Warlpiri Warriors — Australian Rules football in Central Australia
Football is a part of every young Warlpiri man’s life. When discussing the origins and introduction of Australian Rules football in Yuendumu, the older men will often reminisce about a game called ‘Purlja’ that they used to play when they were kids. It involved a round ball of emu feathers bound together with hairstring. They would divide themselves into two teams along the ‘Ngawu-kurlangu’ and ‘Ngurrju-kurlangu’ division of Warlpiri society, or in anthropological terms, two ‘moieties’. ‘Ngawu-kurlangu’ refers to those people in the opposite moiety, ‘Ngurrju-kurlangu’ to those in the same moiety. These divisions, also referred to as ‘nyurrpu’, are occasionally used by boys today when playing football amongst themselves, but are not used for more formal games.
The Book is not dead
The Book is not dead, it’s just changing context. For The Book to be dead, we would have to no longer care about stories or understanding complex ideas that take more than 140 characters to convey. Books are more alive more than ever before. They don’t have to be linear. They don’t have to be bulky. Text and diagrams can move and be played with. Pictures can be zoomed or rotated in 3D. They can be personalised to the extent that if we downloaded the same book, your experience of it could be completely different from mine. They can also be updated in real time. We think of books as defined by their physical containers, but we’re the last generation that is going to think that way.
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