The Lower Murray, the Lakes and the Coorong

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.