri and the Pacific-Ideas for an Intercultural History of the Warlpiri

Bob Tonkinson's dual ethnographic interest in Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific led him to a realisation of the relative poverty of historical anthropology of Aboriginal Australia compared to the efflorescence of work on cultural transformation in the Pacific exemplified by the Kastom debate. In some of his later work on the Mardu he attempted to correct this by reporting developments among the Mardu as they occurred. This paper will borrow some of the mid-level theorising about cultural transformation in the Pacific to suggest a revision of the colonial history of another Australian desert group: the Warlpiri. One way to do this is to extract from the Kastom debate the more general theme of the transformation of self-objectifications of cultural practice over colonial history and the importance of identity development in relation to the colonisers. It will focus on a comparison of the self-objectifications of two generations of intermediary figures. Key figures in the first generation embraced work and, unlike the Mardu at Jigalong, Christianity, but as part of a relatively thorough-going separation of Aboriginal and Whitefella domains. The later intermediary figures, through their unusually high level of education, added skills in a variety of new self-objectifying discourses as 'traditional owners', practitioners of 'two-way' educational and media projects and as bearers of Indigenous rights.