Adelaide as an Aboriginal landscape

Abstract

The relationships pre-European Aboriginal people had with their landscape were complex. Nevertheless, the reconstructive ethnographic literature for southern South Australia has tended to regard Aboriginal geographic knowledge as having been the product of 'tribal' relations with a more or less constant area of terrestrial landscape. The erroneous belief in cultural homogeneity within the 'tribe', has led various researchers to look for 'true' expressions of a culture, such as portrayed by myth. Nevertheless, evidence provided by the early ethnographies indicates that there were wide ranging geographic views within cultural groups. Furthermore, the recorded mythology of many Aboriginal cultures illustrates perceived connections with distant landscapes. In this paper, I account for the diverse range of links to the landscape that Adelaide Aboriginal people possessed. This is a study in cultural geography, considering both material and nonmaterial aspects of Aboriginal cultural construction of the landscape.