2011 - Theses - Flinders University

South Australia, fenced about by ranges, which alternate orange, dark green and blue. Theentrance was marked by brightly painted concrete gate posts arcing towards you as you passthrough. Figures of kangaroos, euros, crows, eagles and fire crowd eachother so you couldbarely read the raised writing: ‘Nepabunna.’You could see the whole township from where you parked at the top of the rise. There wasone new Community Office with terracotta-coloured-corrugated-iron walls curving aroundlawns and gardens; one covered sports court with a huge mural of day and night painteddown one side by anti-Uranium activists; one health clinic in an old cream bungalow and,next door to it, one school, closed but in the process of being turned into accommodation foreducational tour groups. There was one playground in the one park, where plaques with listsand lists of names of those men who took part in the last ceremonies in 1937and 1947 wereset into large boulders. 2The last of them passed on last year. In each direction from the parkand beyond the houses lay the four cemeteries.Two of the cemeteries stopped being used around the late fifties and early sixties. Thesewere the moiety burial areas for Adnyamathanha: one for Mathari, the south wind people,and one for Arruru, the north wind people. Mounded earth marked with stones or woodenwindbreaks, grouped in small clusters around a gully, between the hills, on creek banks.Safety fences pegged them out now, and it was only the memory of old women and men,picking their way cautiously over the uneven ground, that still recorded the names andrelationships of the spirits resting there. ‘Hello Ngamarna! 3 Hello Grandfather! It’s me here,and these other people too’, they would call out, ‘Now wonga wonga: you stay here and don’tfollow us!’ 45