Performance of tritichinna ceremony of snake totem, Urabunna Tribe,Lake Eyre (pub. inThe commonwealth of Australia; federal handbook, prepared in connection with the eighty-fourth meeting of the British association for the advancement of science, held in Australia, August, 1914[1] byGeorge Handley Knibbs
The older tribalautonym was Ngarabana, which may have been misheard by white settlers as Arabana, the term now is generally accepted by new generations of the Ngarabana.[2]
The neighbouring tribes were theKokata to the west, with the frontier between the two marked by the scarp of the western tableland nearCoober Pedy. To their east were theWangkanguru.[2]
The Arabana Corporation are thenative title holders of the land,[9]
In October 2025, it was alleged that the owners of Anna Creek Station had built illegal dams on rivers andwaterholes on the property between 2017 and 2025, including a dam wall around 2 km (1.2 mi) long across Balta-Baltana Creek. The earthworks contravened theAboriginal Heritage Act, theNatural Resources Management Act and theLandscape South Australia Act.[9]
Several traditional stories are well documented, especially that regarding a man-eating buzzard and his eaglehawk mate.[10] The chief protagonists are three animals:
The Arabana were interviewed atOld Peake Station[12] andThantyiwanparda in the nearbygidgee scrub[13] byWalter Baldwin Spencer andFrancis James Gillen over a ten-day period[14] in August 1903 for a specific purpose. Their earlier work had argued that the truly "primitive" nature of theArrernte was indicated by the fact that their totemic identities came from the spirit responsible for making individuals' mothers pregnant.James Frazer adopted this to buttress his theories on the development phases of "primitive societies". A Scottish amateur ethnographerAndrew Lang contested their interpretations of the Arrernte, arguing that they were not "primitive", a label he argued was more appropriate to their near neighbours the Arabana, who traced descent through the mother and linked their totemic system toexogamy. It was to address this challenge that accounted for Spencer and Gillen's return to Arabana lands.[13]
Today, cross-cultural research collaborations are building on Arabana traditional knowledge and colonial and pastoral experiences to develop new ways of approaching modelling climate change.[15]
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