The Wanman's territory extends over some. Their southern boundary lays around the McKay Range and the area of Lake Disappointment. Westwards, it reaches Wadurara on the Rudall River. The northern frontier lays in the vicinity of Lake Dora/Walerelere, Mendidjildjil and Karbardi, while they are present eastwards as far as the George, Wooloomber and Auld lakes. The change from their beloved claypan lakes country (tjapipodari] to mulga terrain in the south marked a limit beyond which they thought danger lay.
Language
Ecology
As often natural features can mark a kind of informal boundary between tribes. With the Wanman, that boundary in the south is delineated by the transition from their clumpy porcupine grassland to the thick mulga shrubland of the Kartudjara. The onset of drought would push them northwest, to around Karbardi and Pulburukuritji, and Kalamilji. Their harsh almost treeless sandhill landscape is mostly devoid of larger game like emu and kangaroo, though the hare wallaby and opossum, if caught, would provide some meat. Its poor grassland constrains the Wanman to develop grass-milling in order to eke out food from seeds, one of the fewAustralian tribes, such as the Ualarai and the Pila Nguru, who resort to this technique A list of the primary foods was provided to Norman Tindale by one tribesman:
Their main cereal food came from threshing and winnowing Triodia grass seed.
Cyperus bulbs could be harvested from clay flats lying between the sand-dunes sometime after heavy rains had fallen.
Sandhill frogs found after rain sweeps the desert.
Ducks were elusive but their eggs, laid after the rains, were prized.
Portulaca seeds, once harvested, were worked in stone-rings The kitibaru also served as a digging stick to forage for marsupial moles. String spun from animals or hair, worn around the waist, was used to lasso lizards, and then hitch them to a string belt to bring back to the campsite.
Social organization
The Wanman were probably divided into six hordes, each with its own wells. Such estates gave exclusive wood-cutting rights to each member of the horde but Wanman from all clans had equal access to the major watering holes Drought would at times force them into Nyangumarta land where, in exchange for water, they would be constrained to hand over their women in marriage. The Nyangumarta themselves would often raid the Wanman in order to secure wives.
History of contact
The extreme conditions of desert life pressed the Wanman to develop techniques to harvest food from grasses and this traditional knowledge served them well as they moved towards the coast, since they could quickly adapt their skills to glean buffel or afghan grass, which had seeded into the landscape from imported camel saddles and was in demand as a fodder grass in arid zones.
