Murlawarni: History of the Pilbara

Abstract

This thesis is an interpretation of the collective precolonial past of twenty-three Aboriginal nations of the Pilbara region of northwest Western Australia, prepared using 212 previously published myths of the Ngardangarli, Pilbara Aboriginal people, as the primary source of knowledge, testimony, and information about the Pilbara’s past. Through an analysis of the 212 myths the thesis presents a ‘deep history’ of the Pilbara, where deep history denotes historical narratives that interpret the past of societies that left no written record of events, the usual archive used by historians to reconstruct the past. What this deep history will demonstrate is that the Pilbara Canon contains a record of four primary processes in the Pilbara’s past – morality, creation, nature, and history – as well as testimony about specific events experienced by Ngardangarli, that is authentic to the lifeworld of the precontact Pilbara and Ngardangarli’s ancestors in a way no other kind of historical knowledge can emulate, because Pilbara mythology is indigenous to Pilbara past time, people, and place.

More broadly, by exploring what Ngardangarli know and say about the Pilbara’s past in their mythologies through empirical, interdisciplinary, comparative, and philosophical approaches, this thesis will explore the function and characteristics of myth as humanity’s original, or oldest recoverable, epistemology and historical practice. In this context, the thesis will situate the Pilbara’s deep history in a global context to (re)affirm Ngardangarli knowledge and gain deeper insight into what the Pilbara and the world’s past contains. Show more