Yuendumu Everyday

Book excerpt: This book explores intimacy, immediacy and mobility as the core principles underpinning contemporary everyday life in a central Australian Aboriginal settlement. It analyses an everyday shaped through the interplay between a not so distant hunter-gatherer past and the realities of living in a first world nation-state by considering such apparently mundane matters as: What is a camp? How does that relate to houses? Who sleeps where, and next to whom? Why does this constantly change? What and where are the public/private boundaries? And most importantly: How do Indigenous people relate to each other? Employing a refreshingly readable writing style, Musharbash includes rich vignettes, including narrative portraits of five Warlpiri women. Musharbash's descriptions and analyses of their actions and the situations they find themselves in, transcend the general and illuminate the personal. She invites readers to ponder the questions raised by the book, not just at an abstract level, but as they relate to people's actual lives. In doing so, it expands our understandings of Indigenous Australia.