had ceased after the gold rush at the end of the nineteenth century). Today over twelve international trusts have exploration licences, but every time a new tract of land is to be opened to exploration, they have to negotiate with the Lajamanu owners and Aborigines from other communities, such as Balgo. This process involves establishing lists of the traditional stakeholders who are entitled to royalties. Before Europeans arrived and began mining in the region, this part of the Tanami Desert was an important traditional gathering site for different ceremonies, but not all Warlpiri groups had a relation of spiritual custody to the place. The drought of the 1920s attracted many Warlpiri to the gold rush camps where many of the current elders’ generation were born. Requests by their descendants for a share in the royalties have to be negotiated with the original custodians who claim to be the only beneficiaries. Nevertheless, sharing tends to be recognised by the majority who do not agree that just a few should become ‘millionaires’ when traditionally all sites were supposed to be complementary within a land system that maintained a balance between all the groups. One current solution to try to prevent inequalities involves paying some of the royalties into a collective fund which benefits the whole community.5
The power of connections
Many Dreaming itineraries do not stop at the site a group identifies as the boundary of its segment in a given direction. Custodians often say that their Dreaming segment is continued by another group, which may or may not be of the same language group. Some of these trails, like Emu or the Two-Men/wind/lizard, are passed from group to group along thousands of kilometres; these groups did not all meet traditionally, but their ritual objects (or other artefacts) could travel across the whole continent, through exchange partners (set through namesakes in the northwest of Australia), by the transmission of rituals and along mythical lines. The result is that the same Dreaming heroes continue their travels from one group to another: similar events can happen to them in different places but most of the time the story unfolds like a serialised story. For instance, two men are said to have given shamanistic practices and kinship rules to the groups they encounter, but in different language groups they give different systems (eight sections, four sections, exogamous or generational moieties). The important thing is that, even if Dreaming heroes are said to stay forever in the places they visited, created or ‘imprinted’, they come from elsewhere and go elsewhere. This limitlessness is a virtual principle for establishing new connections; it enables the Dreaming language to be reformulated and new bonds to be passed on to people today.
With age and experience, men and women acquire information about how to connect knowledge between the different Dreaming heroes both inside and beyond the tribal territory.6 It is the extension of alliances and experiences that gives a wider understanding of this web of connections; knowledge at this level is more then just
5    On the subject of land negotiations in relation to mining, see the thesis by Derek Elias (2001).
6    The use of the word tribe has been banned from Aboriginal studies for legitimate reasons relating to its perjorative usage among administrators, politicians, some journalists and their audience. It has also been criticised in anthropoligical debates. But the Warlpiri people and many other Aboriginal groups still refer to their specific language group as a tribe as opposed to other Aboriginal language groups. In the current French understanding ‘tribe’ does not sound perjorative, but it can be when used in a colonial or postcolonial context. I believe that this word should be re-evaluated because it is valued by people who find in it a way to express the solidarity of their extended family ties and a specific social organisation related to the environment.