Aṉangu

Mm-hmm.

Anangu, I think that's how you pronounce it.

Yeah.

So that's what she replies.

So this is a tribe in Western Australia.

It's a group of tribes that live out in the desert area.

Once again, we get Anangu with power over the dream time.

Yes.

I think that just didn't stick and people said, well, this is what it is.

Of course, for a long period before European settlement, the district was Amangu country, not Anangu, which is another mob, but AM, Amangu country.

They're a Yamatji people of the Midwest, and their territory is described as stretching from around Champion Bay and the Chapman River, south towards Hill River, and inland towards Malawa, Moroa, and Kanama.

excavations at a cave called Yellow Bitty Cave near Lehman gave an indication of occupation of a Mungu country from about 23,000 years ago.

I think that just didn't stick and people said, well, this is what it is.

Of course, for a long period before European settlement, the district was Amangu country, not Anangu, which is another mob, but AM, Amangu country.

They're a Yamatji people of the Midwest, and their territory is described as stretching from around Champion Bay and the Chapman River, south towards Hill River, and inland towards Malawa, Moroa, and Kanama.

excavations at a cave called Yellow Bitty Cave near Lehman gave an indication of occupation of a Mungu country from about 23,000 years ago.

Rounded, clustered, separated by narrow valleys and gorges that create a labyrinthine landscape of shadow and stone.

Kata Chuta is sacred to the Anangu as well, and certain areas within the formation are restricted to initiated men, with specific walking routes and viewing areas designated for uninitiated visitors.

The existence of Kata Chuta, beside Uluru, creates a landscape of paired sacred sites, two enormous geological formations sitting on the same flat plain, each with its own stories, its own restricted knowledge, its own set of responsibilities for the custodians who tend them.

The relationship between the two formations is part of the Chukupa, part of the dreaming narrative that connects all features of the landscape in a web of ancestral journeys and creative acts.

When it rains in the red centre, which is rare this being one of the driest inhabited regions on earth, the rock becomes a waterfall.

Hundreds of temporary cascades pour down the grooves and channels in the sandstone, turning the dry red monolith into a streaming, silvery, almost liquid mass.

Pools form at the base, filling rock holes that the Anangu have used as water sources for millennia.

The water holes are not just practical resources, they are sacred sites, each one associated with specific Chukupa stories, specific ancestral beings, specific events in the dreaming that created and continue to sustain the landscape.

Okay, so it formed millions of years ago, but when did people first find it?

The Anangu people have been living around Uluru for over 30,000 years.

That is tens of thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians even started building the pyramids.

30,000 years? How do you even survive in a desert for that long?

They know exactly how to find food and water.

For instance, they use the wood from mulga trees to make tools and gather sweet honey ants from deep underground.

But to the Anangu, Uluru isn't just a place to find food.

It's deeply sacred.

And there's a song called Earth is Singing that was on the Go In A Dreaming album in 2010.

You know, I was trying to capture that sense, this beautiful line that, a book that Diana James, who spent 40, well more, 50 years of her life really as an anthropologist, working with community art, particularly in the Western Desert, in Anangu country, on the South Australian, Western Australian border out in that world, but right through that Anangu landscape and other places.

And she talked about when Aboriginal people walk back onto their country that they know so intimately that they start to sing because the country is broadcasting and those songs are in the landscape.

And I love that notion that the earth is holding the songs and we've just got to have the antenna up and it's always broadcasting.