The weapons and tactics involved illustrates some important patterns: these acts of physical violence are carefully planned, taking a significant amount of time to develop during the process of stalking prey, but are enacted rapidly with great lethality when opportunity strikes. Patience is required, and strategies of deception and ambush are often utilized.

It is not difficult to see how these tools and skills can also be used in intra- and intergroup conflict. A man who engages in violence strategically in the appropriate context may reap great rewards, while careful deceptions and an abrupt ambush can reduce the chance of reprisal.

Which brings me to a very important type of footwear found among the Aranda and other Central Australian forager populations. P.M. Byrne described the Kurdaitcha shoes thusly:

They consist of a sole made of human hair and a great number of intertwined emu feathers, a certain amount of human blood being used as a kind of cementing material. The whole form a large pad, flat above and convex below, with the two ends rounded off so that there is no distinction between them. The upper part is in the form of a net, made of human hair, with a central opening for the foot, across which stretches a cord of hair which serves as a strap for the instep.

Anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer adds that,

it is by no means an easy matter to make the shoes and, as usual, in the manufacture of any special article, there are certain individuals who are famed for their skill in making them. No woman or child may see them and they are kept wrapped up in skin or else placed for safety in the sacred store house along with the Churinga [male cult objects]. It is said that they may be used more than once, but the nature of the shoe is such that it could not last more than one journey over the hard ground characteristic of the interior.

Further, the right to wear the shoes must be earned, and comes at a cost. Spencer goes on,

Before a man may wear the shoes he has to submit to a most painful ordeal. A stone is heated to redness and then applied to the ball of the small toe of either foot, it does not matter which, until, as the natives say, the joint is softened when with a sudden jerk, the toe is pulled outwards and the joint is thus dislocated. There is no doubt that some such ordeal as this is passed through, as we have examined feet of men who claim to be what is called Ertwa Kurdaitcha at Charlotte Waters, Crown Point on the Finke River, Owen Springs and Alice Springs amongst the Macdonnell Ranges, all of which show the remarkable peculiarity of the dislocation. In correspondence with this is the fact that the true Kurdaitcha shoe has, at one side, a small opening made in the hair network through which the toe is thrust.

The male secrecy oriented around the shoes, as well as the costly ritual required to wear them, is similar to various practices found across other small-scale societies with ‘men’s cults’, as I’ve described previously. The key parallel, however, is that much like the hangahiwa wandafunei costumes I discussed in my article on Nggwal and the Arapesh horticulturalists of New Guinea, the Kurdaitcha shoes were also used by men while undertaking a killing.

In The Creation of Inequality (2012), anthropologists Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus write that across Central Australian societies, “Sometimes a dying man would whisper the name of the person whose magic he believed was killing him. Then an avenger, his body coated with charcoal to make him invisible at night, his footsteps muffled by emu-feather slippers, set out to kill the offender.” I think their choice of the word ‘muffled’ here is unfortunate, because it seems to imply that the function of the shoes was to dampen sound, which is mistaken.

To understand the function of the Kurdaitcha shoes requires recognizing the tracking abilities of Aranda foragers. Spencer writes that,

The tracking powers of the native are well known, but it is difficult to realise the skill which they display unless one has seen them at work. Not only does the native know the track of every beast and bird, but after examining any burrow he will at once, from the direction in which the last track [Page 21] runs, or even after smelling the earth at the burrow entrance, tell you whether the animal is at home or not…Not only this, but, strange as it may sound to the average white man whose meals are not dependent upon his ability to track an animal to its burrow or hiding-place, the native will recognise the footprint of every individual of his acquaintance.