Bardi people
The Bardi people, also spelt Baada or Baardi and other variations, are an Aboriginal Australian people, living north of Broome and inhabiting parts of the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They are ethnically close to the Jawi people, and several organisations refer to the Bardi Jawi grouping, such as the Bardi Jawi Niimidiman Aboriginal Corporation Registered Native Title Body and the Bardi Jawi Rangers.
Language
The Bardi language is a non-Pama-Nyungan tongue, the most northerly variety of the Nyulnyulan language family. It is mutually intelligible with Jawi. It is the best known Nyulnyulan language, and a detailed grammar of the language exists, written by Claire Bowern.The Pallotine priest and linguist, Hermann Nekes, who worked with Ernst Alfred Worms in compiling dictionaries of Baardi and related languages, found his informants to be extremely linguistically astute. In an interview in 1938, a journalist writes of him and the Baardi/Jawi area informants as follows
In a little stone house at Beagle Bay, with a creek running beside it and the sea only five miles away, he has been living and working with nine aborigines, studying their tongues. Every day he and the aborigines sat in a circle round the one big table in the house. Dr. Nekes asked them questions, and from their replies was able to compare their answers on the spot. The strangest feature of these linguistic knights of the round table was that no two of them spoke the same tongue. As the days became weeks and the weeks months, Dr. Nekes became the central figure in one of the oddest language experiments in scientific history. The aborigines began to understand every word that every other aborigine said. At first some of them had used what Dr. Nekes calls a kind of 'pidgin-black.' Now they were all coming to terms. At this stage, some of the brightest of them gave Dr. Nekes a shock. They began to use grammatical terms and hold almost scientific discussions on syntax. Some further months at the round table, and they were dealing with phonetic symbols, explaining fine points of pronunciation, elucidating the differences between dialects that were generally similar, and even giving Dr. Nekes a hand with his job of finding the best written representation of the different tongues
Country
The Bardi's traditional land, estimated by Norman Tindale to encompass about, was in the Cape Leveque peninsula, extending eastwards from Cape Borda to Cygnet Bay and Cunningham Point. There are problems with this estimate, in particular with the southern borders assigned to the Bardi. The Kooljaman resort at Cape Leveque is run by Bardi people.Seasons
The Bardi divide their year up into six seasons whose time length varies:- mankal is the monsoonal wet period, usually a few weeks in January or early February, when food is scarce but turtle eggs can be gathered.
- ngaladany follows, a windless humid period from late February through to early March.
- iralboo is the hot season of swelling tides in April and May, with fruit burgeoning, and reefing possible. Mosquitoes thrive, and influence where one will camp.
- barrgan is marked by cold and strong southeasterlies blowing in, from May to August. The onset marks the best time for hunting dugong.
- jalalay from September to October is characterized by westerlies, the end of dugong hunts and the best time to catch the fattened stingray
- lalin, the season when turtles mate and can be hunted, begins with November, which also affords an abundance of wild bush apple. It is hot, as humidity rises, and northwesterlies blow in, with tropical storms towards the end.
Religion and spirituality
The oldest supernatural beings in the Dampier peninsula thought-world were, firstly, Galalaṇ, followed by Minau. At some time, a young culture hero, Djamar emerged from the sea at Bulgin and, after resting against a paperbark tree for three days, struck out, whirling his bullroarer, for the south, then dived back into the sea after turning west, only to emerge at Ngamagun creek. Going into the bush he cut down a silver-blood tree, and split boards from it, which he fashioned into bullroarers that, as he went back at his campsite on the shore, he shoved into the stone-beds of the creek, forming a line of Tjuringa. He then walked on to Djarindjin where, while seated on a rock, his hand was stung by a rock-fish he had caught underneath it. He found the blood tasty as he licked the wound, and stopped it with a wooden plug. Returning to Ngamagun, he let the blood from his arm drip into a trough of stone. This blood became his food, which he shared with his three unmothered sons: Nalja, Winindjibi and Glabi, and the ritual drink of Baardi men to this day. The three sons took different directions, with Nalja travelling east with the tjuringa, Winindjibi went south introducing initiation rituals and dancing, while Glabi introduced the Law.
He speared another fish at high tide and sang his way back to Ngamagun, collecting his galaguru and, on climbing the Burumar sandhill, swung it round while kneeling. The hair-string broke as he did so, and the bullroarer shot skyward, to rest at a celestial zone called 'With the Fleshless', i.e., at the realm of the dead, in the Coalsack Nebula, a dark spot near the Southern Cross. After his death, Djamar himself went to the Coalsack Nebula, and his presence may be represented by BZ Crucis.
Galalaṇ, was the primordial figure who endowed the landscape with names from the Bardi language as he traipsed all over what became their territory. He was an upright being, easily incensed by signs of greed in the allotment of food. He died when, angered by such behaviour, he channelled inland lake waters to the sea to allow fish and turtles to escape into the ocean and was speared by the outraged people at Gumiri, a waterhole located at Swan Point on the northernmost sector of the Dampier peninsula, and then thrown into the sea where he floated, and is known by the name of Lulul/Lular. He ascended to the realm of the dead where it covers and arc of 33°. The exact celestial coordinates are as follows:
His figure can still be seen in the darker parts of the Milky Way, on both sides of a line drawn from Alpha Centauri to Alpha Scorpionis, Antares. His right foot rests near 113 G of Lupus, and his left foot near Lambda and Upsilon Scorpionis. He bears on his head the feather of white cockatoo, identified with the bright star, Alpha Centauri, and that of an owl represented by the darker Beta Centauri. The whole figure extends over an arc of 33°.'
Minau, the second creator figure, is associated with innovations that are viewed as negative compared the customs laid down by the predecessor Galalaṇ. He was polygamous, invented obscene dances, and introduced painful practices like circumcision and subincision into initiatory rituals. The changes he wrought were associated with the transformation of Baardi parkland estates into mulga scrub, perhaps with the advent of colonial cattle grazers.
A fourth figure that came into prominence in Baardi lore is Djamba. Worms found the cult dominant among the nearby Yawuru by the early 1930s, yet all absent among the Nyulnyulan speaking groups such as the Jabirr Jabirr, Nyulnyul and the Baardi, and hazarded the conjecture, with some evidence, that it came from the central Australian group, the Arrernte, via the Gugadja.
This Djamba, a prototypical figure in widespread Aboriginal lore characterized by crippled feet, is associated with the introduction of guraṇara matters, tyuringa and instruments like the love bullroarer, mandagidgid; magic daggers and spindle-shaped sticks used as points, many associated with innovative sexually explicit corroborees and rites. All this bears strong resemblances to key features of the Kunapipi ceremonies swept over northern Australia. Among the Baardi, there were those who assimilated these innovations to the Djamar cult, and others who, in deference and fealty to the moral example of the primal Dreaming spirit Galalaṇ.
Bardi people could trace their connection to figures in the Dreaming via the presence of their rai, which is a contemporary witness to the primordial period.
Social organisation and economy
In the Dreaming, Galalan split people into two reciprocal groups, the Djando and the nar. According to Worms, Bardi marriage classes later came to accept the following division:| Male | Marries | Children are |
| Banaga | ||
| Burun | ||
| Bardjari | ||
| Garimb |
According to elderly informants however these divisions were recent, and were introduced from Lagrange by the mytho-cultural protagonist Djamba, perhaps alluding to a shift in customs that took place around the 1870s.
Claire Bowern states that the Baardi, unlike many Kimberley groups, do not employ to this purpose the section and subsection names almost ubiquitous elsewhere in the region. Generally the kinship classificatory system among them conforms to the Arrernte type, which is that also used among the Nyigina and Nyulnyul. In such a system there are 4 distinct terms for the grandparents' generation, and cross-cousin marriage, with some exceptions in second-cousin marriages, is prohibited.
Bowern states that the primary division, alluded to by Worms – djando and the nar, – now transcribed as jarndoo and inar – refer to two generational moieties. If one is jarndoo, all members of one's harmonic generation are also within that typology. Likewise, inar groups those people within one's parents' or children's generation. Marriage is only lawful between those who are jarndoo to each other.
Only medicine men had a totem animal, whose presence was thought to carry the implication that one would die earlier that most other Bardi people. The ideal was to take only one wife ideally, with polygamy frowned on.
The Bardi were a maritime, coastal people, composed of five groups. They crafted pegged mangrove logs from a light buoyant variety which they got in trade from the Jawi people of Sunday Island to form rafts to venture out to the sea to hunt, and to visit the outlying islands.
As with the Jawi, the Bardi defined land rights in terms of four kinds of relationship:
- Ownership of a patrilineal estate by virtue of patrilineal descent
- A right of access to the patrilineal estate of one's mother
- Rights stemming from the site associated with one's conception totem
- Rights that derive from customary usage and intermarriage