The Last of the First People - 20 years on

It's been 20 years since a tribe of 9 people first contacted the rest of Humanity, here in Australia. Their story is told in The Bulletin.

On October 24, 1984, Melbourne's The Herald – as it was then known – announced the discovery of the Pintupi nine with an understandably hysterical front-page screamer: "We find the lost tribe." The newspaper had a journalist who happened to be in central Australia and was handed the scoop. But The Herald did not find the tribe and, more particularly, they were anything but lost. Lost people do not survive in a desert, successfully raising children to adulthood, initiating their boys, wandering among claypans and soaks, and literally, in the words of Warlimpirrnga, "chasing the clouds" to stay beneath the precious rain.
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Theirs is a story of pride and survival, not disgrace: they can rightly be called the last of the First People.
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At night, the nine slept by four separate campfires, divided along gender and age lines. Helping keep them warm at night, says Yukultji, was a "big mob of dingoes, full dingoes, might be 12 of them or something". They used their own hair or cat fur to make nimpala, short skirts that served as belts in which to keep lizards – the group's staple – rather than offering concealment.
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Yukultji remembers seeing an aeroplane and a helicopter cross the sky. "We were too frightened," she says. "We hid under a tree." Such visions were not associated with any recognised Dreaming story and impossible to explain.
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Kiwirrkurra's leaders decided to find Warlimpirrnga's group and bring them in. Their main motivation was a sense of pity for what the elders called "the naked ones". It was a prescient move. By then, the group was in real danger – not from the desert, which they had mastered, but from themselves. The gene pool was running dangerously low and inbreeding – which Aborigines avoid with their complex skin classification system – was imminent.
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By 1984, this wandering band numbered nine. Papalya and Nanu, as the group's widow-matriarchs, were both aged in their mid 50s. There was Takariya, then 24, nowadays sometimes known as Doris, and the girls Yalti, 14, and Yukultji, 12. Of men and boys there was Piyiti, then about 26, Warlimpirrnga, about 25, Tamayinya, 15, and Walala, 12. The group's only modern tool was an axe-head that Joshua had brought from Balgo. It was said to be so handled and valued that it was polished to a mirror-finish. Warlimpirrnga had grown into the role of big-game provider. "I would spear mala [kangaroos], emus, pussycat, rabbits, snake," says Warlimpirrnga. "It was easy to catch them. I made my spear sharp with a limestone rock."

Read the whole thing. You'll be alternately proud to be a human being like these nine, and amazed at humanity's folly, no matter how technologically primitive or advanced.