Ngarrindjeri

Ngarrindjeri flag
Ngarrindjeri culture is centred around the lower lakes of the Murray River.

The Ngarrindjeri people are the traditional Aboriginal Australian people of the lower Murray River, eastern Fleurieu Peninsula, and the Coorong of the southern-central area of the state of South Australia. The term Ngarrindjeri means "belonging to men",[1] and refers to a "tribal constellation". The Ngarrindjeri actually comprised several distinct if closely related tribal groups, including the Jarildekald, Tanganekald, Meintangk and Ramindjeri,[2] who began to form a unified cultural bloc after remnants of each separate community congregated at Raukkan, South Australia (formerly Point McLeay Mission).

A descendant of these peoples, Irene Watson, has argued that the notion of Ngarrindjeri identity is a cultural construct imposed by settler colonialists, who bundled together and conflated a variety of distinct Aboriginal cultural and kinship groups into one homogenised pattern, now known as Ngarrindjeri.[3]