Our Approach · Origins · Australia

The Australian Continent · c. 65,000 Years Ago to Today

Aboriginal Australia

The calling still passes from parent to child, and the hands are still the instrument.

Aboriginal Australia holds hundreds of nations, and its healing traditions are as many and as distinct. In the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Lands the healers are the ngangkari. Their central treatment is pampuni, a trained healing touch, and they read the body with the hands before they treat it. Health there covers the person, the family and Country together. The Unified Model of Tone names the regulated bodily state those healers read tone, and measures it.

Australiaart
forthcoming

Flourished

c. 65,000 years ago to the present day

Region

The Australian continent; 350,000 sq km of western desert in the NPY Lands

Source text

Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari, Magabala Books, 2013

Legacy

Healers credentialled by their own law, working in hospitals

The documentary record

What the record shows

Aboriginal Australia is a continent of separate nations with separate laws, languages and medicines. These are the dated points that carry the argument, each tied to the nation it belongs to.

Excavation at Madjedbebe, a sandstone shelter on Mirarr Country in western Arnhem Land, dated the first human occupation of Australia to about 65,000 years ago. The digs of 2012 and 2015 ran under an agreement giving the Mirarr control of the work and its findings. (Clarkson et al., Nature, 2017)

Every healing tradition on this continent sits on the longest continuous human record anywhere on earth.

Aboriginal Australia has no single word for a healer. The Western Desert has ngangkari, northeast Arnhem Land has marrnggitj, and the Sydney region had garraaji at the time of British settlement. (Clarke, 2008)

There is no single Aboriginal Australian medicine. There are hundreds of independent traditions, which is exactly what makes their agreements worth counting.

In the Western Desert, healers treat headache by blowing breath across the patient's head, then working the neck by hand and manipulating what they call strings. The NPY Women's Council published the sequence in 2003. (Ngaanyatjarra et al., 2003, in Clarke, 2008)

The site, the manner and the order of the touch are all specified. That is a taught procedure with a fixed sequence.

Arrernte elder Veronica Perrurle Dobson records that a healer cures a sick person by getting their spirit and placing it back into the body. She writes that a child loses their spirit when frightened while sleeping. (Dobson, 2007, in Clarke, 2008)

A separate Central Australian nation describes the same displaceable state and the same repair, in its own language and under its own law.

A 2009 study in the Medical Journal of Australia assessed 298 Aboriginal adults aged 15 to 54 in a central Arnhem Land community. Greater participation in caring for Country was associated with significantly better health. (Burgess et al., 2009)

Lower body mass, lower systolic blood pressure, less diabetes and less psychological distress all tracked with time spent looking after Country.

The National Aboriginal Health Strategy Working Party defined health in 1989 as the social, emotional and cultural well-being of the whole community, and called it a whole-of-life view. (NAHS Working Party, 1989)

Aboriginal authors put the community and the life cycle inside the definition of health, decades before public health treated that as ordinary.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists awarded the NPY Women's Council Ngangkari Program the Mark Sheldon Prize in 2009. The City of Vienna followed with the International Sigmund Freud Prize in 2011. (NPY Women's Council)

Western psychiatry honored the ngangkari for results in grief, distress and mental illness, and did so twice inside three years.

In 2019 the Northern Adelaide Local Health Network adopted a formal, clinically endorsed procedure for ngangkari working inside its services, including the Lyell McEwin and Modbury hospitals. (ANMJ, 2019)

Ngangkari treat patients in Australian hospitals now, under their own law and through their own corporation.

Madjedbebe, c. 65,000 BP

Sixty-five thousand years, and hundreds of separate nations

Australia carries the longest continuous human record on earth. Excavation at Madjedbebe, a sandstone shelter on Mirarr Country in western Arnhem Land, put first occupation at about 65,000 years ago. The 2012 and 2015 digs ran under a landmark agreement with the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, which gave the Mirarr control of the excavation and of what came out of it.

The figure is disputed. O'Connell and Allen question whether the dated sand grains are the same age as the stone tools lying in them, and argue for arrival nearer 50,000 years ago. The excavators answered those comments in print in 2018. Both ends of that argument are tens of millennia older than farming anywhere on earth.

The peoples who descend from that arrival are alive, and they are not one people. Aboriginal Australia holds hundreds of nations, each with its own Country, its own law and its own language. The medicines differ accordingly, starting with the word for the practitioner. The Western Desert word is ngangkari. In northeast Arnhem Land it is marrnggitj. Around Sydney at British settlement it was garraaji.

There is no continental system to describe. Every claim that follows names the nation or the language group it belongs to.

Caring for Country, 2009

Health in Aboriginal Australia covers the person, the family and the land

In Aboriginal English, Country takes a capital letter and is spoken of the way a person speaks of a relative. It means the particular waters, soils, species and ancestral tracks a person belongs to and is responsible for. Sickness can enter through grief or through separation from place as readily as through injury.

The National Aboriginal Health Strategy Working Party put that in formal terms in 1989, defining health as the social, emotional and cultural well-being of the whole community. That definition calls it a whole-of-life view, taking in the cycle of life, death and life.

Burgess and colleagues tested it. They assessed 298 Aboriginal adults aged 15 to 54 in a central Arnhem Land community, with Aboriginal co-authors from that community, and published the result in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2009. After adjustment for social and behavioral factors, greater participation in caring for Country tracked with lower body mass index and lower systolic blood pressure. It also tracked with less type 2 diabetes, lower HbA1c, less psychological distress and lower cardiovascular risk.

The claim that a person and their world form one system is therefore testable, and it passed.

Some people they get really sick, like losing family or losing country, that's why people get sick.

Debbie Watson, ngangkari · ANZSOG, Healing from the Centre

The NPY Lands

The ngangkari are born to the work and taught into it

The ngangkari are the traditional healers of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Lands, about 350,000 square kilometers of remote western desert. The people of those Lands are Aṉangu. The NPY Women's Council, formed in 1980 and led by Aṉangu women, runs the Ngangkari Program that supports the healers in communities, clinics and hospitals. In Pitjantjatjara spelling the Council and its publisher write the word ngangkaṟi.

The calling runs in families. Maringka Burton learned the work from her father, the ngangkari Charlie Burton, watching him extract sickness from a patient's body before she was given the mapanpa, the healing powers themselves. She describes what changed as becoming mara ala, open hands: her hands opened, her forehead opened, and she saw differently.

Assessment comes first. Burton says a ngangkari can see what a person is made up of, including illnesses that have sat in the body for some time and new pain arriving now. Philip Clarke, surveying the anthropological record in 2008, notes that the closest single Western equivalent to the role combines the general practitioner and the psychiatrist.

Much of what a ngangkari knows is held under Aṉangu law and is not published. What appears here is what the healers themselves chose to put into print.

Pampuni

The treatment is the hand, and the hand is specified

South Australian health services list three ngangkari treatments by name alongside bush medicines: pampuni, the healing touch; mapampa, the healing breath given by blowing; and marali, the care of the spirit. Pampuni is the center of the craft. The healer works directly on the body, feeling for what the ngangkari describe as pain or blockage, then drawing it out by hand.

The touch is not improvised. In the Western Desert, headache is treated by blowing breath across the patient's head. The healer then works the neck by hand and manipulates what ngangkari call strings, which they hold to control blood flow to the brain. The NPY Women's Council published that sequence in 2003. Site, manner and order are all fixed.

Victoria Grieves Williams summarized the method in 2018 as observing, listening and touch. Massage releases what the healers identify as blockages, and plant preparations are applied alongside. The examination and the treatment run through the same instrument, which is the trained hand.

Ngangkari practice has no anatomy of the nerve. It makes graded, sited, sequenced physical contact its primary lever, and has done so for as long as anyone can date.

Kurunpa

A spirit that can be displaced, and what displaces it

Kurunpa is the Aṉangu word for the spirit, will and self of a person. The ngangkari hold that it can come loose from the body. Maringka Burton describes the repair plainly: the healer finds where a person's kurunpa has become disconnected, then takes it back and puts it inside the person again.

The causes named are losses. Debbie Watson names losing family and losing Country. Grieves Williams records that the spirit is understood to be dislodged through trauma, and that mental and physical disorder follows. The picture is of a state that accumulated hardship pushes out of place.

Arrernte elder Veronica Perrurle Dobson records the same event and the same treatment in Arrernte terms, and adds that fright during sleep can dislodge a child's spirit. Aṉangu and Arrernte are separate nations with separate languages, and both describe the same displaceable state.

Naomi Kantjuriny, a senior ngangkari with the NPY Women's Council, reports results in the register of a clinician. She says that depressed people can feel a lot better within themselves after a ngangkari treatment, and calls that one of their specialties.

Tinospora smilacina

The plant knowledge is a working pharmacopeia, and it is local

Aboriginal plant remedies across the continent treat fever, congestion, headache, skin sores, swollen limbs and digestive trouble. Philip Clarke's 2008 survey groups the preparations by route rather than by ingredient. Drinks are made by heating water with plant additives, and washes are applied to the skin. Plant material is heated and then massaged into swollen parts, and aromas reach the patient in steam and smoke.

In northern Australia, headache brought on by hunger, thirst or sickness is treated by wrapping the head with the stem of snakevine. Tinospora smilacina is a woody climber whose milky sap has a cooling property. The Laramba Community Women published their own account of the plant in 2003, one of many community-authored records of local plant knowledge.

The pharmacopeia is regional by necessity. People moving seasonally through different habitat zones have to know which species grow where, and when each is potent enough to use. A remedy documented in the Northern Territory says nothing about what is used two thousand kilometers away.

Route, dose and timing are all chosen deliberately in these accounts, which puts plant preparation on the same footing as the hand.

ANTAC, 2013

The healers put their work into print, then into the wards

For most of its length this tradition needed no book. In 2013 its keepers made one. Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari, compiled by the NPY Women's Council and published by the Aboriginal-owned Magabala Books, runs to 272 pages of life stories, photography and artwork in the healers' own words. It won the 2013 Deadly Award for Published Book of the Year and was commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

Institutions followed. In 2013 the ngangkari Debbie Watson, Taylor Cooper, Witjiti George, Margaret Winton and Mukayi Baker founded the Aṉangu Ngangkari Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation with the researcher Francesca Panzironi. ANTAC is the first organization of Aboriginal healers in Australia credentialled by traditional law, and it holds the register of accredited healers.

In 2019 the Northern Adelaide Local Health Network adopted a formal, clinically endorsed procedure for ngangkari working in its services. It covers acute, rehabilitation and palliative care as well as mental health, at the Lyell McEwin and Modbury hospitals and other sites.

The healers also direct their own research. Uti Kulintjaku means to listen, think and understand clearly. It is an award-winning initiative of the Ngangkari Program, led by ngangkari and senior Aṉangu, and it works on mental health understanding for Aṉangu and for the services around them.

Uti Kulintjaku is a new way, using the old way, and bringing it into the new world.

Rene Kulitja, ngangkari · NPY Women's Council

The convergence

What these nations documented, and what it is called now

The healers of the NPY Lands, of Arrernte country and of northern Australia have no anatomy of the nerve and no instruments. They work from what the hands feel and what a person's manner shows. Their practice is built around a bodily state that can be read, that shifts under loss, and that answers to specified touch. Independent traditions across the world reached the same short list of observations, which is evidence that the state itself is real and detectable by an unaided observer. The Unified Model of Tone names that state tone and measures it. Their observations stand on their own. The measurement is what this model adds.

Pampuni, mapampa and the Western Desert headache sequence fix the site, the manner and the order of the contact, and the sequence is taught rather than invented at the bedside.Input quality, where the character of an input decides the response.
Person, family and Country are described as one system, and time spent caring for Country tracked with measured blood pressure, blood sugar and distress in 298 Arnhem Land adults.Coupling, the linkage that makes separate parts behave as one system.
Losing family and losing Country are named by ngangkari as causes of sickness, with the kurunpa displaced by accumulated grief and loss rather than by any single injury.Load, the accumulated demand a system carries and eventually shows.

Common questions

Frequently asked

Who are the ngangkari?

The ngangkari are the traditional healers of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Lands, about 350,000 square kilometers of remote western desert in Central Australia. The people of those Lands are Aṉangu. The calling passes through families, and the healing powers, mapanpa, are held to reside in the healer's body and above all in the hands. The NPY Women's Council records that ngangkari have looked after people's physical and emotional health for thousands of years, and they practice today.

Is there one Aboriginal Australian system of medicine?

No. Aboriginal Australia holds hundreds of nations, each with its own Country, law and language, and their healing traditions differ from one another. Even the word for a healer changes across the continent. It is ngangkari in the Western Desert, marrnggitj in northeast Arnhem Land, and it was garraaji around Sydney at the time of British settlement. Any accurate statement about Aboriginal healing names the nation or language group it describes.

What is pampuni?

Pampuni is the ngangkari healing touch, and it is the center of the practice. The healer works with the hands directly on the body, feeling for what the ngangkari describe as pain or blockage and drawing it out. It sits alongside mapampa, the healing breath given by blowing, and marali, the care of the spirit. Bush medicines are used as well. South Australian health services list all three by name in their own documentation.

What is kurunpa?

Kurunpa is the Aṉangu word for the spirit, will and self of a person. The ngangkari hold that it can be shaken loose from the body by shock, by grief, and by losses such as losing family or losing Country. A person whose kurunpa is displaced sickens in ways a scan does not show. The healer finds where the kurunpa has become disconnected and returns it to the body. Arrernte accounts from Central Australia describe the same event.

How old are Aboriginal healing traditions?

Older than any others still practiced. Excavation at Madjedbebe on Mirarr Country, published in Nature in 2017, dates human occupation of northern Australia to about 65,000 years ago. That date is argued over, and critics of the luminescence dating put arrival nearer 50,000 years. No one can date any particular healing lineage that far, and the NPY Women's Council states only that ngangkari have worked for thousands of years.

Do ngangkari work in Australian hospitals?

Yes, under a formal agreement. In 2019 the Northern Adelaide Local Health Network adopted a clinically endorsed procedure for ngangkari working across acute, rehabilitation, palliative and mental health services, including the Lyell McEwin and Modbury hospitals. The healers work through their own corporation, ANTAC, founded in 2013 and credentialled by traditional law. Their mental health work had already won the 2009 Mark Sheldon Prize and the 2011 International Sigmund Freud Prize.

What does Country have to do with health?

In Aboriginal understanding a person, their family and their Country form one living system, so separation from Country can make a person sick and tending it keeps them well. The 1989 National Aboriginal Health Strategy definition puts community and culture inside the meaning of health. A 2009 Medical Journal of Australia study of 298 Arnhem Land adults aged 15 to 54 found greater caring for Country associated with significantly better health.

What does the Unified Model of Tone say about Aboriginal Australian healing?

That these healers are reading a real bodily state without instruments, and describing what they read accurately. Pampuni and mapampa specify the site, manner and order of a physical input. Person, family and Country are treated as one coupled system, and the 2009 Arnhem Land data support that. Grief and loss are named as accumulating causes of sickness. The model takes none of these traditions as its mechanism. It measures the state they read.

Keep reading

Where this connects

Tone is the regulated bodily state a ngangkari reads with the hands, defined and measured.
Input quality is why pampuni fixes the site, the manner and the order of the touch.
Coupling is the modern account of person, family and Country behaving as one system.
Load is what accumulated grief and separation from Country do to a regulated system.
Māori romiromi is another living Pacific hands-on tradition with its own law and its own practitioners.
The Pacific Islands hold massage traditions that developed on separate island groups with separate names.
Maritime Southeast Asia shows the same reliance on graded manual work across an equally scattered set of peoples.
Stress and physical symptoms is where loss and grief show up in the body, measured.

Sources

References

Last updated 2026-08-10

← PreviousThe Pacific Islands Next →The Sami