Both the Ngaiawang people of the Lower Murray and the Adelaide region's Kaurna used their variant pronunciation for the Nukuni, namely, nokunno and nokuna, to signify, an assassin, a mythical figure who was given to roaming about at night in search of people to kill.
The Nukunu were the southeastern-most tribe which adopted not only circumcision but also subincision as part of their rite of initiating young males into full tribal status. The Nukunu took pride in being "ritual purists". A. P. Elkin established that the Nukunu represented the most southeasterly tribe maintaining a matrilineal moiety system, involving two marriage moieties, the Mathari and the Kararru. The system was essentially akin to that existing among the Barngarla, Adnyamathanha and Wailpi.
Culture
The Nukunu land was full of sacred sites, and formed the starting point for the longest songline registered in Australia, the Urumbula songline. This songline extends from a large tree, representing also the Milky Way, said to stand near the present day Port Augusta Hospital northwards right to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The story cycle dealt with the wanderings of the western quoll. The Arerrnte central desert people retain details of the mythical events which are located far south, in Nukunu tribal lands.
History of contact
Colonisation of the area began in 1849, and a late estimate is that the tribe consisted of between 50 ands 100 people. Before this, it is thought that the Nukunu had been ravaged by the spread of smallpox from the Murray River, some two decades earlier. The subsequent transformation of the land for pastoral and wheat-growing purposes devastated the Nukunu. Peter Ferguson and William Younghusband took up a "run" of some from Thalpiri, now known as Port Pirie, to Crystal Brook which was stocked with 25,000 sheep and 3400 cattle. In late June 1852 Ferguson, a gaunt Scottish Highlanderrecorded in colonial memory as "as good-hearted a man as ever lived", rounded up seven "niggers" after pursuing them to retrieve 54 sheep that had been taken from his flocks and they were remanded at Clare County Court for trial in Adelaide, but were released after two months when no plaintiffs appeared to assist the prosecution. In 1854, after cattle had been pilfered, Ferguson, together with his stockmen, is reported as having killed a group of local Aboriginal at Crystal Brook. Writing in 1880, J. C. Valentine stated that only eight Nukunu had survived these radical upheavals, five men and three women; the rest, in his view, had expired from phthisis. This enclosure of their tribal lands for pastoralism led to the dispossession, and decimation, of the Nukunu from the end of the 1840s onwards, and small remnants took refuge in scattered camps around Orroroo, Melrose, Wilmington, Stirling North, and Baroota. Some Nukunu managed to keep alive their direct attachment to their traditional lands by remaining at Port Germein, the Baroota reserve set aside for them, and at Port Augusta. With their fragmentation and dispersion, they could no longer adhere to their rigorous rules, and subsequently intermarried with people with Narungga, Barngarla and Wirangu descent, while maintaining a keen sense of their Nukunu identity.
