Chapter 4

Mudjon, elder of the Mandildjara

Mudjon was to accompany us in the search for Warri and Yatungka, because the country we would be traversing was that over which he had wandered with his people. Every detail of this land was known to him, from the low hills of Bulgarri, Tjurina and Wanderandja in the east to Djunderoo soak in the west. From Djulinoo soak in the south to beyond Yallendjiri rock hole in the north, he was familiar with every well and rock hole, every geographical feature. And Mudjon had wandered far outside his own country and was familiar with much of the Gibson Desert. As a young man he had roamed the Budidjara land to the west. He had visited the Ngadadjara in the south. He had gone into the country of the Pitjandjara, the Pintubi and the Walpiri. He had travelled far, and what he saw he never forgot.

Mudjon had first seen white men and women when he was on ‘walkabout’ to the Warburton Ranges. A mission had been established there in the early 1930s and for many of the desert people this was their first contact with non-Aborigines. Mudjon observed the missionaries from a distance. He noted their strange behaviour and heard them speak in a strange tongue. He feared them for he had heard his people speak of the terrible things that had been done by the white man, the atrocities committed against Aboriginal people when they had speared the cattle that had spread out over the land, land that belonged to them, their land since the Dreamtime.

Back to Extracts