Imagining Mumeka: Bureaucratic and Kuninjku perspectives

Abstract

Mumeka is the name of a place; it was once the location of a seasonal camp. Since the late 1960s it has been called an outstation or homeland. The name first appears in the archive in the late 1960s, but the immediate precursor to its establishment was the blazing of a vehicular track from Oenpelli to Maningrida in the Northern Territory in 1963 that crossed the Mann River adjacent to this wet season camp (see Figure 14.1). That place was inhabited by members of a community that speak what we now refer to as the Kuninjku dialect of the pan‑dialectical Bining Gunwok language (Evans 2003).