As we recently travelled through the northern goldfields just over 500km north of Kalgoorlie, we couldn’t help but get tied up with the interesting Aboriginal and European history of Wiluna. Yes, it might be just another of WA’s small gold rush towns, but in fact Wiluna has many more interesting faces visitors will not find anywhere else in Australia.
O
ne of the first things in town that quickly grabbed our attention was the story of two now quite famous desert Aboriginals. Widely recognised as the last of the desert nomads to give up their traditional lifestyle and ‘come in’ to the welcoming outback community of Wiluna, Warri and Yatungka left behind a life of solitary desert exile which they had endured for most of their lives. This outback story of love and survival made news around the world in 1977 as the old couple reluctantly gave up the life they had known together in the vast Gibson Desert of WA.
This story in fact, has its beginnings back in the 1930s when Warri and Yatungka met and fell in love. Tribal law however, forbade them from marrying because they were the wrong match according to ‘skin group’ law of the Mandildjara desert Aboriginals. The consequences for breaking this law in those days was often a punishment of severe physical injury or even death, and so these star-crossed lovers ran away together in the middle of the night from their tribal families, telling no-one of their plans. Over the years in their world of desert isolation, the couple had three children. Their daughter however, died at a young age but their two sons survived and eventually returned to their estranged Mandildjara family, leaving their now ageing parents to once again wander naked and alone from waterhole to scant waterhole and living off the land. Despite the couple’s continued defiance of tribal law and their clandestine departure years ago, the Mandildjara elders had not forgotten them,
THE LAST OF THE NOMADS n BY COLIN KERR
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... and Wiluna, the tow that welcomed them.
| Western 4W Driver #124
