The Karajarri are an Aboriginal Australian people, who live south-west of the Kimberleys in the northern Pilbara region,[1] predominantly between the coastal area and the Great Sandy Desert.
[11] The Karajarri are divided into two distinct groups, those who inhabit the coastal areas, called Naja (Nadja), and the inlanders dwelling on the eastern plains and bushlands, the Nawutu (Naudu).
[12] The social hierarchy is headed by ritual leaders (pirrka, literally 'roots of a tree'),[13] male elders who organise ceremonial life, and who are also responsible for management of the country and the general affairs of tribal members.
[14][15] Members of a Karajarri group are classified in four ways, panaka, purrungu, parrjari and karimpa, a tribal taxonomy that is determined by alternate generation levels distinguished along moiety lines called inara.
[17] Pukarri (dream) connote states of reality formed in the mythic Dreamtime when the landscape was created, and exercises a binding, inviolable force, the word being applied to institutional practices that are traced back to the primal order of things in a given tribal country.
[22] The Karajarri perceive their world (ngurrara 'one's own country') in terms of a mythology that weaves seamlessly together all the features of the landscape, the language and customs, a nexus which was then reflected in ritual practices.
After striking inland for 50 miles, Panter returned to report that the land was furnished with numerous native wells, thickly wooded and endowed with groves of cajeput eucalypts suitable for construction.
An expedition led by James Richard Harding (1838–1864), comprising Panter, William Henry Goldwyer (1829–1864) and three police troopers, set out to explore the pajalpi lands suitable for pastoral development south around La Grange Bay.
[37] Stock routes in the 1880s such as those opened up by Nat Buchanan, who developed the de Grey-Kimberley stockroute, often followed Aboriginal Dreamtime contours and their sacred watering sites,[38] and, as government inspectors noted, those who took up pastoral leases often then denied native peoples access to the wells on their stations.
[35] Eventually the Karajarri and other regional tribes, especially after the Aborigines Act (1905), were taken on as indentured labour, their local knowledge of the waterways and lay of the land being of great use to the pastoralists.
[41] At the same time Western Agricultural Industries, a private development company, was eyeing the Karajarri lands for the potential their abundant waters offered for establishing a vast irrigation scheme for cotton production, though subsidiary cultivations of sugar cane, leucaena, exotic hardwoods, hemp, viticulture and freshwater aquafarming were also envisaged.
[42] The earlier Camballin Irrigation Scheme, implementing similar aims, turned the region immediately to the north of the Karajarri lands into a dustbowl, the toxic washout of chemical fertilisers leading to drastic losses of local fish-eating species like pelicans and ibis, and the disappearance of kangaroos.