Utopia community

Utopia is an Aboriginal homeland formed in November 1978 by the amalgamation of the former Utopia pastoral lease with a tract of unalienated land to its north. It covers an area of 3,500 square kilometres, transected by the Sandover River, and lies on a traditional boundary of the Alyawarra and Anmatjirra people, the two language groups which predominate there today. The name is probably a corruption of Uturupa, which means ‘big sand hill’, a region in the north west extremity of the area.

It has a number of unique elements. It is one of a minority of communities created by autonomous activism in the early phase of the land rights movement. It was neither a former mission, nor a government settlement, but was successfully claimed by indigenous people who had never been fully dispossessed. Its people have expressly repudiated any municipal establishment, and instead live in a score of outstations or clan sites, each with a traditional claim to the place.

European occupation of the Sandover region began in the early 1880s in the southern Davenport Ranges, then on the Elkedra and the Bundey rivers. These outfits did not have good resources and were short of surface water; most were abandoned by 1895 because of drought and conflict with the Aboriginal inhabitants.

A second phase began in the decade from 1915 to 1925. The two portions which later became Utopia station were first leased by cattlemen in 1928. Relations between the Aborigines and cattlemen appear to have been problematic north of Utopia in Alyawarra/Anmatjirra/Kaititja country, but more cooperative in the south: Utopia, MacDonald Downs, Mt Swan, and Bundey River. The Chalmers family sold the lease of Utopia as a going concern to the Aboriginal Land Fund in 1976. The cattle enterprise had largely lapsed by the time the two land claims were settled in 1978 and 1980.

Alyawarra people displaced by the violence during European dispossession fled in significant numbers across Wakaya country to Soudan and Lake Nash on the Barkly Tableland, and to refuges in the east in Kaytete lands and beyond. That is why Utopia people today have close kinship ties with the communities of Ali Carung, Ti-Tree, Harts Range and Lake Nash.

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