The Ngarkat's traditional lands have been estimated by Norman Tindale to have extended over some of the: Mallee scrub belt lying east of the Murray River. They took in Alawoona south as far as Pinnaroo, Taunta, Keith, Tintinara, and Coonalpyn. Their eastern boundaries reached Tatiara and about Murrayville Kimber argued that Tindale had pushed the Ngarkat territorial extension into lands properly possessed by the Wotjobaluk to their east, and takes the Jackegilbrab around Bordertown as belonging to the latter, but a distinct tribe.
Ecology
The Ngarkat lived on extremely inhospitable terrain eking out life on a waterless karst plateau. Rainfall varied from 8 inches in the north to 18 in the south. Winters were freezing, while temperatures could hit in summer, though averaging. In no part of the land was there a single perennial stream, water was found in soakages, by working mallee roots or culling whatever hollow trees retained, or rock cleavages held. Waterskins were manufactured from kangaroo and wallaby hides. The biogeographical constraints of their terrain lacking surface water, determined much of their lifestyle. Neighbouring tribes such as the Warki, Jarildekald, and Portaulun had access to swamps, marshes, lake water, and stretches of river where they could hunt and trap animals, fish and ducks, and such resources enabled a more settled tribal existence. The Ngarkat, conversely, were an ever-shifting nomadic people, lacking even a fixed nomenclature for the mallee groves where they pitch camp and draw water from the mallee roots, day after day. The few stable points of return, which allowed a seasonal living base, were named and the lore of the ancestral beings of each clan developed only in such places. In periods of severe drought the Ngarkat withdrew to the Devon Downs Rock-shelter, called Ngautngaut, on the Murray River, to which they were permitted access by a track down the cliff. In local mythology this Ngautngaut was a Being who dwelt in the mallee scrubland, who had been murdered when he knelt down on his knees to slake his thirst at a water-hole.
Social organization
The Ngarkat subtribal units were widely dispersed given the scarcity of water and were divided into six hordes, according to an old Tatiara informant
Kooinkill
Wirriga
Chala
Camiagiiigara
Niall
Munkoora
Material culture
The Ngarkat faced a particular problem in making implements, millstones, hammers and axes, since suitable stone or rock materials were quite rare in their area. Onsets of highly arid weather, on draining soakages, yield evidence, aside from skeletons, of tools fashioned from chert, quartzite and jasp-opal. Despite its arid inhospitable terrain, Ngarkat territory was crisscrossed by trade routes, from Lake Hindmarsh to Bordertown, from Nhill to Murrayville and Pinnaroo, from the Wirrurgren Plain north of Lake Albacutya through Pinnaroo country to the Murray Bridge area. The items bartered along these trails were things like yabbyclaw necklaces, pipe clay, red ochre, diorite stone axes, and the like.
Relations with other tribes
The Ngarkat, who often had to seek water on other tribal lands, had difficult relations with several tribes. One aetiological legend, according to the Ngarrindjeri elder Matt Rigney, explains the pink waters of Lake Bumbunga, often called by settlers "Pink Lake", as the outcome of a sanguinary battle between the Ngarrindjeri and the Ngarkat which left many slain warriors in its waters. Their lands were considered in surrounding tribal lore as dangerous and "legends of fear" circulated concerning its proneness to hurricanes, or its putative infestation by malign spirits. Its Tatiara denizens were said to prey on human flesh, though ritual cannibalism was also attested among many other tribes, and was not uncommon. had the Ngarkat practiced it, in times of extreme scarcity of food, they would not have been an exception.
History of contact
The explorer Edward Eyre passed through Ngarkat lands during his 1940-1841 travels. He wrote of the tribe that they shared similar "dialects" but were mutually unintelligible unless a common third dialect was used to bridge misunderstandings. According to Richard Glyn Kimber only 50 of the Jackegilbrab horde survived into the mid-1840s, attributing the decline to disease, and by the late 1870s it is thought only one member was still alive. A Lameroo-Pinnaroo tradition has it that the Ngarkat were massacred by the Tatiara horde of the Potaruwutj after the former had raided the latter's camps to steal women. Some possible confirmation of this may lie in the 70 skeletons discovered at a soakage in the Lameroo district by early pioneers. Though virtually extinct, the tribal name has been restored and conserved in the South Australian landscape by the establishment of a locality called Ngarkat, and by setting aside part of its traditional land as the Ngarkat Conservation Park.
