Ngarrindjeri

Ngarrindjeri country is the lower Murray river, lakes Alexandrina and Albert, and the long sand spit and lagoon of the Coorong where the river finally meets the Southern Ocean. It is some of the richest country on the southern coast for fish, waterbird, reed and root, and it supported a dense population by Australian standards. Ngarrindjeri is a confederation rather than a single group: something like eighteen local clans, each with its own country, which met in a council called the tendi to settle disputes and to decide matters affecting more than one of them, a structure formal enough to have drawn early ethnographic attention and to have been described in the nineteenth century literature as a form of parliament. Colonisation of the lower Murray came early and hard.

Point McLeay mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 by the Aborigines' Friends' Association, and it was where many Ngarrindjeri families were concentrated, where the language was discouraged, and where the writer and preacher David Unaipon was born in 1872. The mission is now the Ngarrindjeri community of Raukkan, run by Ngarrindjeri people, and its church stands behind Unaipon's portrait on the Australian fifty dollar note. What the atlas records of Ngarrindjeri religion follows from that history: an early and substantial written record produced under mission conditions, a continuing community, and a body of knowledge whose restrictions Ngarrindjeri have asserted publicly and at length.

In the 1990s a proposal to bridge the channel between Goolwa and Hindmarsh Island in Ngarrindjeri country produced the longest and most damaging public argument Australia has had about restricted religious knowledge. Ngarrindjeri women stated that the area held knowledge belonging to women, which they could not disclose in general terms and which the bridge would harm. A South Australian royal commission in 1995 concluded that the restricted women's knowledge had been fabricated.

In 2001 the Federal Court, hearing a different case on much fuller evidence, took the other view: Justice von Doussa stated that he was not satisfied that the restricted women's knowledge had been fabricated. Both findings stand on the record, and the two camps that formed around them have not merged. The atlas takes no side, and it is worth being explicit about why. Deciding the question would mean examining material Ngarrindjeri women say is theirs to withhold, which is the thing the dispute was about in the first place. What the atlas records instead is the shape of the problem: that a legal process which requires disclosure in order to test a claim of restriction cannot test such a claim without breaking it, that this was recognised at the time by people on several sides, and that Australian practice has since moved slowly toward mechanisms for receiving restricted evidence in closed session. The bridge was built and opened in 2001.