Most Australians will be familiar with the AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia, which shows some hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups (social, political or language).
I've noticed that American maps will often superimpose an additional region on top of groupings, e.g. the Cherokee and Cheyenne are both "Plains Indians". It looks like this was the work of Alfred Kroeber:
I was wondering if Aboriginal Australians or others had ever identified such broader groups (whether by region or some other affiliation) and - if so - whether those broader groups are still considered meaningful.
Kroeber-style Cultural Areas have been applied to Australia, and they even appear on some variants of the AIATSIS map (for example). Now, I can't really speak to how meaningful these groupings are. If they're anything like the cultural area system used here in the US, then they're more a matter of convenience these days. A way to usefully subdivided the continent into areas on study based on broad-stroke similarities. I've seen the "(Western) Desert cultural bloc" get mentioned in the literature occasionally, but generally people are working with specific groups rather than a cultural area as a whole.
There's a lot of spill over between areas and a lot of variation within them. For an example from the US, the Cherokee aren't actually a Plains nation. They're more aligned with the other (Southeastern) Woodland nations, and only moved west of the Mississippi en mass during the Indian Removal Period. The Cheyenne, for that matter, were originally a (Northeastern) Woodland nation, but by the Euro-american anthropologists started classifying these things, they were more or less fully enculturated into the Plains region.
Now, going back to Australia, various indigenous peoples have grouped themselves into larger blocs as a form of cultural and political solidarity, and these groups often have some parallels to the cultural areas highlighted by anthropologists. If you're Australian yourself, I'm guessing you've probably heard of several of these groups. There's the Noongar around Perth (making up the bulk of the Southwest group). The Koori take up a big portion of the Southeast and, I believe, the Riverine region too. The aboriginal communities of the Kimberley have united united behind the "Kimberley" designation, which makes sense in the light that, unlike many other regions of Australia, there's a lot more linguistic variation along the northern coast so no single indigenous world to unite behind.
