Wik Mungkan - Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The Wik were hunters and gatherers, constrained by the generally flat Terrain and seasonal variations. Food resources were scarcest at the height of the wet season when people also had a more restricted range; in the dry season, groups camped near lagoons and lakes to exploit such resources as fish, swamp tortoises, birds, and water-lily roots. Yams were taken in large quantities from sand-ridge country, and fish and crustaceans from estuarine waters. The forms of economic life have changed radically in the contemporary settlements, particularly with the large-scale introduction of a cash economy in the late 1960s. Some of the Wik still spend periods on or near their traditional lands, supplementing their cash incomes with hunting and fishing. However, government transfer payments are the main source of income for the Wik, and almost all of the rious attempts to institute economically viable industries, such as beef-cattle raising, have failed.

Industrial Arts. Wik technology was relatively complex by Aboriginal Australian standards, and there are a variety of distinctive items (e.g., spears and spear throwers, woven bags, and fishing nets) that today form the basis for a small handicraft industry selling mainly to urban centers elsewhere in Australia.

Trade. There is evidence of trade in material items such as pearl shells, originating in the Torres Strait and most likely being traded down by northern and eastern neighbors, with stone axes and stingray barbs being traded out. Internal trade in the region also existed, as it still does to some extent, in spear handles, ochers, and resins. However, trade was, and is, rarely a purely economic activity, serving social, political, and ritual ends rather than formal economic ones.

Division of Labor. While the general picture is one where women and children gathered and men hunted, the fine-grained picture is more complex. Culturally appropriate tasks varied through the life cycle of individuals, and they also depended to some extent on the composition of the particular exploiting party. Men and women both fish, although women rarely do so with spears. Women never hunt game with rifles or spears. The material items associated with each sex's roles were in general manufactured by members of that sex, although certain women made spears on occasion. The food gathered or hunted was usually prepared by the person obtaining it; thus men cooked game and women prepared vegetable foods. It is fairly common today, however, to see men preparing bread baked in ashes. Indigenous models of the division of labor in the contemporary settlements have been Influenced profoundly by those of the cattle stations, Missionaries, and European settlement staff. Only Wik men work at cattle mustering or as mechanics or operators of heavy equipment. Nurses' aides and health workers are all female. Some men have recently become involved as teachers' aides and clerical staff.

Land Tenure. The model of the Wik presented by early ethnographers was essentially one of patrilineal landowning clans that combined to form dialectal tribes, with territories containing sites relating to species or phenomena that were the totems of the particular clans. There is evidence that along the Archer River and in the sclerophyll-forest country there was some degree of isomorphic mapping of landholding clan estates and sites relating to their own totems and a lower degree of linguistic diversity than along the coast. In coastal areas, and most probably in the inland zones as well, the ideological native model is indeed that of patrilineal totemic clans with unique bounded estates (although it is a form of custodianship rather than of ownership). But the actual picture is considerably more complex, with crosscutting land tenure, clan totems, totemic ritual cults, and linguistic affiliations. This model has been rendered even more complex where landholding groups have died out and estates are now vacant. Furthermore, claims to land and to sites through the mother's side and into the grandparental generation can in certain circumstances be legitimate, and a further complication is added by the necessity to consider the difference between tenure of land and access to it.