Four trackers from an aboriginal group called the
Pintubi helped Webb's team interpret 20,000-year-old human footprints discovered in southeastern Australia (SN: 1/7/06, p.
(8.) Western Desert dialects, namely Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra, with Luritja and
Pintubi to a slightly lesser extent, are spoken as a first and or second language by the majority of Aboriginal people in this region.
During one IRCA forum, Susan Locke, manager of
Pintubi Anmatjere Warpiri Media (PAW Media) at the time, pointed out the deep irony of the VAST plan: the introduction of satellite had been the reason for BRACS; now a new satellite solution was to be the end of it.
[so] that for instance, I had often heard [Walpiri] men speak contemptuously of the
Pintubi [Pintupi], who even yet have not fully grasped the principles underlying subsection affiliation' (Meggitt 1962: 169).
By the last period of time spent living in Papunya I had begun to read the desert landscape, knew some language and travelled regularly with a particular group of
Pintubi women who went into the desert to perform their ceremonies.
`But the
Pintubi Aboriginal women's traditional hunting skills provide much more: where the cats have found prey, what they've eaten, how many times they've urinated or defecated, even where they've sat, waiting to pounce.'
However, these were to be administratively distinct and were also occupied by distinct peoples - primarily Pitjantjatjara,
Pintubi, and Walbiri.
I am thinking particularly of his panorama of a
Pintubi hunting party to the west of the MacDonnell Ranges taken in the mid-1930s.
Myers (1986) emphasized the egalitarianism of traditional
Pintubi society and linked the lack of stable, centralized, overarching order to the primacy of individual `autonomy' in traditional social life(8).
In 1957, anthropologist Donald Thomson (1960:177-9) observed
Pintubi men making and wearing Crotalaria bark sandals at Lappi Lappi, an important water point south of Lake Hazlett on the western margin of the Tanami Desert in Western Australia.
also Sharp 1974), speaks of the
Pintubi 'erasure of the historical', and says that:
Myers, FR 1986,
Pintubi country,
Pintubi self, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.