Traditional Aboriginal Learning How I Learned as a Pitjantjatjara Child

Abstract

As a child I lived at a place called Angatja. My father, mother, grandmother, older brothers, aunts, and uncles taught me there and I learned from them. My mother taught me about her bush foods. She collected the plant foods and prepared them and I learned by watching her. I learned also from my father. He taught about meat foods, cooking the meat, making spears, joining parts of the spears tightly with sinew and going out hunting for meat. My mother would take me out with her. We two went out together to collect small animals and plant foods, hitting sand goannas, and sometimes collecting bush honey. I watched her and gathered some foods and when we all came together in camp we ate the meat and plant foods. My mother gathered various plant foods, native millet seeds, pigweed, roots which grew in the rocks and other seeds. These foods were available in autumn. Other foods were found on trees in spring. These fruits included mistletoe berries, mulga apples, native plums and quandongs. Also the native fig trees grew on small rocky hills.