Talk:Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy

Ian McLachlan

I have made a correction about Ian McLachlan. He was the Shadow Minister for the Environment not Aboriginal Affairs when he resigned from the Opposition frontbench over the secret women's business. The Shadow Treasurer (talk) 00:54, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Litigation

How does the following link fit into the 2001 civil case? Or is it a different matter? I'm looking for references/citations for the article. [1] Ozdaren 23:37, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Reading the link to the FCA case, they are quite separate. The ABC report is about libel. Paul foord (talk) 04:13, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Aboriginal Women

As indicated before it was not just Aboriginal women who objected to the bridge. However, this keeps on being asserted in the article. Can we have a discussion about this? Refer to Margaret Simons, "The Meeting of the Waters".--Jack Upland (talk) 10:42, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Naming Names

In this article Tom and Wendy Chapman are named as the original proponents of the bridge. The article then goes on to refer to Ted Chapman's connection to Vicki Chapman of the Liberal party and his place in SA politics. Although there is no factual error in this, the article does not explain what connection there is between Tom and Wendy Chapman and Ted Chapman and his daughter Vicki. In fact the way the article is constructed, readers could get the impression that Tom and Ted are the same person, which is untrue. If these people are going to be named in the article, their role in the matter and their connection if any should be clarified. --Rudy22 (talk) 08:23, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

2001 Federal Court case

The lead paragraph currently states (this diff) that the federal court case "found against the developers and claims of fabrication". In my opinion this sentence is designed to make it sound as if the Secret Women's Business were found to be true. I suggest a minor toning down of the wording, something to the effect that the Federal court cast doubt on the findings. WLRoss, you've suggested I read paragraph 441 of the case - I did so, but I do not see any specific reference to the claims of fabrication being false. I think a quote from the middle of paragraph 444 may be more apt: "...I am not satisfied that the applicants have established the non-existence of the tradition." Failure to prove a negative does not prove the positive. At any rate, it's a bit close to OR to cite it to the entire judgement transcript. Here's a report from Kerry O'Brien: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2001/s350217.htm. In my opinion, this would verify the following statement, to be inserted after the bit about the Royal Commission: "The Chapmans sued for damages, but Justice von Doussa found against their claim, adding that he was not satisfied they had proved that Secret Women's Business was a fabrication. The Ngarrindjeri took this a vindication of their position." How about that?--Yeti Hunter (talk) 11:36, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

It's more than just para 441...relevant comments continue from there to the end of the page and it is clear that the evidence supporting claims of fabrication were rejected in total. This does not imply that the womens bussiness was true. The judge found only that none of the claims supporting it could be refuted by the dissidents and that on the ballance of probabilities the claims should be accepted. That he was not more specific is due to his finding that even if the claim was not true it was irrelevant as there was enough evidence to justify blocking the bridge construction. Your suggestion implies that the claims of fabrication had merit which is ambiguous at best. Wayne (talk) 15:37, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

I read down to para 460, and then snippets until the end. This ruling was about whether or not the Chapmans were entitled to compensation - he found that they had suffered no loss, and therefore were not. I'm no law student, but I don't think a federal court opinion can overrule a royal commission. I could post all sorts of published works demolishing the von Doussa decison, but it wouldn't really be relevant: It comes down to the fact that the lead paragraph's sentence seems to be saying that the Federal Court found the SWB claims to be true, which it did not. I'm sure we can work out some suitably NPOV wording. --Yeti Hunter (talk) 03:02, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

I'll have a think about better wording. There is no doubt that the court did find against the claims of fabrication so we just need to find wording to indicate that despite this it didn't neccessarily prove the proponents claim. As for those cite tags you added.... That para came from the Chris Kenny book so I will have to look up the specific page. That the Chapmans had spent years doing environmental impact reports and consulting with aboriginal elders is not disputed and the 1989 Lucas report for example had already raised concerns that there could be problems, but the paragraph itself is in regards to doing so after 1990 when these problems began to be realised. I now have the Margaret Simons book which is obviously very pro dissident (judging by the language of the cover notes) so will do some more work on the article from that once I've read it.Wayne (talk) 04:18, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Nevertheless, the wording that I cite tagged implies that there had been no consultation. The recent change is an improvement, but the claim of insufficiency still needs a specific inline reference. I thought that both Henry Rankin and George Trevorrow were mentioned as having been consulted, although they both later denied this. Regarding the von Doussa decision, I will have a go at expanding the aftermath section. There is a lot of criticism of the J. v. D. decision from both sympathisers and opponents (as well as a lot of praise), and this could certainly be better reflected in that section.-Yeti Hunter (talk) 08:05, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Secret Womens business

In this section some of the claims are detailed. I had spoken to elders in regards to what I could write and it was requested that no mention be made of what the island looked like or of the action mentioned in bullet five. When I mentioned them in the artical I used ----- to replace those words while leaving enough detail for a reader to infer what they could be. As this is a sensitive religious issue is it neccessary for the reader to see those words? If so then is there a tag that can be added to the artical warning readers of content that may offend? Wayne (talk) 14:01, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure you're aware that Wikipedia is not censored. I had a bit of a look around for a policy on disclaimers, and apparently they are not used in just about any instance (see WP:NDA). It is certainly not my intention here to insult anybody, but frankly I was amazed that such an otherwise detailed article had just the barest mentions of the content of the claims. Without at least explaining what the claims were, this article is just one side claiming fabrication and the other denying it - the reader's basically got to pick one side or the other with no information to decide if they're right or not. I was just a child when all this happened, but I distinctly remember the resemblance of the islands being widely reported - it's not like this has been dug up from the depths of the inquiry. If the facts can be verified by reliable sources (and they can), then the article just isn't complete without them. --Yeti Hunter (talk) 14:55, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Although come to think of it, I see no harm in making the first paragraph of the section a bit more obvious in saying that the claims are about to be listed, as something of a warning to anyone who might be offended.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 15:13, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Religious disclaimer

With all due respect, I'm dead against the inclusion of that banner disclaimer at the top of the article (this diff). Aside from the issues regarding disclaimers generally which are detailed at WP:NDA, this particular one goes beyond merely warning a reader about the content within - it explicitly admonishes certain readers not to proceed! If certain publishing houses wish to include similar warnings on their books then they are free to do so, but that in no way compells Wikipedia to follow their lead.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 09:58, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

As mentioned in the section above I have spoken to people about this and it has caused offense that this secret knowledge has been detailed. It was mentioned to me recently that if it has to be included that the warning be added. The disclaimer is not just certain publishing houses, it is now becoming the standard practice on any publication that can be read in Australia that mentions secret knowledge. As far as Wikipedia is concerned this is the only page such a disclaimer should be on but I could be wrong and I doubt that more than a handful of pages would require one if I am wrong. Nothing in WP:NDA is applicable in this specific case. It does not duplicate the information at one of the five standard disclaimer pages and is not covered in why disclaimers should not be used. WP:NDA states disclaimers are negotiable subject to consensus. I have also read the Wikipedia disclaimers and none cover restricted religious knowledge and even if they did the practice of hiding them as a clickable link at the bottom of the page negates their use in this specific situation. I have no problem with the disclaimer box being smaller as I just used one I already had.Wayne (talk) 14:45, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

These are the relevant Australian government guidelines on disclaimers for sacred and secret knowledge.Wayne (talk) 15:31, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

I grant that yours is a valid argument and there may well be a case for an exception. So I think it would be best if this went to a breif RfC. If a consensus does emerge that a disclaimer would be appropriate, I'd strongly suggest using a generic and fairly bland warning along the lines of "Readers of Australian Aboriginal heritage are advised that this article contains details of Aboriginal beliefs that may be considered secret", similar to the warning on many government TV programs that feature deceased aboriginal people. I'm not saying I would necessarily support such a move, but if a disclaimer must be had it certainly shouldn't tell people what they may or may not read.--192.43.227.18 (talk) 02:33, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

(sorry, this is Yeti Hunter by the way - editing from Uni and forgot to log in)--192.43.227.18 (talk) 02:35, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

The disclaimer is the one for books so may be too clunky for a single page article. I had a talk with some people last night and it was suggested to use something shorter such as you suggest with proper cites.Wayne (talk) 04:46, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Should a disclaimer be added to warn of sacred beliefs written in the article?

This article contains details of Australian Aboriginal beliefs which were central to a significant political and legal controversy several years ago. Some of the beliefs are considered "secret". Is it appropriate to include a disclaimer warning of the inclusion of such potentially offensive material? --Yeti Hunter (talk) 10:05, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Comment: Current Australian Government policy regarding published confidential and/or sensitive Indigenous materials.Wayne (talk) 11:04, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

• Yes. In a form that receives consensus and is located at the top of the page. As an editor on several indigenous articles I sometimes consult with Indigenous elders for views. In this capacity I was requested to add a disclaimer for this particular article as the inclusion of knowledge forbidden to uninitiated women and all men who hold traditional beliefs caused some concern. As an example of the importance of a disclaimer, I point out that an important legal challenge was withdrawn to avoid revealing this knowledge. The number of pages requiring such a disclaimer would be very limited and quite possibly only this article at the present time. WP:NDA does not exclude disclaimers and states that such are negotiable subject to consensus.
  

The disclaimer example I chose was that provided for books and scientific papers. A shorter version has been suggested to me along the lines of In areas where traditional Aboriginal religion is still significant, exposure to this material by uninitiated people may cause offence and a smaller box to lessen the visual impact on the page is not a problem.Wayne (talk) 11:34, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

• No - flatly violates WP:No disclaimers in articles. This goes against long-established Wikipedia practice. I've removed it.[2] Robofish (talk) 00:59, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Comment: While it does go against established Wikipedia practice, it does not violate any part of the WP:No disclaimers in articles policy.Wayne (talk) 05:00, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

The arguments at WP:NDA which are in favour of disclaimers centre around the idea that people should be protected from inadvertently accessing offensive material. Anyone looking up the "Hindmarsh Island Bridge controversy" would reasonably expect to see some discussion of what the controversy was about - it's very unlikely that it could catch someone off-guard.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 05:48, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

As the article stood on July 14, a reader would understand exactly what the controversy was about without needing to see the actual secret material itself which is, as was found in numerous court cases, irrelevant to that understanding. Now that the material has been detailed, this is no longer the case. The community accepted the article as it was but the addition of (unneccessary?) detail has caused concern although they feel they can live with a disclaimer if the detail has to be there. This is not a matter of protecting people from offensive material as the knowledge is not offensive to anyone. What is considered offensive is the lack of respect to the owners of that knowledge. Wikipedia has strong copyright policies yet in this area, where Indigenous sacred/secret knowledge has copyright status in practice if not law in Australia, we have editors who are happy to dismiss Indigenous concerns entirely. Wayne (talk) 07:45, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

I have been doing some research and found the following. The Supreme court case Foster v Mountford (1976) 29 FLR 233 covers Aboriginal intellectual property and concluded that the Australian Government recognises that the protection of Aboriginal knowledge transcends copyright. In this particular case an injunction restraining further publication was granted for breach of confidence based on the concept that 'revelation of secrets to the uninitiated may undermine the social and religious stability of the community'. I also note that there have been cases recently where traditional Aboriginal readers have been subjected to tribal punishment for inadvertantly reading/accessing secret knowledge in published books and that this is why disclaimers are now common practice in Australia where such sensitive information is discussed (see Photography's other histories Objects/histories : critical perspectives on art, material culture, and representation ISBN 0822331136). After further consultation I have added a sample disclaimer to the page for comment. Wayne (talk) 15:36, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

• No. Wikipedia has a general content disclaimer which accounts for all material that could possibly be offensive for a range of reasons. On the same basis, we would have to add disclaimers to all articles about Freemasonry and its rituals, most of which are considered (by practitioners) as secret to all but initiated Freemasons. Likewise, there are a number of articles about Scientology which detail some of the knowledge of that belief system which practitioners consider secret. None of those articles include disclaimers warning uninitiated practitioners not to access the information contained therein. I understand there are cultural sensitivities but unfortunately, none of the exceptions in WP:No disclaimers in articles apply in this instance. Stalwart111 (talk) 11:40, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia DOES NOT account for all material that could possibly be offensive. Your examples are not even remotely similar to this case. In Aboriginal belief systems traditional Aborigines earn the right to certain types of knowledge with actual physical punishments, usually spearing but up to and including death sentences, for the uninitiated viewing secret knowledge which is why Australia considers this material "copyrighted". Please do not use irrelevant examples but provide similar examples of Wikipedia refusing disclaimers. Wikipedia does not even consider or address this possibility in their disclaimers. WP:NDA states it is not policy because of possible exceptions and I argue that this is one. So far everyone comes back with "violation of WP:NDA" (which it is not) rather than give specific objections. Wayne (talk) 14:40, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

As much as possible I try to stay out of RFCs which I have called, but I think the examples given by Stalwart above are entirely appropriate, despite the lack of spearing involved. I'm pretty sure that the illegality of the death penalty in Australia extends to Aboriginal customary law, too. --Yeti Hunter (talk) 15:09, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

It's actually ambigious, in the 1970s there was a case where a traditional woman read a book with secret material and the government intervened to prevent the death penalty. Spearing is tolerated although that can lead to death itself. I would dissagree that the examples are appropriate as no one is hurt by the material being printed. A closer example could be printing the blueprints of a bomb where you have issues of safety? Wayne (talk) 16:26, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Hang on, so you're telling me that in an Aboriginal community a bit over an hour's drive from Adelaide, someone might get the death penalty because they read a Wikipedia article? "Spearing is tolerated"?? Are you serious, this sort of thing still goes on? --Yeti Hunter (talk) 23:56, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Of course it still goes on. Such punishments are taken into account when judges set jail terms in Australian courts, ie: "The Queen v Wilson Jagamara Walker SCC No. 46 of 1993" where Walker was given a suspended sentence for manslaughter on the condition that evidence of spearing be provided when the punishment was inflicted after his release. Quote from court transcript page 6: Chief Justice Martin- when you return to Yuendumu, you will be called upon to face tribal punishment ... by getting speared in each of your legs a couple of times in such a way that you will be pained for at least a couple of weeks ... A hunting spear would be used. The punishment would be administered by the brother of the dead man, that is by Kevin Fry. It would be done publicly; people will know that it has been done. Medical attention will be available if required.

It should be noted that the australian legal system recognises traditional punishments without condoning them and that prosecutors use their discretionary powers to decline charging anybody for inflicting the punishments even when death results. Spearing is also legal under Australian law as long as the victim volunteers and "grevious harm" (ie: permanent injury) is not intended. A study of Alice Springs hospital stab admissions in 2005 revealed that between 1998 and 2005 there were an estimated 620 people speared in the thigh as traditional punishment. Injuries were of three types, to the medial thigh (designed to kill the victim), posterior thigh (designed to permanently disable) and to the lateral thigh (to punish). In 2004 Jeremy Anthony was arrested for causing death by drunk driving in Katherine. He was speared once before his arrest but was also sentenced by his elders to be speared in the thigh four more times which they stated in the Supreme court during Anthony's trial. Although the judge said the spearing would be illegal because it was intended to cripple, Anthony volunteered to undergo the additional spearing to avoid being cursed. Death is far less common now because of Australian law but it does still happen. In 2000, three men were speared to death in Central Australia (American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology: March 2001 Volume 22 pp 92-95) one was deliberate but the other two were due to accidental severing of arteries. This might be of interest: Traditional Aboriginal Law and Punishment pdf Wayne (talk) 08:06, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Heres another very interesting case to further illustrate the importance of tribal customs. R v Charlie Limbiari Jagamara 1984. Jagamara was a Warlpiri and his wife (a Willowra) was suspected of having an affair. Jagamara speared the man and he died. He was later arrested for murder and the Willowra tribe subsequently inflicted punishments on Jagamara while he was out on bail. In the Supreme Court trial he was found guilty and sentenced to the rising of the court (immediate release), Justice Muirhead stated: There are cases where I consider complete regard should be had for Aboriginal custom and tribal law. This is one of them. The sentence of this court is that the prisoner will be sentenced to the rising of the court. Wayne (talk) 09:46, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

So people are getting speared to death, and it's Wikipedia that has to change its ways?--Yeti Hunter (talk) 09:36, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

This is not such a clear cut problem. All I'm saying is that Wikipedia should follow community norms for this type of content and treat the material with respect.Wayne (talk) 14:54, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

No, of course it doesn't. The practice was a ritualistic penalty which could, but did not always, result in death (ritualistic in the same way as hanging someone as a death penalty is supposed to recall the story told of Judas who hung himself - there are many ways to kills someone but this was chosen because of symbolism). I'm not about to guess why spearing was chosen but it is inconsequential anyway. Examples like Freemasonry (where you can be expelled, which for a believer might be akin to death) or Scientology (when you can be excommunicated and therefore unable to access the information that might free your soul) are entirely appropriate. The issue of a potential disclaimer isn't about the degree to which the information is secret, it is that the information is secret at all. There are plenty of things on Wikipedia that would be considered secret to some and none of them have disclaimers. Wikipedia does not keep secrets - Wikipedia is not censored.

Secondly, your request to [please] provide similar examples of Wikipedia refusing disclaimers. Wikipedia does not even consider or address this possibility in their disclaimers. WP:NDA states it is not policy because of possible exceptions and I argue that this is one... The guidelines are so because of possible exceptions and it lists some of the possible exceptions. This article does not fit into any of those categories. Wikipedia does not "refuse" disclaimers; the guideline says that the consensus is that they should not be used. I respect your right to try and change people's minds and gather a consensus against the norm but because the assumption is against disclaimer statements they are quite simply never applied except in a very limited number of instances, most of them related to technical information. The argument that this article is so unique that it transcends Wiki guidelines and policy so as to require it's own unique policy, does not hold a lot of water.

Finally, please assume good faith - comment was requested and comment was given. Please don't refer to people's contributions as irrelevant because they state a view you happen not to share. Stalwart111 (talk) 03:44, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

I did not say your contributions were irrelevant. I said the consequences of the examples themselves were irrelevant when compared to the consequences of Aboriginal law. Australian law accepts that traditional law "transcends copyright" (the governments words not mine) so to state that Wiki guidelines are a superior standard is POV. I also fail to see why a disclaimer is equated with censorship as nothing is being removed or hidden, in fact it makes the Wiki disclaimers that are actually hidden visable, albeit they dont cover this situation.Wayne (talk) 08:29, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Whether or not so-called "ritual punishment" still goes on, there's no indication that such punishment has ever been sentenced for knowledge of the secret women's business at Hindmarsh Island. That would indeed be an interesting twist in the ongoing affair. And even if it was, I don't think it's the ethos of Wikipedia to encourage people to self-censor. --Yeti Hunter (talk) 09:43, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting punishments would be inflicted in this case, its the principle. Why is censorship brought up again? Who apart from WP is trying to censor something? Wayne (talk) 09:53, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

It is being mentioned because the article section WP:NOTCENSORED deals with this issue: Wikipedia cannot guarantee that articles or images will always be acceptable to all readers, or that they will adhere to general social or religious norms. and says further, Nor will Wikipedia remove content because the internal bylaws of some organizations forbid that information from being displayed online. The section is premised by a See also list which includes WP:NDA. Describing Aboriginal law as "organizational bylaws" might be cold but the premise is the same.

Many will see any attempt to discourage (by disclaimer) someone from accessing a portion of Wikipedia as an attempt to prevent someone from accessing a portion of Wikipedia, though there are obvious differences between the two. But censorship is not just about banning something or preventing access by removing content, it can also be about preventing access by discouraging access. Including a disclaimer that discourages a certain portion of the community from accessing a certain portion of Wikipedia is going to struggle to find consensus, irrespective of the noble reasons for proposing it in the first place.

To your statement: "Australian law accepts that traditional law "transcends copyright" (the governments words not mine) so to state that Wiki guidelines are a superior standard is POV" - It's not about superiority or a "point of view"; Wikipedia is not subject to Australian laws, and thus is not subject to laws that transcend Australian laws. Wikipedia is subject to it's own policies and guidelines, general U.S. copyright laws and some of the laws of Florida "where Wikipedia is hosted". (And as such has been accused of being a law unto itself.) Though the copyrights policy says that, "Wikipedia contributors should respect the copyright law of other nations", the consensus you are trying to build is that "foreign" copyright should override WP guidelines. That's not likely to be a popular view but, again, you are more than welcome to try. Stalwart111 (talk) 05:46, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

"Wikipedia contributors should respect the copyright law of other nations" and here we have the dilemna as it is not being respected. The Indigenous community is actually opposed to copyright as they are worried copyrighting would block anthropological research that would benefit them and also limit their own access, as it has in regards to much of Mountfords work that is restricted as it contains secret material. They do want control of the material though and as a compromise to exclusion, the community is willing to accept disclaimers so there is no attempt to enforce Australian copyright. The disclaimers specifically say they do not discourage or limit access so there is no censorship issue either. Wayne (talk) 07:27, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

It is being respected; at least four editors respect it enough to give it due consideration and discussion. But, again, you are trying to build a concensus in favour of your proposal which is contrary to Wikipedia guidelines. Unfortunately, what you are trying to argue is already opposed by long-standing concensus. Even if you managed to convince those already involved in this discussion (which seems unlikely given you are the only person who has argued for your point of view), the change you are proposing calls for a fundamental change to be made to Wikipedia; that is, the inclusion of another exception to WP:NDA not already listed there. Again, you are more than welcome to do this, but I suggest you leave this RFC on hold and start a new one at the Talk Page for WP:NDA asking if concensus can be found for the inclusion of an exception to NDA for an Aboriginal law disclaimer. Arguments like the ones you are making are better made at the talk page of the guideline, rather than at the talk page of a specific article, given the widespread nature of the change if consensus is found. Stalwart111 (talk) 00:54, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

This is a hard one. Two important principles clashing: freedom to write whatever we like, provided it's within policy vs caring about the feelings of the indigenous community. Since the story can be told without disclosing the secrets, I'm in favour of behaving humanely. Arguing "I want to. I can. So I will." doesn't convince me. Hurting people gratuitously is being a knob. Anthony (talk)

Understand where you're coming from Anthony. I understand the issue of whether or not the information should be included was decided during previous discussions. This RFC is aimed at finding consensus for a disclaimer to warn people that the information appears in the article, despite WP:NDA. Any thoughts? Stalwart111 (talk) 23:30, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Whilst I mostly agree with you, Anthony, I don't believe this article can be complete without the secrets. The story is the secrets. A bridge was banned on account of them, a royal commission was called to determine whether they were fabricated, legislation was enacted in response to them, and they were exceedingly influential in the wider debate about race relations in Australia. So it's certainly not a case of "I want to, I can, so I will." Leaving them out robs the reader of any possible way to analyse the claims and counter-claims. One side says they're fabricated, the other says they're true. Who's right? Or does the truth, as is so often the case, lie somewhere in the middle? It's not for Wikipedia to decide unless it's reporting a reliable third-party sourced decision. Put all the facts out there, and the reader decide.

That said, you're certainly right that we shouldn't hurt people gratuitously. I don't think we need to go against policy by including explicit disclaimers or excluding verifiable material to achieve that. See my proposal below.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 01:19, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Searching for compromise

I believe we have a consensus for including the material, and also an emerging consensus against a disclaimer, but also consensus to include the information in such a way as to minimise the chance of it being seen by those who might be upset by it. A previous suggestion that I made was to confine the revealed secrets to a single paragraph, titled and phrased in such a way that it would be obvious that secret material was about to be revealed, thus warning the reader without disclaiming. But this has the disadvantage of not allowing discussion of the secrets elsewhere in the article where it might be necessary (the "isn't it obvious?" meeting springs to mind). My suggestion is: given that for whatever reason, many indigenous people do believe that this information should be "respected" and may still consider it secret, that fact actually adds to our understanding of the still-ongoing controversy. If a reliable source can be found specific to the Ngarrindjeri and this issue rather than Aboriginal secrets generally, a sentence could be included in the lead along the lines of:

"Despite the public scrutiny that "secret women's business" received as a result of the controversy, many Ngarrindjeri people still consider the information to be secret, and believe that it should still be treated as such."

That achieves everything that a disclaimer would, but rephrased from a statement of opinion into a reliably sourced statemebnt of fact, and the full weight of Wikipedia policy would enforce its inclusion. I would argue that a self-published source by the Ngarrindjeri may be sufficient in this case, since it is being used only to verify facts about the Ngarrindjeri themselves. Wayne may be able to help on that one. Thoughts?--Yeti Hunter (talk) 01:19, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I think it resolves 90% of the issues. I acknowledge it doesn't have equivalency with the current Australian Government standards but this issue has been canvassed extensively. I think a self-published source, given the context, would be adequate and appropriate. Would be interested to get Wayne's opinion. It also leaves the door open for future provisions should Wayne decide to push for a new exemption at WP:NDA as suggested. Stalwart111 (talk) 02:32, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

It looks like a good compromise but I'll get further direction from the Ngarrindjeri and get back to you on the most relevant source to use. Wayne (talk) 09:33, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Non-existence of the Ngarrindjeri

So we meet again Moriarty aka YetiHunter! ;)

Actually my current working hypothesis is that so called "Ngarrindjeri" do not exist & never have ... how's that for you YH? The same as so called "'Kaurna" never existed & they both are beat up hoaxes by people with axes to grind, especially we willy waving whitefellas since 19 Feb 1836 & especially since 28 Dec 1836 "Proclamation Day" ... Let's cut the crap shall we? I quote:

Long Dr Ron Brunton quote from User:Mifren

"Blocking Business An Anthropological Assessment of the Hindmarsh Island Dispute Ron Brunton Tasman Institute Occcasional Paper B31 August 1995 CLARIFICATION On page 37, Dr Lindy Warrell wishes to make it clear that the only doubts she has relate to the way in which ‘women’s business’ was handled and not in relation to ‘women’s business itself. Tasman Institute Limited Tasman Asia Pacific Pty Ltd (Incorporated in Victoria) 457 Elizabeth St Melbourne Vic 3000 Tel: (03) 9326 8033 Fax: (03) 9326 8002 ISSN 1035 5456 Summary • The anthropological research on the Ngarrindjeri, and the context in which it occurred, make it extremely unlikely that the existence, if not the details, of the ‘women’s business’ that has blocked construction of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge could have escaped notice until recently. • The most important study of traditional Ngarrindjeri culture was carried out in the early 1940s by Ronald and Catherine Berndt, who were internationally renowned for the detail and quality of their field research. • The Ngarrindjeri men and women they worked with were committed to recounting all they knew of the past. As well, Catherine Berndt was aware of the existence of secret women’s knowledge elsewhere in Australia and would have been sensitive to its possible existence among the Ngarrindjeri. • The Berndts specifically noted that there was no evidence of any gender-based secret domain among the Ngarrindjeri. The most remarkable feature of the reports prepared by Professor Saunders and Dr Fergie is that neither make any mention of this finding by the Berndts, despite its crucial relevance to their assessment about the significance of ‘women’s business’. • The Berndts’ research, the silence of Saunders and Fergie, and the apparent absence of certain consequences that would inevitably have followed from women’s secret traditions, virtually compel us to conclude that ‘women’s business’ is recent. • Nevertheless, although the Royal Commission has to determine whether ‘women’s business’ is ‘fabricated’, and therefore presumably illegitimate, this is not as straightforward as it may seem. In a sense all traditions are ‘fabricated’ or invented. ‘Women’s business’ may be little more than a less easily disguised example of processes occurring elsewhere in Australia, and which governments and others have accepted as legitimate. • These processes of invention and elaboration result from a number of pressures and incentives on Aborigines, including government programs and legislation, a compromised anthropology profession, and supposedly authoritative, but false statements about the universal characteristics of Aboriginal cultures. For instance, statements in the Report of the Black Deaths in Custody Royal Commission and The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia would encourage Ngarrindjeri women to think that traditionally they would have had their own secret traditions, but that these had not been recorded. Introduction A number of commentators have noted that there was no mention that Hindmarsh Island was an important site for Aboriginal women until 1994, despite detailed ethnographic accounts of the Lower Murray and Encounter Bay region that go back 150 years. In response, Ngarrindjeri women and their supporters have argued that secret knowledge about the significance of a site would only be revealed to outsiders as a last resort, and that the women who held this knowledge did not learn about the threat to the island until very recently. This report assesses these rival arguments. It discusses the anthropolog-ical information that should have been included in Cheryl Saunders’ report to the Commonwealth Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, as well as in the report to the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement written by Dean Fergie, which seems to have had an important influence on Saunders’ views. It also discusses the difficulties of distinguishing between the illegitimate ‘fabrication’ of traditions, and the normal processes whereby traditions are ‘invented’ and ‘elaborated’, particularly given the Aboriginal cultural revival that has been developing in recent years. Finally, it exam¬ines the social and political pressures currently operating on sections of the anthropology profession in Australia, and considers the effect that these may have had on the Hindmarsh Island Bridge controversy. Important elements of the beliefs that were invoked to justify banning the construction of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge remain confidential. Never-theless, there is enough information in the public arena to allow the conclu-sion that these beliefs are almost certainly of recent origin. Indeed, if they are not, it is not only developers who would suffer. The consequences for Australian anthropology are also very serious, and would suggest that the ver¬acity of a great deal of information which has been collected over the past century could be called into question. The most authoritative publicly available statements about contemporary Ngarrindjeri women’s beliefs relating to Hindmarsh Island and its surrounds are the two reports prepared by Dr Fergie, an anthropologist from the Uni-versity of Adelaide, and Professor Saunders, a constitutional lawyer from the University of Melbourne. The latter draws significantly on Dr Fergie’s account, as well as on Professor Saunders’ own discussions with Ngarrind¬jeri women. However, the major source for both reports appears to have been Doreen Kartinyeri, who was authorised by a supposedly representative group of thirty five Ngarrindjeri women to recount the secret knowledge. These two documents have formed the major source on which this assess-ment is based, although I have not seen the two confidential appendices to the Fergie report. I have also drawn on various statements about the women’s beliefs that have appeared in the media where this seems appro-priate, although clearly these must be given less weight than Dr Fergie’s and Professor Saunders’ accounts. ‘Women’s Business’ in the Lower Murray Fergie and Saunders both claim that the ‘area of the lower Murray, Hind-marsh and Mundoo Islands, the waters of the Goolwa Channel and Lake Alexandrina and the Murray Mouth are, in Ngarrindjeri womens [sic] sacred traditions, crucial for the reproduction of the Ngarrindjeri people and of the cosmos which supports their existence’ (F: 15). Both note Doreen Kartin-yeri’s comment that this area is ‘the most important place for Aboriginal people of the lower south’ (F: 15; S: 35). Saunders also adds that ‘this tra-dition is not mythological but spiritual and an actual reflection of tradi¬tional practice, handed down from mother to daughter, drawn out of the landscape itself’ (S: 28). She quotes Doreen Kartinyeri’s rather surprising words (given traditional Aboriginal ideas about the Dreaming), ‘this is not just a dreaming; it’s a reality’ (S: 28). The precise reasons for the significance of this area remain secret, but appear to result from a metaphorical association between its topographical features and the reproductive parts of a woman’s body. In June 1994 Rocky Mar¬shall, an anti-bridge activist, wrote a letter to the Adelaide Advertiser in which he claimed that in the last century Aboriginal women told his grand-mother of an ‘Aboriginal legend covering this Lower Murray area as being a mother figure, with the Murray Mouth as the vagina, Hindmarsh Island as the womb, Mundoo Island as the egg, and the river, surrounding lakes and mainland as a connected part of the whole’. According to Fergie, Marshall was later berated by Ngarrindjeri women ‘for having thought that the pres-en¬tation of such a story was an appropriate thing for him to do’ (F: 3). Soon after, he wrote an apology for having revealed ‘details of a sacred legend’, adding that his grandmother ‘obviously had no idea that this was sacred knowledge that should not have been passed on and in particular to a boy’. However, in an interview published recently in Who Weekly, Doreen Karti-nyeri is reported to have said that ‘the whole waters around there repre¬sent the womb and all that’. (The author of the article in which the inter¬view appeared has told me that the words were checked back with Ms Kartinyeri before publication. ) Although neither Fergie nor Saunders made such an explicit connection between the Lower Murray and the female reproductive system, they both quote from Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s anthropological study of the Ngarrindjeri people, A World That Was. The Berndts, who in the 1940s worked with the last of the Ngarrindjeri to have gone through traditional initiation rites, noted that people spoke of the River Murray and the sur-rounding area as symbolic of the body of the great male creative being Ngu-runderi. (However, it should be noted that, unlike what are said to be the present claims, the symbolic body they depicted was not anatomically con-sistent, as the ‘neck’ and ‘tongue’ seem to have lain alongside the ‘legs’.) Fergie said that the Berndts were outlining ‘some dimensions of the public knowledge [her emphasis] concerning Ngarrindjeri understandings of their territory’ (F: 13), while Saunders went a little further, stating that the Berndts’ account meant that ‘there are some indications of this [secret] tra-dition on the public record’ (S: 29). Whatever the exact details of the Ngarrindjeri women’s secret tradition might be, as a consequence the women believe that the construction of a bridge between Hindmarsh Island and the mainland would ‘form a perma-nent link between two parts of the landscape whose cosmological efficacy is contingent on separation’ (F: 19). This link would supposedly be fundamen-tally different from the links that presently exist in the Lower Murray in the form of barrages or the ferry cable, because ‘neither the barages [sic] nor the ferry cable stop the waters flowing’ (F: 19). Indeed, Fergie suggests that in this respect the barrages ‘might, by the cultural logic of the women secret tradition, be understood as an aid to the proper functioning of this area of the lower Murray within the terms of that secret knowledge’ (F: 19). A further factor is the greater ‘permanence and “solidness” of bridges’ compared to the barrages. All of these points were repeated in the Saunders report, with an additional suggestion, taken from the confidential part of the Fergie report and said to be tentative, that links between islands—or between an island and the mainland—had to be mediated by water: ‘It occurs to me [i.e. Fergie] that it may well be that what the women haven’t been able to articu¬late clearly is that the problem with linking Kumarangk [Hindmarsh Island] and the mainland together by a bridge is precisely that a bridge goes above the water. It is... unlike the barrage or ferry cable, unmediated by water’ (S: 39). Both Fergie and Saunders emphasise another point, although it seems inconsistent with those mentioned above. In the period when the barrages were being built—from 1935 until 1940 —Aborigines ‘had no prospect whatsoever of doing anything about it’ (S: 38). Indeed, the passage of State and Federal heritage legislation imposed a greater responsibility on Aborigi¬nal people, and Kartinyeri told Fergie something to the effect that ‘to fail to protect your culture when you are disempowered is no shame. But to fail to protect your culture when you have apparently been given the power to do so is truly destructive’ (F: 23; S: 38-39). As well as describing the significance of the Lower Murray region in general terms, Fergie referred to a number of specific sites of importance. She noted that there was a significant women’s site at the Murray Mouth on Hindmarsh Island (F: 6, 10). She also reported that Connie Roberts claimed ‘that Mundoo Island was a mens [sic] sacred site and that “people didn’t go across there and live there, it was just for certain ceremonies and burials—that’s all they went there for”’ (F: 10). (Mrs Roberts is regarded as the most traditional of the four custodians of the women’s knowledge, and initially she was strongly opposed to releasing it to either Fergie or Saunders, F: 5, 8.) Fergie and Saunders further state that archaeological sites of burial grounds and a large common camping ground are significant to contemporary Ngarrindjeri people, although this appears to be linked to the women’s secret knowledge only slightly, if at all (F: 14-15; S: 26-28). Two other matters should be noted before concluding this section. Firstly, Fergie is clearly attempting to give the impression that the women’s traditions were not a recent development. She claims that four of the Ngarrindjeri women—including Kartinyeri, who is now sixty—have had the relevant knowledge ‘since their puberty’ (F: 16). Fergie states that ‘this case demonstrates the resiliance [sic] of tradition in Aboriginal society. It also demonstrates the specificity and persistence of womens tradition in Aboriginal society’ (F: 12). Her remarks are quoted by Saunders in the context of comments from Hon J.H. (Hal) Wootton about the time depth that might be required for ‘traditions’ under the Commonwealth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (S: 21). And the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Mr Tickner, seems to have believed that ‘women’s business’ involved long-standing Ngarrindjeri traditions. In the press release announcing that his declaration under the Act would remain in force for 25 years, he stated ‘there is no doubt from the evidence independently provided to me by Professor Saunders that Aboriginal people have continuing [my emphasis] strong spiritual beliefs associated with the sites...’. Fergie invokes the legislative restrictions under which South Australian Aborigines suffered from 1911 until 1962 to explain why knowledge of important traditions might be so restricted, and why people ‘are extremely reluctant to disclose information about their culture, especially the most significant and cherished aspects of that culture, to European representatives of the state’ (F: 20). She also implies that the secret traditions took so long to emerge as an issue because the women with the relevant knowledge were all living in different and distant parts of South Australia—including Adelaide and Murray Bridge—and that ‘for some time [they] were unaware of the proposal to build a bridge to Hindmarsh Island’ (F: 16). Elsewhere, Dr Fergie has stated that Doreen Kartinyeri heard about the bridge proposal for the first time in early January 1994, while in an Adelaide hospital. Secondly, Fergie highlights the significance of the women’s traditions by stating that Doreen Kartinyeri believes ‘should she become ill in the near future that her death will be attributed to her part in the process of divulging sacred womens knowledge’. She adds that many other Ngarrindjeri women express fears for their lives should the areas of significance be further disturbed or destroyed. She claims that there is an ‘extraordinary’ correspondence between these fears and observations Rev. George Taplin made in 1864 about ‘the increased illness and death that was occurring amongst those Ngarrindjeri who had rejected “tradition”’ and become Christians (F: 17). However, she makes a rather interesting omission in her quotation from Taplin—his belief that the most probable reason for this increased mortality was ‘the dread of witchcraft which preys on the mind, although the sufferer tries to hide his fear even from himself’. Consequently, it is not really clear just what is involved in this ‘extraordinary’ correspondence: contem¬porary Ngarrindjeri women’s fear of affliction resulting from supernatural—but extra-human—retribution, or a possible fear of reprisal through human acts of witchcraft or sorcery. Anthropological Research on the Ngarrindjeri People Before examining the above claims, it is necessary to discuss the nature and quality of the anthropological research against which they can be tested. The most important and extensive research covering traditional Ngarrindjeri culture was carried out by Ronald Berndt in 1939, and by Berndt and his wife Catherine in 1942 and 1943, as part of a wider project on acculturation. Although a few publications resulted from this work in the succeeding years, the major book on traditional culture which they promised to their Ngarrindjeri friends was not completed until 1990, and did not appear until 1993. This book, A World That Was, focused on the Yaraldi, who were one of a number of closely allied language/dialect groups making up the ‘Narrinyeri constellation’. As Professor Robert Tonkinson notes in his Foreword, ‘such were the many common cultural elements linking these groups that the Berndts often use the term “Yaraldi” in this study as a synonym for the wider Narrinyeri cultural bloc’. The Berndts also preferred the name ‘Kukabrak’ to ‘Narrinyeri’ or its variants, noting that this was the traditional term which the people used ‘to differentiate themselves from neighbours whom they regarded as being socio-culturally and linguistically dissimilar’. Kukabrak country included the Encounter Bay, Lakes, Coorong and Lower Murray areas; the Yaraldi territory included the area near where the Murray entered Lake Alexandrina down to a point on the Coorong opposite Ewe Island. Yaraldi clans occupied Mundoo Island and part of Hindmarsh Island; clans of the Tangani and Wakend language/dialect groups occupied the remainder of Hindmarsh Island. The Berndts’ book discussed—and where appropriate, evaluated—earlier ethnographic sources on the Ngarrindjeri. These include the writings of Rev. H.E.A. Meyer and Rev. George Taplin, missionaries who lived amongst the people in the nineteenth century when aspects of their traditional life were still functioning—even though extensive and devastating changes had long since begun—and the writings of A.R. [Radcliffe-]Brown and Norman Tindale, who were both professional anthropologists. Radcliffe-Brown visited the area in 1915 and most of the information he obtained was on social organisation. Tindale began his research in the mid-1930s, at a time when ‘only a few elderly men and women, born between 1860 and 1870, retained some of their traditional knowledge’. The Berndts state that ‘Tindale’s work constituted the first detailed and systematic recording of Lower Murray and Coorong culture’. The Berndts were working with what they called a ‘memory culture’, for traditional life had long since disintegrated. They had three principal Ngarrindjeri teachers or informants, Albert Karloan, Mark Wilson, and Pinkie Mack, although they also obtained information from more than a dozen other people. Nevertheless, Karloan and Mack ‘supplied the bulk of the data’ they presented, with Karloan providing the greatest amount. Karloan was born in 1864 at Point McLeay, brought up in Aboriginal camps around Lake Albert, and attended school for a few years at Point McLeay. When the Berndts knew him, he was living at Murray Bridge because he wanted to be independent of mission influence. He was the last Yaraldi man alive to have undergone the traditional sequence of initiation rituals. The Berndts state that he ‘was without doubt an intellectual of the highest calibre’, and that his fund of knowledge about the Ngarrindjeri appeared to be ‘inexhaustible’. Ronald Berndt believed that he was only able to obtain a fraction of what Karloan knew before Karloan’s death in 1943. Pinkie Mack was born in 1869, and was the daughter of Louisa Karpenny, who was a renowned authority on traditional life. Apart from Karloan, Pinkie was the last fluent speaker of Yaraldi. She had gone through part of the women’s initiation rites, and had always had a great interest in the ‘old’ culture, especially in the songs and ceremonies. Pinkie was also the mother of Laura Kartinyeri, the Ngarrindjeri elder who died last June, and who was claimed to ‘have held the key’ to the Hindmarsh Island ‘women’s business’. Mark Wilson was born in the late 1860s and died in 1940, after Ronald Berndt’s first period of fieldwork. Although he was not a fluent Yaraldi speaker, the Berndts state that ‘he possessed a deep insight into both traditional life and then contemporary Aboriginal affairs’. Although there is much of value in Meyer’s and Taplin’s accounts—which are based on observations which began before the Berndts’ informants were born—it is certain that a great amount of information about traditional Ngarrindjeri life and culture had been completely lost by the time that the Berndts began their research. The Berndts fully acknowledge that there are gaps, limitations and possible biases in their work. Memories can be very fallible, and even the best informants can conflate accounts of what actually occurred with idealised statements about what should have been the correct behaviour. There were occasional inconsistencies in what Karloan and Mack told the Berndts. Nevertheless, whatever its shortcomings, as an account of traditional Ngarrindjeri culture A World That Was will never be surpassed. The people who provided the information on which it is based were the most knowledgeable members of their generation, and when they died four or five decades ago, a great amount of their knowledge died with them. Tonkinson comments that it is clear ‘that the elderly Yaraldi from whom [the Berndts] gathered data on the old traditions had not been disseminating this information among their fellows’. It should also be noted that although the Berndts cannot be said to have made a great theoretical contribution to anthropology, they were exceptionally accomplished and respected field researchers. As Robert Tonkin-son—his successor in the Chair of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia—and Myrna Tonkinson wrote in their obituary of Ronald Berndt, ‘Together with Catherine Berndt, his wife and fellow anthropologist, he did more anthropological research in a greater number of Aboriginal communities over a longer time span than any other Australianist... the Berndt’s prodigious output of richly detailed and important works on Aboriginal societies and cultures has brought them international renown’. Our confidence in the Berndts’ book and its relevance for an assessment of the Hindmarsh Island situation can be enhanced by a number of other aspects of their research procedure and the context in which it took place. Firstly, Albert Karloan was extremely committed to the task of telling the Berndts as much as he could about traditional Ngarrindjeri culture, and he completely re-oriented his life in order to do this. ‘For him it was a sacred trust, a duty he willingly assumed so that the people who were to follow him would not lose their ties with what he called “the old life”’. He took this duty so seriously that he felt the need to make a signed and witnessed declaration stating that the Lower Murray people traditionally did not have bull-roarers, after Tindale published an article, based on information given to him by Clarry Long but later retracted, stating that the Tangani did. Pinkie Mack did not see things in quite the same light, and was uncertain ‘how her experiences could be beneficial to the new generations’. But both Karloan and Mack knew that much of what they spoke about was unknown to others, and they insisted they had a responsibility to ensure accuracy in the presentation of what they regarded as facts... They wanted to tell about the old life because they realized that a break with it had been made, and that what had been taking place over the years was irreversible. They wanted to tell the hard with the easy, the bad with the good. They were not concerned with what members of the new generations of Kukabrak might make of it or for that matter what their feelings might be. ‘Tell it as it was, without embellishments’—and that is what they did. Assuming that the Berndts are telling the truth—and given their attachment to the Ngarrindjeri they are most unlikely to have dissembled on this matter—it is very difficult to accept that something that was really ‘the most important place for Aboriginal people of the lower south’ would have been kept from them. It needs to be recognised that the Berndts were told specific things that had once been secret and which once ‘on no account could... be mentioned in front of strangers or women’. These were secret names, given to children when they were around five years old, ‘known only to themselves, their father and male members of their family’, and which symbolised ‘the special and specific association with their own country and the Dreaming’. So it is particularly hard to accept that they would have been given no inkling of the existence—as opposed to details of the content—of such a major domain of customary life as secret religious or cosmological traditions. And as will become obvious below, had they received any indications that such traditions existed, their portrayal of Ngarrindjeri culture would have been quite different to the one presented in A World That Was. Secondly, the Berndts’ research procedure gave both Karloan and Mack the maximum opportunity to talk about the matters that they wanted to, rather than conform with a research agenda determined by the anthropologists. ‘Because we had no control over what we were told, except in regard to checking with the early material of Taplin and Meyer, we placed no restrictions on what Karloan and Pinkie Mack wanted to talk about, apart from suggesting broad subjects for discussion.’ It should also be noted that the Berndts were clearly not creatures of the Mission or the Aborigines’ Protection Board—indeed, Ronald Berndt’s relations with David Unaipon, then perhaps the most famous Ngarrindjeri, were rather distant because of Unaipon’s close association with the church. And when the Berndts camped at Murray Bridge reserve to be close to Karloan, they ‘were identified as Aboriginal people by tourists and curious locals’. Consequently circumstances of the kind mentioned by Fergie, and referred to earlier, that might have made people reluctant to disclose information about the ‘most significant and cherished aspects’ of their culture are extremely unlikely to have been operating. Thirdly, by the time that Catherine Berndt became involved with the research, Phyllis Kaberry’s pioneering ethnography Aboriginal Women, Sacred and Profane, which discussed the secret life of Aboriginal women in the Kimberley, had already been published. Kaberry’s work had been actively sponsored by Professor A.P. Elkin, who was also the Berndts’ spon-sor. In other words, Catherine Berndt would have been sensitive to the possibility that Ngarrindjeri women did have their own secret traditions. The Berndts state that although it could be said that their study suffers from male bias because more of the material they present came from Albert Kar-loan, ‘that bias is counteracted through the comments made by and discus-sions we had with Pinkie Mack and other persons’. Finally, and most importantly for present purposes, there is nothing to sug¬gest any secret-sacred religious rituals or traditions among the Ngarrind-jeri, at least in terms of the separation of the sexes. In her article in Women, Rites & Sites, Catherine Berndt states that although there was some friendly rivalry between Albert Karloan and Pinkie Mack, ‘this was not on the basis of gender, because the traditional culture of the region was remarkable in at least one respect (among others). Gender-based differences in the sense of inclusion-exclusion, in religious and other affairs, were minimal.’ In his Foreword to the Berndts’ book, Tonkinson notes that ‘no evidence exists that there was any issue of secret-sacred versus public-sacred or non-sacred material that could conceivably have divided senior Yaraldi people in terms of whether or not to divulge such information to outsiders. All the material gathered by the Berndts, including that pertaining to sorcery beliefs and practices, was freely available and public, just as it had been traditionally, according to the Berndts’ Yaraldi teachers’. The Berndts refer to this apparent absence of a secret-sacred domain at a number of points in their book. A Strategic Omission? Clearly, despite the force of all the circumstances that I have just noted, it is not possible to state with complete certainty that there were no arcane women’s traditions in traditional Ngarrindjeri culture. Logically, there are no ways of providing an absolute proof for the non-existence of something that is said to be so secret. Nevertheless, it is possible make a confident assessment by pointing to certain consequences that would follow if these traditions did exist, considering the anthropological questions they would raise, and examining how these have been handled in the Fergie and Saun-ders reports. But there is a most remarkable omission in both the Fergie and Saunders reports. Neither make any mention of the atypical openness of traditional Ngarrindjeri religion, even though it would seem to be absolutely central to any appraisal of ‘the particular significance of the area to Aboriginals’. Saunders has even noted ‘some unusual features of the Ngarrindjeri organi-sation’, including the ‘unusually developed system of clan and inter-clan leadership’ (S: 15-16). She has drawn these unusual features from the report prepared by Dr Fergie’s husband, Rod Lucas, in 1990 (which I have not seen). As this was long before the issue of ‘women’s business’ was raised, it may be that Lucas saw little point in mentioning the apparent absence of secret-sacred traditions, although he did have access to the Berndts’ manu-script before it was published (F: 13). But Saunders also makes a number of direct references to the Berndts’ book (S: 15, 34), so it is surprising that she did not note what is clearly the most relevant ‘unusual feature’ of traditional Ngarrindjeri life for her task. It is possible that Saunders’ ignorance of anthropology has prevented her from recognising the problem that has to be addressed, although a number of non-anthropologists have been able to see the difficulty very clearly. Saunders does state that the absence of an anthropologist who would assist her in the preparation of the report hindered her ability to put information she was given into context (S: 8), and this is evident in a comment such as ‘this tradition is not mythological but spiritual’ (S: 28), which in relation to Aboriginal religion is simply fatuous. To compensate for this absence, Saunders seems to have relied heavily on Fergie’s report in a surprisingly uncritical way, even though she was obviously aware that Fergie could not be seen as a completely neutral commentator. Professor Saunders appears to have gained confidence from the fact that Fergie’s account of the women’s traditions was entirely consistent with the account she received (S: 2, 9), although this consistency could have an explanation very different from the one Saunders seems to have adopted. Saunders may have expected that an academic anthropologist would feel professionally obliged to present as full and straightforward an account as possible, no matter how committed he or she might be to informants’ causes. But as we will see, such an expectation may be naive. Fergie is happy to invoke the authority of the Berndts—or other earlier observers—when their comments might suggest continuity bet¬ween tradi-tional culture and current practices. She reports that the Ngar¬rindjeri women held hands and formed a large circle on the beach at the Murray Mouth, and notes that the Berndts discuss ‘the importance of circu¬lar motifs in the first stage of women’s initiation’ (F: 6). (Although ‘importance’ seems some¬what exaggerated given what the Berndts actually state. ) Fergie refers to the Berndts’ treatment of ‘the cul¬tural significance and extraordinary elabo¬ration of Ngarrindjeri treatments of the dead’ to justify concerns that a bridge would disturb grave sites and skeletal remains (F: 15) and, as men¬tioned earlier, she notes the Berndts’ statement that the Murray area was symbolic of Ngurunderi’s body (F: 13). She also discusses the different terms used by the Berndts and others for the Ngarrindjeri in order to resolve what might otherwise appear to be a ‘logical contra¬diction’ (F: 13). But the Fergie report makes no reference whatsoever to the most impor-tant aspect of the Berndts’ findings for the ‘anthropological assessment’ that is supposedly being provided: the apparent absence of secret-sacred tradi-tions. There can be no justification whatsoever for this omission. In saying this, I am not suggesting that the Berndts’ book is a work of incontestable truth. In the past anthropologists have come to very different interpretations about the cultures they have studied—the Freeman-Mead controversy about sexual attitudes and behaviour in Samoa is just one example. But if an anthro¬pologist comes to a conclusion that is fundamentally opposed to another authoritative account on a crucial matter, at the very least it is incumbent on her to note the difference and to make some attempt to explain it. I do not know the precise reason for Fergie’s silence in this regard. However, I would suggest that it provides very strong grounds for thinking that she had no way of explaining the difference between her claims and those of the Berndts, other than to acknowledge that the secret women’s traditions may be a very recent phenomenon. Other Questions Men’s Knowledge and Women’s Traditions The arguments for the recent development of the secret women’s tradi-tions rest not only on Fergie’s and Saunders’ silence. Had these traditions existed in the past, and had they had the significance now being claimed for them, certain behavioural and other consequences would have followed. Indeed, Saunders has inadvertently acknowledged this with her comment that the story she was told by a resident of Hindmarsh Island about ‘an Aboriginal who preferred to take his canoe around the island rather than ride his bicycle across it “for superstitious reasons”’ may reflect the women’s tradition (S: 29). The point is very simple. Fergie is accepting contempo¬rary claims that the sacredness of sites on Hindmarsh Island was such that there had been ‘“very strict laws” about where people could go’ (F: 10). Knowledge of the reason for the laws might be confined to particular people, but all Ngarrind¬jeri would have had to know that the laws existed so that they could be obeyed, and the sanctity of the sites preserved. In other words, Ngarrindjeri men should have been in a position to tell anthropolo-gists that there was something very important about Hindmarsh Island, whether or not they were in a position to explain why. How likely is it that such laws or restrictions could have existed and not been recorded? Certainly, there are occasional references in the writings of the Berndts and other observers to restrictions on particular sites. Rev. Meyer noted that the Ramindjeri—the members of the language/dialect group of the Narrinyeri constellation located along Encounter Bay—distin-guished ‘several large stones or points of rock along the beach’ by name and sex. One rock was regarded as an old man called Lime, and women and children were not allowed to tread on it. The Berndts mention a granite rock named Madunggu at Mumerang, which was believed to be a metamor-phosed navel cord deposited there by the creative being Ngurunderi, and note that when Albert Karloan travelled past this site in a canoe as a boy, people looked away and maintained silence until it was behind them. They identify a swamp at Prangkunga which contained a large stretch of reeds which was carefully preserved because ‘it was said to have been left there by Ngurunderi’s wives; children caught breaking them were severely pun-ished’. Nevertheless, it would be unreasonable to conclude that they and others recorded all the sites to which restrictions of one kind or another might have been attached. However, the Berndts and other anthropologists such as Tindale and Harvey did obtain very detailed information about the Ngarrindjeri view of the geog¬raphy of the region, and this included its mythical significance. (It should be noted that the mention of a place as a significant site in an impor¬tant myth does not mean that the place was necessarily subject to any restric¬tions, despite the apparently widespread belief amongst non-Aboriginal Australians—and many contemporary Aborigines—to the contrary. ) Had they received any material of the kind Fergie has identified, it is most unlikely that it would not have been noted—especially in the case of the Berndts—because it would have had major implications for understanding Ngarrindjeri religion, relations between men and women, and beliefs about conception. In other words, had the Berndts obtained any suggestions that Hindmarsh Island or its environs had the significance now being claimed for it, they would have produced an interpretation of traditional Ngarrindjeri culture that would have been substantially different from the one that they actually wrote. This issue can be taken further, as a consequence of Fergie’s statement that Connie Roberts—who is the most traditional of the four women with supposedly long-held knowledge of the secret traditions—claims that ‘Mundoo Island was a mens sacred site and that “people didn’t go across there and live there, it was just for certain ceremonies and burials—that’s all they went there for”’ (F: 10). If this is really true, it was not just women’s secrets that were being kept from the Berndts, but men’s secrets as well, and by an informant—Albert Karloan—who was apparently so committed to telling them as much as he could about ‘the old life’. For had they been told these things about Mundoo Island, it is hard to see how they could have made their statements about camping sites and fishing grounds on the island without indicating these restrictions, or to understand why they would have ignored it in their account of the Ngarrindjeri environment and its cultural and religious significance. (If it were true that people did not live on Mundoo Island traditionally, it is also difficult to understand how Rev. George Taplin could talk of the ‘Mundoo tribe’ or the ‘Mundoo blacks’. ) But if we discount Connie Roberts’ claims, and accept that the Ngarrind-jeri were one of the few Aboriginal societies without a secret-sacred men’s relig¬ious sphere as the Berndts’ evidence showed, we are faced with an even more extraordinary situation. For the implications of the Fergie report would then be that the Ngarrindjeri had a secret-sacred domain for women, but not for men. Such a unique situation would be an anthropological dis¬covery of great significance indeed, and would warrant international attention. Forbidden Links Fergie’s and Saunders’ statements about the desecration involved in con-nect¬ing Hindmarsh Island to the mainland also need to be subjected to scru-tiny (F: 19-20, 22-23; S: 38-39). Some commentators have questioned how restrictions on joining Hindmarsh Island to the mainland could have been formulated originally, given that there were no bridges or barrages in tradi-tional times. However, one possible retort, which would not be unrea¬son-able, might be that although the physical means of joining widely sepa¬rated areas did not exist, the concept did—as evidenced by the Ngarrindjeri myth in which the earth is joined to the sky by spears thrown one after the other, each piercing the end of the last. (This assumes that this aspect of the myth is traditional. Meyer and Taplin both record different versions; but in Taplin’s account at least, the joining is effected by the means of a line attached to a single spear. ) As already noted, there is an apparent inconsistency in both Fergie’s and Saunders’ attempts to deal with the issue of the desecrating effects of a bridge compared to the effects of the existing barrages. On the one hand the barrages are thought not to bring about desecration because they are not as substantial, or because they act like a ‘pacemaker’ in assisting the waters’ proper functioning; on the other hand the Ngarrindjeri had no prospect of doing anything about them. The apparent inconsistency could be resolved by saying that different statements are made by different people. This is the implication from Saunders’ remarks, though not from those of Fergie. It is only to be expected that people would come to terms with the barrages and ferry cables in different ways, particularly as they do not appear to have had any devastating effects on the reproduction and existence of the Ngarrindjeri people. But at the time of the Berndts’—and Tindale’s—fieldwork the situation would have been very different to the contemporary situation. This field-work took place while the barrages were being constructed and in the period soon after they were completed. The subtleties of the distinctions that are now being made would have been extremely difficult to sustain at that time, as the believed cosmologically damaging effects would not necessarily have had time to manifest themselves. At the very least there would have been a wide range of opinions, and considerable discussions about the likely conse-quences. Certainly, there can be no doubt that any Ngarrindjeri objections would have been ignored by the authorities. But had there really been any anxieties that connecting formerly distinct parts of the landscape could lead to disaster, it is impossible to accept that these would have been kept from the Berndts or from Tindale. Their informants did not shrink from making their anger and concern known about other matters which they had little hope of preventing, and whose effects were not seen as portending the end of the Ngarrindjeri people. Thus Tindale, writing in 1938 while the barrages were being built, noted that when recording place names and geographical knowledge of the Tangani (another language/dialect group of the Narrinyeri constellation) in the field, informants frequently had cause to lament the physiographic changes which have been wrought by the clearing of sandy ground, the stocking of the Coorong with sheep and cattle, and its invasion by rabbits, leading to rapid drifting and alteration of old fixed sandhills, lookouts and other landmarks. As one old man expressed it: ‘Our [creator being] told us, long, long ago, to “beware of ants”. White men must be the “ants” he spoke of, for they have eaten away all my people, my herbs, my game, and even my sandhills’. Similarly, Ronald Berndt noted that, when recording place names on the Murray while on a trip with Albert Karloan, Karloan ‘frequently had cause to lament the physiographic changes which have been wrought by the advent of the European’. Furthermore, the Berndts wrote that ‘in the early 1940s some of the older people including Albert Karloan and Pinkie Mack were outspoken about those who excavated burial mounds and camp sites, and sharply criticized Aborigines who helped Europeans in such activities, condemning them for desecrating their land’. The Berndts do refer to the barrages in their book, but it is reasonable to conclude that no specific complaints of the kind Fergie would claim were raised against the barrages, for otherwise it is most unlikely that they would have produced the interpre¬tation of traditional Ngarrindjeri culture that they did. However, the complaints noted by Tindale and the Berndts do raise two further issues. Firstly, their Ngarrindjeri informants are expressing a wider Aboriginal idea in which the whole landscape is in a sense sacred, so that most of the acts which transform the landscape that Europeans take for granted involve some form of desecration. From this point of view both the Commonwealth and the South Australian Aboriginal heritage legislation could be used to block almost any activity which affects the land. Secondly, while some archaeologists have been willing to lend their scientific author¬ity to preventing the Hindmarsh Island bridge from proceeding, the quoted comments suggest that their own activities may involve even greater desecration. Finally, it is necessary to make a comment about Fergie’s attempts to eluci¬date the principle that would result in the desecration of the women’s tradi¬tion by the bridge, but not by the barrages. In particular instances anthro¬pologists may argue that there is no single underlying principle that explains a given set of beliefs or practices; i.e. that the ritual or restrictions or state¬ments have been produced not by an identifiable ‘cultural logic’, but by a historically contingent and previously unpredictable set of circum¬stances. Or they might adopt Fergie’s position and argue that it is possible to identify a specific principle that has generated the beliefs under consid¬eration. But while the ‘cultural logic’ of other traditions may be very differ¬ent to Euro-pean understandings, anthropological attempts to analyse this ‘logic’ are not exempt from the requirements of intellectual rigour and con¬sistency. And here there seems to be an additional problem with the Fergie report. She appears to believe that her informants are being ‘insightful’ when they say that one of the fundamental differences between the bridge and the barrages is that the latter will not stop the waters from flowing (F: 19), but she does not explain how the bridge will stop these waters. Fur¬thermore, in the extract from the confidential third Appendix quoted by Saunders, Fergie speculates that a bridge would create a link between island and mainland that, unlike the barrage or the ferry cable, is not ‘mediated by the life-supporting waters of the Goolwa Channel’ (S: 39). But as far as I am aware, the proposed bridge is not a suspension structure. Why would its pylons not allow the ‘life-supporting waters’ to achieve the necessary mediation? Protecting the Culture Fergie and Saunders both seem to take seriously Doreen Kartinyeri’s state¬ment that ‘to fail to protect your culture when you have apparently been given the power to do so is truly destructive’ (F: 23; S: 38-39). But this raises a problem in terms of Fergie’s claim that the four women with the requisite knowledge about the secret traditions only learnt of the proposed bridge development late in the piece. If the women really do believe that the State and Commonwealth Aboriginal Heritage legislation have given them a new responsibility, it is reasonable to ask why they appear to have neglected to keep themselves informed about potentially life-destroying threats to crucial areas. Residence in Adelaide, or Murray Bridge, the Riverland, or even Port Germaine—as in Kartinyeri’s case —(F: 16) is unlikely to have been a bar for people who are as genuinely concerned about their responsi-bilities and as worried about a possible failure to fulfil them as Fergie and Saunders would have us believe. For as Tonkinson notes, ‘despite this geo-graphical spread [from the Lower Murray region, including Murray Bridge, to the Riverland and Adelaide], there is considerable movement of indi-viduals between extended family groups. A sense of community has been maintained and is reinforced whenever large numbers of Ngarrindjeri people congregate, most notably for funerals.’ Once again, Fergie’s claims do not seem to withstand any close inspection. Conscious Fabrication or Innocent Invention? The combined effect of the above arguments means that we are virtually compelled to conclude that any Ngarrindjeri women’s secret traditions sur-rounding Hindmarsh Island are recent. But the question of whether they were contrived to prevent construction of the Hindmarsh Island bridge, or whether their origin is a result of other circumstances, still needs to be con-sidered. Given the statements by Dorothy Wilson and her friends that the ‘women’s business’ was a hoax, and the courage they have shown in their refusal to retract despite facing great pressures to do so, I believe it is most likely that one or more people invented new beliefs—or very substantially elaborated existing ones—in an attempt to stop the bridge. Having said this however, I should also note that it is by no means a straightforward matter to distinguish between the ‘fabrication’ of tradition, which is presumably ille-giti¬mate, and the ‘creation’ or ‘elaboration’ of tradition, which is presumably acceptable. The terms of reference of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission, which require it to inquire whether ‘women’s business’, or any aspect of it, was a fabrication, hark back to a view of Aboriginal traditions that is no longer sustainable in the light of existing anthropological knowl-edge and understandings. The problems involved can be illustrated by considering the South Aus¬tra-lian Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988, and its definition of ‘Aboriginal tradi-tion’. The Act states that this ‘means traditions, observances, customs or beliefs of the people who inhabited Australia before European colonisation and includes traditions, observances, customs and beliefs that have evolved or developed from that tradition since European colonisation’. Certainly, by implying that Aboriginal cultures, like any other human cultures, are not static—and never were static, despite the ‘40,000 year old customs’ man-tra—this definition has creditable aspects. The false idea that Aboriginal cultures were changeless is the outcome of the interaction of two different sets of beliefs: a very widespread Aboriginal religious dogma which stressed timelessness and immutability, and Western—and older anthropological—notions about the nature of ‘primitive’ societies. Thus fifty years ago, the anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow could write of the Aranda, ‘Myths, chant and ceremony are firmly fettered by rigid bonds of tradition... The thorough-ness of their forefathers has left them not a single unoccupied scene which they could fill with the creatures of their own imagination’. In using the phrase ‘evolved or developed’ however, the South Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988 definition is closer to older, conventional, and fallacious understandings of traditions. Traditions were seen as being transmitted with little, if any, conscious manipulation; they were organic expressions of the collective life and identity of peoples that have developed in ‘some “natural” and non-polemical way’. However, anthropologists have come to realise that, in the words of Ruth Finnegan, one of the disci-pline’s most distinguished scholars of oral traditions, ‘all traditions are likely to be in one way or another constructed or exploited by individuals and interested parties (although not always with conscious deliberation)’... Behind the development and continuance of any tradition, there are likely to be specific political processes and interest groups’. In other words, ‘fabrication’, or the slightly more neutral word, ‘invention’, is a very com-mon aspect of any tradition, and traditions may arise in response to new political and social circumstances in which the originators find themselves. This is as true for our own traditions as it is for Aboriginal ones. The book that played a major role in focusing scholars’ attention on the proc¬esses and contexts involved in the creation of traditions, The Invention of Tradition, edited by the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, showed how many European traditions were created or elaborated to meet particular social or political needs, although they often used old materials and themes. Thus, in one of the chapters Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that ‘the whole con¬cept of a distinct [Scottish] Highland culture and tradition is a retro¬¬spective invention’. The distinctive national apparatus of kilt, tartan and bagpipe, to which Scotchmen ‘ascribe great antiquity, is in fact largely modern. It was developed after, sometimes long after, the Union with Eng-land against which it is, in a sense, a protest. Before the Union, it did indeed exist in vestigial form; but that form was regarded by the large majority of Scotch¬men as a sign of barbarism...’ The creation, or elaboration, of the traditions justifying ‘women’s business’ needs to be understood in the context of the changes that have affected Aboriginal people—including the Ngarrindjeri—and their relations with other Australians over the past couple of decades. Although of necessity my presentation will only be in broad terms, I think that there is sufficient evi¬dence available to suggest that the ‘invention’ of women’s business is little more than a less easily disguised example of processes that have been going on for some time in other parts of Australia, and which appear to have been accepted as legitimate. As a result of the substantial and positive revaluation of Aboriginal culture that has occurred in the public mind in the last two or three decades, ‘non-traditional’ Aborigines are attempting to recover or recreate aspects of tradi¬tional life which some communities lost or abandoned generations ago. There are a number of salutary aspects to this cultural revival, and it is hardly surprising that many Aborigines want to reclaim aspects of their past that have disappeared, particularly as their parents or grandparents may have had little say in the matter. But faced with a situation where much of the traditional local knowledge has been irretrievably lost, and continually being reminded how important it is for self-esteem and empowerment ‘to keep their culture strong’, many communities are using models from other parts of the country—or from generalised accounts of Aboriginal culture—to create a past ‘culture’. These models may have little relation to the local cultures that are supposedly being revived, for much of their plausibility derives from pan-Aboriginal notions that have been filtered through differ¬ent sources. These sources include such things as Cultural Awareness Camps, originally funded through the Commonwealth Government’s Par¬tici¬pation and Equity program, curriculum materials for schools, and official and other documents which spell out supposedly defining features of Aboriginality. To take just two examples of generalisations which are pertinent to the question of ‘women’s business’, we can refer to a couple of sources which are seen as impeccably authoritative. Whether or not Ngarrindjeri women have actually seen these particular texts does not matter: they express ideas which circulate very widely. In the National Report of the Royal Com-mission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Commissioner Elliott Johnston presented an idyllic account of pre-contact Aboriginal society. While rec-ognising that ‘the social and economic organization of Aboriginal groups varied greatly throughout Australia’, he stated that ‘some general observa-tions can be made’: Women usually provided the staple food supply, and they owned and had special responsibilities towards sites in the landscape, asso-ciated song cycles and Dreaming stories. They had exclusive control of the secret ceremonies of reproduction, and their maternal function as child rearers was highly valued... The tablet of the law which was ensconced in the landscape itself was explained through Dreaming stories as people travelled. While women were in charge of their own business–sacred and secular... And in The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, Professor Catherine Ellis writes in the entry on ‘Women’s Song’: Until relatively recently, it has not been well understood that women have a secret song life of importance, just as men do. Women throughout Australia maintained (and in some areas still perform) sacred and secret songs that were particularly concerned with the entire process of procreation... Without songs of their own, women feel powerless. Where they have been able to preserve their songs, they have great strength and political dominance. These kinds of statements are an invitation to elaborate in a very specific direction the remnants of tradition that may still exist in people’s memories, and to do so in the innocent confidence that the prejudices of previous observers prevented them from recognising and recording what clearly must have been there. The restraints on the elaboration or creation of local traditions are loos-ened by a widespread distrust of outside recorders of Aboriginal culture, particu¬larly anthropologists from earlier times who are seen as having been com¬promised by their social and political attitudes. (It is not just Aborigines who hold this view—many contemporary anthropologists are quick to find fault with their predecessors on this score. ) This distrust means that anthropological accounts of past beliefs and practices can be readily set aside in good conscience when they do not appear to conform with the needs or expectations of the present. A vivid, although I think not uncommon, expression of this sentiment came from an Aboriginal participant in the Pre-Assembly Women’s Meeting of the Seventh Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Canberra in 1991: ‘Most of our societies were matriarchal until white anthropologists stuck their noses in. They didn’t talk to the women, so they went away thinking we were patriarchal’. Fergie herself points to the suspicion and hostility towards anthropology held by some Ngarrindjeri women: ‘My presence at the meeting and role in the process was critically questioned by some women. Some were clearly angered by the presence of a white woman whose profession they associated with “ripping off” their culture, “stealing” and revealing their secrets and cultural traditions’ (F: 3-4). Elaborations and inventions can be effected with remarkable rapidity and be dependent on the actions—or inaction—of a single person. Writing in the mid-1980s, Howard Creamer, an anthropologist with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, noted: In 1980 an Aboriginal elder, originally from another area, named an impressive granite rock outcrop near Tamworth ‘Wave Rock’, because of its resemblance to a wave; the site was recorded at his request because he believed that in the past it must have been an increase site for rain... In just a few days, Norah Head on the cen-tral coast gained a rich mythology from one enthusiastic local elder which very nearly prevented a major public works project, until initiated men were brought in from the north coast to separate newly acquired individual knowledge from pre-existing, shared cultural beliefs and thus determine the validity of the claims. Likewise, prehistoric sites in a forest proposed as a possible site for an army base quickly became ‘sacred’ for nearby Kooris who had not actually seen them but who realised their potential value for the construction of a local Aboriginal identity. In more general terms, Creamer notes that ‘sites become incorporated into the collective knowledge of a local community where previously they were unknown, and contemporary beliefs and ideas gain a new clarity as ancient truths’. Writing in 1989, Catherine Berndt made a similar point: A new kind of ‘sites of significance’ has been developing in the recent past. To some people of Aboriginal descent who were not reared in a living-traditional Aboriginal culture, almost everything of that culture which they hear about or read about now is, by definition, sacred, or almost so. And that applies to ‘country’ as well: all sites in Australia are ‘sites of significance’ because they are, or were, Aboriginal sites... If people can’t get information about their own local past beyond the memory of living, or recently living persons, because the lines of transmission have been broken or blocked, what can they do? Perhaps they can say, as some have already done in such circumstances, ‘As of now, this is how it is—or was. This is how it could have been, or might have been.’ In the present trend towards a generalised Aboriginal culture with ‘islands’ of local-cultural survival, this is a likely outcome. Perhaps the most famous example of official protection bestowed on a site whose significance was based on recently elaborated traditions is the Federal Govern¬ment’s 1991 decision to ban mining at Coronation Hill. Local Jawoyn custodians claimed that mining at the site would disturb a Dream¬time being called Bula and bring about a catastrophe. The document which provided the justification for this ban, the Final Report of the Resource Assessment Commission’s (RAC) Kakadu Conservation Zone Inquiry, acknowledged that ‘elaboration has occurred in Jawoyn religious thought’ and stated that this was ‘consistent with the processes of theological reflec¬tion and doctrinal development that occur in many religions, and with the recent appreciation among anthropologists of the “tremendous vitality and adaptability which is present among Aboriginal religious concepts”’. The precise extent of this elaboration has been the subject of considerable anthro¬pological controversy. But I would contend that the anthropologists and others who argued that mining should be prevented have not been able to refute evidence which strongly suggests that little more than a decade or so previously, Coronation Hill did not have any of the crucial characteristics of sanctity and danger which provided the basis for the ban. Indeed, in articles defending his position in this controversy, Dr Ian Keen—who, together with Dr Francesca Merlan, prepared the anthropological report for the RAC on the cultural significance of the area to Aboriginal people—has stated that he and Merlan thought ‘that current beliefs should [his emphasis] count most in an assessment of the significance of the Conservation Zone’. He argues that an insistence on unchanging tradition, aimed to contain potentially binding forms of belief within strict limits, to prevent the extension of cosmological principles to new conditions and hence to forestall the possibility of the consequences of those extensions being binding on others. This insistence has also guarded against the possibility of giving Aboriginal people a degree of control unacceptable to currently controlling interests. Yet it is in the logic of Aboriginal beliefs to interpret newly discov-ered aspects of the world in terms of ancestral traces and powers. The particular form that reinterpretations and elaborations may take in different areas and different times varies as a result of sometimes conflicting pressures, incentives and local requirements. But a tendency towards increasing the secrecy surrounding aspects of Aboriginal religious practices and locations is reinforced by the expectation, common to many Aborigi-nal—and other—cultures, that the most valuable things are those surrounded by the greatest restrictions. (This is not to deny the existence of counter-vailing influences on Aboriginal people which may work to reduce secrecy in some circumstances. ) In a number of parts of Australia, such as the Pilbara, this expectation has played an important part in the displacement or downgrading of comparatively open local ritual complexes by more restricted traditions adopted from neighbouring people. The importance of secrecy is also enhanced by the political strategies of Land Councils and other Aboriginal organisations. For instance, in a paper prepared in the early 1980s, Daniel Vachon and Phillip Toyne set out the principles that Aborigi-nes should adopt in dealing with resource developers: ‘Firstly, it must be accepted and recognised that Aboriginal people are the experts in matters relating to the religious significance of their land. Furthermore, the know-ledge is theirs by right and therefore, must be controlled by the people whose ancestors have responsibly held such knowledge for ages. Should informa-tion on sites and Dreamings be made freely available to mines departments and mining companies control is lost’ [emphasis in original]. The significance of the circumstances and statements discussed above for the invention of the ‘women’s business’ surrounding Hindmarsh Island should be reasonably clear. Whether the original impetus came from Ngar-rindjeri women—or men—themselves, or from outside non-Aboriginal sources, it is not hard to see how many Ngarrindjeri women could have jus-tified the creation with a clear conscience. They wanted to stop the bridge, perhaps as an exercise in the assertion of cultural and political ‘resistance’ and ‘a fierce sense of Aboriginality’, or because they were concerned that burial sites might be damaged, or because like Albert Karloan’s generation they believed—or had come to believe—that any major construction dese-crated the land, or for some other reason or combination of reasons. Under pressure to come up with grounds that would be substantial enough in politi-cal terms for the Commonwealth Minister to utilise—for in legal terms the relevant Act seems more than broad enough to have done the job—the Ngarrindjeri women may have believed they were doing little more than recovering what once would have been there. If a women’s secret life was found in all Aboriginal cultures, the apparent absence among the Ngarrind¬jeri must have been due to the biases of early white anthropologists and missionaries, and remembered fragments—or read texts—associating the Murray region with the body of a male mythical being would surely have had a secret female counterpart. And so on... A reading of the ethnographic materials on the Ngarrindjeri suggests a fair range of possibilities for elaboration. If we accept the need to recognise new interpretations that lie ‘within the logic of Aboriginal religious discourse’ (to use Ian Keen’s phrase), particu-larly as that ‘discourse’ has been shaped by the contemporary circumstances of cultural revival referred to earlier, it is difficult to see how a recently invented ‘women’s business’ could be condemned. Even if the basis of ‘women’s business’ was consciously adopted from Aboriginal women else-where in Australia, why should this not be seen in terms of the pre-contact adoption of religious ideas and ceremonies from neighbours, extended in a context of the much wider geographical range of interaction that now exists? And in the ‘thousands of years’ time frame which seems to provide an important basis for the public’s readiness to provide substantial protec¬tion to Aboriginal heritage sites—or even in the two hundred years since European settlement—how significant is the difference between a dozen or so years of ‘tradition’ at Coronation Hill, and three or four months at Hind-marsh Island? Anthropological Imperatives Of course, the above comments do not mean that Dr Fergie was justified in suggesting that ‘women’s business’ demonstrated the ‘persistence of tradi-tion’, and neglecting to mention all the evidence pointing to the recent origin of ‘women’s business’. Nevertheless, it should be recognised that once she had accepted the commission from the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement, it would have been difficult for her to have given proper emphasis to evi-dence that would have been interpreted as undermining the Ngarrindjeri women’s case against the bridge. Had she thus gone against an Aboriginal organisation with such state and national links and influence, her future access to a great many Aboriginal communities for research could have been jeopardised, and as a still relatively junior anthropologist her academic career could have been harmed. Although there are important exceptions, the general climate within aca-demic anthropology is hostile to those who are seen as assisting the interests of developers against the perceived interests of indigenous people. To take just a single instance, an introductory textbook written by the late Roger Keesing, former Professor of Anthropology at ANU, and very widely used in Australia and North America during the 1980s, told students that the Yanomamö Indians of the Amazon Basin ‘will be driven into the abyss of ethnocide and genocide, in the name of progress and the interests of cynical greed’. Keesing went on to draw a comparison with Australia: Such cynical greed is not confined to the Third World. Aboriginal Australians whose aspirations to community control and develop-ment, recognition of rights to ancestral lands, and the preservation of sacred sites are all recognized in the rhetorical pronouncements of state and federal governments, have been cynically manipulated, deceived, intimidated, and invaded when they stood in the way of mineral explorations. Recognition of Aboriginal rights in the abstract is a convenient rhetorical stance for Australian politicians; but particularly in the most conservative states, Queensland and Western Australia, these rights are trampled whenever money is at stake. The political stance appropriate to the anthropologist in the face of ethnocide, genocide, or the oppression of powerless minorities in pursuit of profit is clear enough. Anthropologists are frequently admonished about the need to consider the political implications of their work, and to place the interests of the people they study above all other considerations. It is seriously suggested that because of ‘a political struggle ongoing among the people described [in ethnog¬raphies], their advocates, and the state in its various guises’, research-ers must now make ‘political evaluations... which ask not just whether the ethnography is “helpful” in some absolute sense but will its subjects regard it as so’. The ‘Principles of Professional Responsibility’ of the American Anthropological Association, the largest and most influential body in the profession, states this quite clearly: Anthropologists’ first responsibility is to those whose lives and cultures they study. Should conflicts of interest arise, the interests of these people take precedence over other considerations. Anthro-pologists must do everything in their power to protect the dignity and privacy of the people with whom they work, conduct research or perform other professional activities. Their physical, social and emotional safety and welfare are the professional concerns of the anthropologists who have worked among them... Anthropologists have an ongoing obligation to assess both the positive and negative consequences of their activities and the publi-cations resulting from their activities. They should inform indi-viduals and groups likely to be affected of any consequences rele-vant to them that they anticipate. In any case, however, their work must not violate these principles of professional responsibility. If they anticipate the possibility that such violations might occur they should take steps, including, if necessary, discontinuance of work, to avoid such outcomes... [Emphasis in original.] In expressing professional opinions publicly, anthropologists are not only responsible for the factual content of their statements but must also consider carefully the social and political implications of the information they disseminate... The Australian Anthropological Society’s Code of Ethics is less strict, as it allows that ‘the views and interests of those studied should be placed first, except where this would compromise a member’s conscience or commit¬ment to truthfulness’. Nevertheless, the practical effects of the distinction may not be so great. John Forbes, a Reader in Law at the University of Queensland, quotes a conversation he had with a Sydney barrister in June 1994: I was involved in an Aboriginal land claim [i.e. with parties oppos-ing the claim] and I rang round various universities to try and get an expert witness and no one would be in it. They were worried about their promotion. A couple of them said that they would never ever [his emphasis] get a permit to go on to any Aboriginal land again to do work, and they would be effectively blackballed in their profession. On the basis of my own familiarity with the discipline, I do not believe that this is a misrepresentation or exaggeration. Forbes goes on to note that the former President of the Australian Anthropological Association (Dr Nicolas Peterson from ANU, although Forbes does not name him) has been reported as saying ‘most anthropologists are more comfortable working for Aborigi¬nes than in some situation where they could be construed as working against their interests’. The Australian anthropologist Professor Kenneth Maddock has taken this further, and expanded on what may be involved: Many anthropologists feel a moral commitment to help ‘their people’. As material aid on any but the smallest scale is usually out of the question, the anthropological ‘debt’ is best—and most visibly—expressed by championing the interests of the community. Less visibly, anthropologists can refrain from bringing forward embarrassing information, for example, details of land use or tenure that conflict with a claim before the Land Commissioner might never get mentioned. Such suppression, which is of course different from outright falsification, could be defended on a variety of grounds—repaying informants, preserving field access, uplifting the downtrodden, and so on. The problem is exacerbated by the increasingly relativist attitude towards knowledge that a great many anthropologists—and other social scientists—are adopting. The now-dominant position within anthropology is hostile to the belief that it is possible to speak of unique truths or of objective facts which exist independently of the observer or his culture, or of a system of power relations. A relatively mild expression of this position is found in the text book referred to earlier. Keesing states that recent political debates in anthropology have given the lie to the widespread assumption that social science can be objective and neutral—that it can be free of ideological and political commitments and can seek truth without involvement... The myth of scientific objectivity has also begun to fall apart through an awareness of the ideological bias implicit in social science theory. But perhaps the best testament to the rather compromised state of the disci¬pline can be found in the circumstances of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge case itself. A large number of anthropologists are very familiar with the contents of the Berndts’ book. Half a dozen are mentioned in the Acknowl-edg¬ments, and many others have read the book and would be aware of the Berndts’ findings about the traditional absence of secret-sacred traditions. An even larger number would realise that there is something very strange about women’s secret traditions which would have required behavioural restrictions on men, yet which men apparently had no knowledge about. Nevertheless, despite all the publicity surrounding the case, there has been a great silence from a profession that claims it has a duty to educate the public about the nature of indigenous cultures. Although some anthropologists have obviously been making sceptical statements to journalists, this is being done anonymously. To my knowledge, before the Royal Commission commenced only three anthropologists had been willing to publicly identify themselves with doubts about ‘women’s business’ or the way in which it has been handled—Kenneth Maddock, Philip Jones, and the anthropologist who was engaged by the developers, Lindy Warrell. Certainly, there may be a few whom I do not know about. But there is nothing esoteric or difficult about the analysis I have presented in the first part of this report. Something similar could have been written by any anthropologist who was familiar with the relevant ethnography—or perhaps just Robert Tonkinson’s fifteen page Foreword to the Berndts’ book. Had a number of anthropolo¬gists come out publicly at the beginning of the controversy and pointed to the problems surrounding ‘women’s business’ there may not have been any need for a Royal Commission, and the damage that has been suffered by a great many people would not have occurred. Almost as revealing is the profession’s silence following the claims of Betty Fisher, described in the media as an ‘English-born amateur historian’, that she recorded information about ‘women’s business’ in 1967 during a ‘12 to 15 minutes’ interview with Rebecca Wilson, a Ngarrindjeri woman. We can leave aside the difficulty of accepting that matters of supposedly extreme secrecy—which are said to have required hours of anguished dis-cussion before they could be released to Professor Saunders (F: 4-5)—would be given to someone under the circumstances described by Mrs Fisher. But even a highly experienced anthropologist, completely familiar with the existing research on a particular culture, would never claim to have unrav-elled the significance of comments which undermined the interpretations of a competent colleague—let alone colleagues of the Berndts’ stature—on the basis of a single fifteen minutes interview with one member of that culture. If Mrs Fisher’s claims are taken seriously, they would call into question the research procedures on which anthropology has been based during most of this century. (Only a few details of Betty Fisher’s interview with Mrs Wilson have been covered in the media. But those that have emerged suggest that in inter¬preting the statements she claims to have recorded Mrs Fisher may have simply run together—and have unjustifiably made arcane—aspects of Ngar-rindjeri culture which were publicly known. For instance, Mrs Wilson’s concerns that ‘non-Aborigines were “digging up our culture”’, may well express the same sentiments about archaeology that the Berndts recorded in the 1940s, and which I referred to earlier. And remarks Mrs Fisher made in a Channel 10 interview on August 8, to the effect that the waters could not be connected to the sky, may allude to a myth in which a Dreaming hero and two women escape from the women’s husband, first by diving into water, then finally by climbing into the sky after it has been pulled down to earth. ) Conclusion Four years ago, the Commonwealth Government, Aboriginal organ-isations, and others dismissed the concerns of people who argued that the grounds being used to ban mining at Coronation Hill meant that any project, in any part of Australia, now could be blocked. The fiasco of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge is simply another stage in a ‘historical trajectory’ whose dev¬elop¬ment is proving entirely predictable—the result of a combination of forces, including open-ended and anthropologically naive legislation; pol-iticians and governments wishing to make symbolic statements about their position on ‘Aboriginal issues’; an Aboriginal cultural revival that involves ele¬ments of ‘resistance’ to non-Aboriginal society, and which in many reg-ions can only be based on local fragments of memory and often faulty notions about a generalised Australia-wide culture; a widespread public belief that Aborigi¬nal traditions are tens of thousands of years old; an anthropological profes¬sion largely, if not totally, committed more to a role of advocacy than to independent scholarship on Aboriginal matters; and the willingness of con¬servation groups to use Aboriginal issues to stop projects which cannot be prevented under existing environmental legislation. Despite what are likely to be claims to the contrary from other anthro-polo¬gists, I am not suggesting that significant Aboriginal heritage sites should not be recognised and protected. Nor am I suggesting that such pro-tection should only be granted to sites which are based on an unchanging Abori¬gi¬nal tradition. This would be an impossible requirement—as I have noted above, all traditions change; all are the outcome of acts of individual inven¬tion and manipulation, whether deliberate or not. But Aboriginal heritage should not provide the carte blanche against development projects that it has been allowed to become. The Australian public and governments need to be far better informed about the nature of Aboriginal traditions, about their dynamism, and the potential of sites to change their meaning and signifi¬cance very rapidly—including during the course of a dispute, as a direct result of the dispute processes. Aboriginal heritage legislation and its implementation clearly need to be based on a recognition of the implications of this dynamism—not by acceding to its unconstrained development—but by establishing reasonable criteria for assessing significance, including the likely time-depth of the major elements being used to justify protection. And the anthropologists and other experts who will prepare these assess-ments need to have their work subject to a much more rigorous and critical scrutiny. This report is based on a submission made to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission. About The Author Dr Ron Brunton trained as an anthropologist and for ten years taught anthropology in universities in Australia and Papua New Guinea. He resigned from his lecturing position at Macquarie University in 1981, and since then he has worked in government, politics, and private industry. From 1990 until May 1994 he was the Director of the Environment and Aboriginal Affairs Unit of the Institute of Public Affairs. He is now a Senior Fellow at Tasman Institute, and Interim Director of the Markets and Environment project. He also runs his own company, Ron Brunton Research Pty Ltd, which specialises in anthropological and social research. Since 1993 he has been an honorary Senior Associate in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of a number of technical articles in anthropology, as well as many articles on anthropological, envi-ronmental, political and social topics. He has published two books: The Abandoned Narcotic: Kava and Cultural Instability in Melanesia (Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Black Suffering, White Guilt? Aboriginal Disadvantage and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Institute of Public Affairs, 1993)."Mifren (talk) 08:38, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Given source documents like

Dr Ron Brunton's "A World That Was" (extensively quoted, again)

Dr Ron Burton's "Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s anthropological study of the Ngarrindjeri people, A World That Was. The Berndts, who in the 1940s worked with the last of the Ngarrindjeri to have gone through traditional initiation rites, noted that people spoke of the River Murray and the sur-rounding area as symbolic of the body of the great male creative being Ngu-runderi." ... • The most important study of traditional Ngarrindjeri culture was carried out in the early 1940s by Ronald and Catherine Berndt, who were internationally renowned for the detail and quality of their field research. • The Ngarrindjeri men and women they worked with were committed to recounting all they knew of the past. As well, Catherine Berndt was aware of the existence of secret women’s knowledge elsewhere in Australia and would have been sensitive to its possible existence among the Ngarrindjeri. • The Berndts specifically noted that there was no evidence of any gender-based secret domain among the Ngarrindjeri. The most remarkable feature of the reports prepared by Professor Saunders and Dr Fergie is that neither make any mention of this finding by the Berndts, despite its crucial relevance to their assessment about the significance of ‘women’s business’. • The Berndts’ research, the silence of Saunders and Fergie, and the apparent absence of certain consequences that would inevitably have followed from women’s secret traditions, virtually compel us to conclude that ‘women’s business’ is recent. • Nevertheless, although the Royal Commission has to determine whether ‘women’s business’ is ‘fabricated’, and therefore presumably illegitimate, this is not as straightforward as it may seem. In a sense all traditions are ‘fabricated’ or invented. ‘Women’s business’ may be little more than a less easily disguised example of processes occurring elsewhere in Australia, and which governments and others have accepted as legitimate. • These processes of invention and elaboration result from a number of pressures and incentives on Aborigines, including government programs and legislation, a compromised anthropology profession, and supposedly authoritative, but false statements about the universal characteristics of Aboriginal cultures. For instance, statements in the Report of the Black Deaths in Custody Royal Commission and [[The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia would encourage Ngarrindjeri women to think that traditionally they would have had their own secret traditions, but that these had not been recorded.

It would also be equally important therefore for Wayne to respectfully, considerately, seriously contact Ramdinjeri Heritage Association Inc Pre-eminently enduring Sovereign Spokesman & Chair Karno Walker who do and does not (along with others identified as "Ngarrindjeri") necessarily recognise the current Trevorrow-Rigney Tendi Rupelle Regime - significant considerations for all seriously concerned in these matters especially considering we whitefellas' Adelaide Australian Federal Court House Hearing Ramindjeri Call Over "Ngarrindjeri"-"['KAURNA]" Mifren (talk) 01:39, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Mifren, what? We are discussing how to deal with secrets revealed in the article, not the veracity of Secret Women's Business or the legitimacy of current Ngarrindjeri leadership.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 11:49, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Actually today when I was able to speak with Ramindjeri Elder Meryl Mansfield pers comm 2 Mar 2011 I heard readings from if I recall correctly p19 & p59 of Berndt & Berndt's "A World That Was" which collectively indicated that "Ngarrindjeri" never existed per se. Sadly I do not have a personal copy however I just found a copy online at http://books.google.com/books?id=gYhQnj6cWh8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=a+world+that+was+berndt+%26+berndt&source=bl&ots=lKbrA_EpKL&sig=T9e9oQ_LMwZsUFXsLvZkTEpuL9Q&hl=en&ei=GlZuTenWK87qrQf3oMiHDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false so I will now have a go at independently looking for these references. One of which is actually transcribed,

Yet more extensive quoting from "A World That Was"

"A world that was: the Yaraldi of the Murray River and the lakes, South Australia" By Ronald Murray Berndt, Catherine Helen Berndt, John E. Stanton Chapter "1 The land and the people p19 Identification: the Narrinyeri constellation and its neighbours Up to now, we have used the wider identifying term Narrinyeri. However, the people themselves did not use that name to refer to the collectivity of groups whose members recognized a common social and cultural perspective, although not necessarily a common language or dialectal one. Narrinyeri (sometimes Narindjeri or Ngarindjeri) means 'belonging to people' as contrasted with Kringgari (Europeans), and was derived from kornarinyeri (belonging to men or human beings--implying that all other people were non-human). The term was apparently first used by Taplin (in Woods ed. 1879: 1) and under that label he distinguished a range of tribes. He contended that it was possible to 'consider the Narrinyeri as a nation divided into tribes, or as a tribe of Aborigines divided into clans'. As we shall see, the evidence suggests that members of a number of language/dialectal units acknowledged common bonds and interests over a fairly wide area of country. However, on that basis alone it is not appropriate to speak as Taplin did of this constellation of units constituting a confederacy or a nation. Identification of the people concerned rested primarily on membership of a dialectal or language group in which were located a number of clans linked specifically to stretches of territory. All of the people within this constellation had a common language with dialectal variations; moreover, there were also dialectal variations between some of the clans. The appropriate traditional categorization of the whole group was Kukabrak: this term, as we mention again below, was used by these people to differentiate themselves from neighbours whom they regarded as being socio-culturally and linguistically dissimilar. However, the term Narrinyeri has been used consistently in the literature and by Aborigines today who recognize a common descent from original inhibitants of this region-- even though their traditional identifying labels have been lost. If contemporary descendants do know them, they may still prefer to use the broader form which has now gained some currency since it was first used well over a century ago. The territory of the Narrinyeri was roughly that noted by Taplin, although on the basis of the information we were given by Aborigines in the early 1940s, it has actually been enlarged a little, stretching to the coastal area of the Gulf St Vincent. At the edges of the broader territory of this constellation, the lower Kaurna (as a segment of the Adelaide 'tribe') were located from Brighton to a point between Hallet's Cove and Port Noarlunga. They spoke a language different from Narrinyeri or Kukabrak, although there were said to be able to understand and converse in, for instance, Ramindjerie. Despite their peripherality, it is clear that the Kaurna people were part of the wider group (see Teichelmann and Schurmann 1840; Wyatt in Woods ed. 1879 and Williams 1839).

"Mifren (talk) 16:18, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Mifren, this is not the way to go about trying to discredit the very existence of two of the dominant tribes of the Adelaide region. --Yeti Hunter (talk) 02:54, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

LOL YH, how can one be "trying", seriously, to "discredit" two conquested, conquering, colonising, corporate, commercial, Commonwealth, Constitutional Crown legal fictions only respectively Registered so called Native Title Tribes, 1998 your so called "Ngarrindjeri", 2000 "Kaurna" when clearly neither actually existed other than in another legal fiction "SA Museum" "compromised" Ethnography then Anthropology Departmental minds!? I'm currently engaging emotionally both positively & negatively with Ramindjeri Claimant Elder, "Chirpy" Allan & his apparent Scottish Clan Campbell family "Brothersinarms Leader Johnny & neice Tess, Theresa Kate Campbell who has helped bring us together over this last year & provided a format on Tess' http://www.facebook.com Wall to facilitate what has been happening as a result ...

Where, how then YH does what I requote, "A world that was: the Yaraldi of the Murray River and the lakes, South Australia" By Ronald Murray Berndt, Catherine Helen Berndt, John E. Stanton Chapter "1 The land and the people p19 here discredit that which clearly, never existed prior to we whitefellas or Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Caucasian cousins advent? "The appropriate traditional categorization of the whole group was Kukabrak: this term, as we mention again below, was used by these people to differentiate themselves from neighbours whom they regarded as being socio-culturally and linguistically dissimilar. However, the term Narrinyeri has been used consistently in the literature and by Aborigines today who recognize a common descent from original inhibitants of this region-- even though their traditional identifying labels have been lost."Mifren (talk) 01:32, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

I'll take that as a comment.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 05:31, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Interesting to note then that YH ducks, dodges my explicit question now asked again, "Where, how then YH does what I requote, "A world that was: the Yaraldi of the Murray River and the lakes, South Australia" By Ronald Murray Berndt, Catherine Berndt, John E. Stanton Chapter "1 The land and the people p19, here discredit that which clearly, never existed prior to we whitefellas or Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Caucasian cousins' advent?"Mifren (talk) 23:35, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

I'll now also ask again YH & any other wikiEditors, "how can one be "trying", seriously, to "discredit" two conquested, conquering, colonising, corporate, commercial, Commonwealth, Constitutional Crown legal fictions only respectively Registered so called Native Title Tribes, 1998 your so called "Ngarrindjeri", 2000 "Kaurna" when clearly neither actually existed other than in another legal fiction "SA Museum" Ethnography then [to quote Anthroplogist Dr Ron Brunton] "compromised" Anthropology Departmental minds!?" Mifren (talk)

Were you told that you were very clever for your alliteration in primary school or something? To answer your question, you are arguing the Ngarrindjeri are a pure invention of modern historians - that's a pretty aggressive argument, and most would see it as an attempt to "discredit" the present leadership.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 00:06, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

1/ In answer to your question YH, no.

2/ I'm seeking truth from which justice naturally flows, including natural justice right of reply/s eg restorative justice. In actual fact, I'm not "arguing" anything per se other than following logic, using scientific method from first principles using Occam's Razor.

PLEASE CEASE & DESIST FROM SPEAKING FOR, PROJECTING ONTO ME THUS SPEAK, WRITE ONLY FOR YOURSELF!

3/ Irrespective of your personal opinion, "beliefs", Dr Ron Brunton explicitly stated, posterity published August 1995, "Blocking Business An Anthropological Assessment of the Hindmarsh Island Dispute", Tasman Institute Occcasional Paper B31, "These processes of invention and elaboration result from a number of pressures and incentives on Aborigines, including government programs and legislation, a compromised anthropology profession, and supposedly authoritative, but false statements about the universal characteristics of Aboriginal cultures. For instance, statements in the Report of the Black Deaths in Custody Royal Commission and The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia would encourage Ngarrindjeri women to think that traditionally they would have had their own secret traditions, but that these had not been recorded."

4/ "The present leadership" no longer includes what was, "current Trevorrow-Rigney Raukkan Rev George "Taplin touched" Tendi Rupelle Regime", http://www.google.com.au/search?rlz=1C1SKPL_enAU413&aq=f&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=george+trevorrow http://www.google.com.au/search?rlz=1C1SKPL_enAU413&aq=1&oq=matt+rigney&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=matt+rigney+funeral Mifren (talk)

1/ Pure nonsense. You are clearly using this as a forum to further the Ramindjeri agenda.

2/ Occam's Razor is not a scientific method and neither is Anthropology. Anthropology is based on interpretation of the available knowledge within a society at a specific time. By undertaking this you can produce the anthropological record. In regards to this article, it is based on the current anthropological record and your assumption that Ngarrindjeri and Kuarna are fictions of the S.A. Museum are flawed. The ethnographic concept of Ngarrindjeri preceeded the S.A. Museum. Taplin recorded the name in 1878 in "The Narrinyeri: an account of the tribes of South Australia." The only influence the S.A. Museum had was due to the work of Norman Tindale and the information that he synthesized from the available ethnographic record and the ethnography he recorded with Clarence Long, a Tangani man and other members of the lakinyerar. Ronald Berndt on the other hand relied primarily on Albert Karloan, a Yaraldi man. The Kukubrak was the name Berndt was given for the entire cultural system which is not dissimilar to the the Ngarrindjeri Nation of Tindale, Taplin etc and possibly a linguistic nuance of Karloan. Regardless of whether it is Kukubrak or Ngarrindjeri, both these cultural units or "nations" included the Ramdinjeri. It appears that you choose to promote Ramindjeri autonomy, which you have the right to do, but I reiterate, Wikipedia is not the right platform for promotion although I encourage you to write a new article on the Ramindjeri Native Title. But be prepared, as Wikipedia is a public encyclopedia that anyone can edit, such an article can undermine the Ramindjeri claim. For example, Title requires continuity and Berndt mentions that Ramindjeri separated from the Ngarrindjeri in colonial times as they occupied (coastal) land belonging to dispossessed Kuarna, other information could be potentially even more damaging to the claim.

3/ This is confusing. Are you insinuating that Aborigines are opportunistic liers? If so then this also applies to the Ramindjeri. That secret traditions not recorded by Anthrologists are inventions? There is ample evidence of traditions passed down without any Anthropological record, ie; Thukabi which was used as evidence in the Hindmarsh Island court case.

4/ Why does it make a difference that Trevorrow and Rigney have both passed away? Wayne (talk) 13:18, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

1/ Thanks for contributing Wayne, I don't yet comprehend your 1st Comment in response to my answer to YH's 1st question. Irrespective given that you have such a high IQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WLRoss does that then mean that you too have directly communicated with Ramindjeri, especially Karno Walker to make such strong claims?

If not, why!? Also why Comment so strongly if you too haven't contacted Karno? What clearly is your evidence, supporting your claims?

Am weary, it's 1238 here in Bali now so will toddle off to bed then get back to this. Mifren (talk) 16:40, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

0435 & my mind, subconscious has woken wondering, why when both you YH&Wayne RossWayne has it taken someone born OS, raised out of that legal fiction, provincial, conquested, conquesting, Crown colony over the last 175years since then illegitimate Duke of Normandy, WilliamIV effectively stole by asserting British Sovereignty 19 February 1836 with HM's legal fiction Founding Document "South Australia Letters Patent" which HM's niece then effectively stole Sovereignty again 6 Jul 1900 with HM's legal fiction Founding Document, "Commonwealth of Australia Letters Patent" to form Federation 1 Jan 1901 that "South Australia" State of minds, yours now born then bred, included!? It intrigues me personally, professionally, politically to see that the very people who have most to lose, least demonstrated cognisance yet YetiHunter was, is so quick to derogatorially denigrate, by calling bizzare, now Wayne of that Scottish red haired family Ross, you're calling my answer, no, nonsense! LOL So is your use thus abuse of logic! Irrespective, I note then that neither of you seriously have any real ethnography, let alone anthropology credentials, yet seem so quick to criticise when cognitive dissonance & group think seems to rule your minds!? Have you in actual fact both been to that other legal fiction "Museum South Australia"!? Clearly neither of you appear to have yet been able to demonstrate a single verifiable visit to Ramindjeri pre-eminent enduring Sovereign Spokesman Karno Walker who clearly was publicly elected 16 Dec 2009 yet neither of you clearly have demonstrated any respect, recognition, resourcing Ramindjeri asserting their clear pre-emient enduring Sovereignty since Karno's apical ancestor "Princess" Con aka Sally aka Sarah Walker's father, "King" Kondoi apparently met my namesake Matthew Flinders and Captain Nicholas Baudin in a 1802 tri-nation meeting at "Encounter Bay"!?

YH has dubious credentials, only embarking on seeking truth, recognising, resourcing pre-eminent enduring Sovereignties after I had 3xwikiwars with him over former summer Vice Regal Residence Marble Hill, South Australia's sale saga when I as 23 Nov 2007 legal fiction "Australian Parliament", Kingston Campaign Candidate, clearly demonstrated YH had to apologise several times over the ways in which he chose for whatever reasons to try despirately to hide, damage, protect his precious Adelaide Hills, South Australia, Marble Hill from any pre-eminent enduring Sovereign thus Lodial Title assertions ... It's been & continues to be entertaining to see just how quick you both have been and I guess are at criticising another whistle blower! LOL Irrespective, my life isn't dependent on either of your lives nor mere "opinions" ... neither of your vain attempts to cover up what we whitefellas have & continue to do to that island continent will in actual fact prove anything, seriously until you both in actual fact paradigm shift your brains, perhaps with the help of both Michael Anderson's New Way Sovereignty Summits and Mark McMurtrie's OSTF Original Sovereign Tribal Federation facilitation ... It's entertaining too to see how that other legal fiction since 1836 in this 175th year, "HistorySA" is white washing "South Australia's" black history!Mifren (talk) 21:14, 22 September 2011 (UTC) Further to Wayne Ross's Responses, Questions, Sections 2&3 above, I remind ourselves YH aka Moriarty thus perhaps raise Wayne's awareness to, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Marble_Hill,_South_Australia#Unlawful_land_grab_PART2_..._respecting.2C_recognising.2C_resourcing_Ramindjeri_or_does_Norman_B_Tindale.27s_so_called_.22.5B.27KAURNA.5D.22_actually_or_ever_exist-ed_other_than_legal_fictions_created_by_people_wanting_money.21.3F Mifren (talk) 23:11, 22 September 2011 (UTC)