STRANGE ABORIGINAL BEINGS
“ … a large human footprint preserved in solid rock … with six toes …”
Elsewhere I have recorded the inter-tribal controversy concerning Nagarun, the dreamtime giant, who journeyed down the Wilton River to the Roper River, and then east towards the Gulf of Carpentaria, giving names to the hills, billabongs and caves en route.
Coming at last to the beach which he named Argamunninya, he waded into the sea and was lost.
According to some Aborigines, the giant being was reincarnated in the early 1960s causing a debate which has yet to wane.
Apparently, Thursday Islanders were dynamiting the ocean for pearl shell near Argamunninya. One of their explosions injured Nagarun as he lurked beneath the waves, and the islanders saw him crawl up on to a nearby beach where he died from loss of blood.
Aborigines from Numbulwar heard of the legendary giant’s re-appearance and travelled along the coast to examine the corpse. On the body the men recognised markings were were identified as the secret decorations worn by Yabuduruwa dancers, designs many thousands of years old. Frightened, the men ran away.
Eventually news of their discovery reached the Roper River camp. Three men – Lorborr, Murulbur and Mabungor – went to investigate the extraordinary claim of their countrymen.
Most of the flesh had rotted from the bones, they said. Thousands of feathers lay scattered about in the grass. The bones looked heavy, but were amazingly light to lift and these were subsequently interred in the sand.
Lorborr insisted that the skeleton was between 10 – 12 metres long, the fingers were a metre long, and there was a tuft of human hair on the skull. The skeleton’s features were recognisably human, he said, with arms, legs, eyes, ears and a mouth.
Part of the cadaver still bore white and red feathers, reminiscent of the sacrosanct motifs peculiar to the Yabuduruwa corroboree.
“That giant him only got little one mouth,” Lorborr told me. “Nagarun don’t eat. Him drinkem stink from dead things.”
Tribal elders helped me retrace part of Nagarun’s old-time route, leading down from northern Arnhem Land. One significant gully contained a large human footprint preserved in solid rock, about a metre in length – but with six toes.
A similar petrified track had been stolen by southern anthropologists during an expedition to the area, the tribesmen complained. Somehow the thieves had cut the historic stone and carried it away. All attempts on my part to locate the evidence have met with a deep academic silence.
Now you might understand why I am deliberately ambiguous when describing sacred Aboriginal sites. Desecrations of this type, even though perpetrated under the guise of “scientific research”, can utterly destroy the sequence of an entire corroboree, and when that occurs the people decline into a state of spiritual deterioration and are soon corrupted. Anthropology is an intensely competitive field and many of its participants jealously guard their evidence and findings, using it to advance their own careers and status.
An ancient ceremonial legend tells of an occasion long ago when the Giant People suffered a catastrophe – interminable rains caused terrible floods which drove the tribes to higher ground until, in desperation, they sought the safety of a huge cave near the crest of a lofty hill. Rising waters overcame them as they slept and all were drowned.
The cave containing the bones of giants was maintained by later generations as an important memorial and was preserved, the old people say, till the time the Japanese bombed Darwin. Troops camped in the vicinity of the cave carried away the giant skeletons as curiosities, and later anthropologists depleted most of what the soldiers had discarded. Today only a few bones remain. Tribesmen no longer visit the place. Their dreamtime sanctuary has been irrevocably destroyed.
Aborigines claim that in remote Arnhem Land, at a place known to them as Burrunjor, is still the home of a mammoth animal commonly thought to have become extinct in eons past. Stories substantiating the claim are legion around tribal campfires but, perhaps, the most impressive confirmation of all came from a white man, a crusty Northern Territory police officer.
Some years ago while mustering scrubbers (cattle) at Urapunji I became lost and drifted into Arnhem Land’s lonely wilderness, where I wandered for three days before my mare brought me safely back to the homestead. Unbeknown to me at the time, my path was being followed by the mounted white policeman and his two blacktrackers. The first evening out, the lawman decided to make camp on the fringe of Burrunjor, despite strong objections from the trackers. Ignoring their protests, which he dismissed as superstition, he hobbled his horse, cooked a damper, rolled out his swag and soon fell asleep.
Sometime during the night he sprang awake to find the trackers babbling unintelligibly as they fumbled with packs and saddles. The ground was shaking as though moved by an earth tremor, and over Burrunjor hundreds of weird lights flickered, illuminating the rocky terrain momentarily, then plunging back into an eerie darkness.
Naturally, terrified, he gathered together his gear and cantered away.
Talking to me later at the Urapunji homestead, he recalled: “I heard a sound, too, like a puffing or grunting noise a large animal makes.”
I asked: “Are you going to mention it in your report?”
“No way,” he grinned. “They’ll think I’ve gone troppo annd haul me off to have my head examined … Next time you get lost,” he added, “don’t go near that place because if you do I won’t come looking.”
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Aboriginal lore is the uniformity it frequently shares with other exotic cultures. The Australian tribes, allegedly isolated for thousands of years from foreign contact, conceived identical mythological (?) figures as arose in distant racial legends scattered across the planet.
During my research into clandestine ceremonial data among the Arnhem Land tribes, this fact puzzled me endlessly, and I have yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion as to how this phenomenon might have eventuated.
Without inter-cultural stimulus, did the indigenous Australian casually create his legendary heroes – giants, dwarfs, mermaids, etc – blissfully unaware that people in other countries shared his imaginative processes?
To the modern Aboriginal, such questions are sheer heresy. His myths (as we call them) are actual historical accounts as irrefutable as the Bible is to the Christian, the personalities based on living entities, embroidered, he admits, with symbolical inference and a certain literary licence.
If the Irish, for example, have tales of fairy folk, or the Greeks relate legends of semi women-cum-fish, or a Jewish historian mentions men of abnormal stature, he readily accepts these as the equivalents to his own legendary beings, the morkoi (little people), the giluri-giluri (mermaids), and nagarun (giants).
Aboriginal logic is direct and simple. Unlike the mununga (white people)), he avoids theory and distrusts philosophical curiosity. His beliefs are implicit and even more so when supported by a knowledge based on personal experience.
When collecting ceremonial myths related to the Goonabibbi and Yabuduruwa rituals, I noticed the recurrence of mermaids in the accounts related bya tribal elder, Indilinyeerie. In post-creation times, according to ancient tales of the giluri-giluri, who were amphibious women with fish tails, they had their home in the dark waters of the river known as Gulngor, emerging occasionally to instruct the land-dwelling females in ceremonial procedure. Women performed the original corroborees and the males were totally excluded. When the mermaids withdrew, the jealous men forced their women to reveal to them the sacred dances and songs, thereafter banning all females from their annual celebrations.
“What did the mermaids look like?” I asked my old informant.
“They bin same colour as yella-fella (meaning a half caste),” he said in his throaty, lilting voice. “They got long, black hair and tail all-a-same barramundi (a tropical fish).”
“Are they all dead now?” I enquired.
“No more,” he said. “Giluri-giluri still alive. Them fella no more live longa Gulngor like in old time. They camp longa Yandajanda (another Northern Territory river) now. You can see them fellas up there. They sit on rocks, but they jump in water quick-fella if they look man coming.”
Another old man, Wullagun, of the Ngandi tribe, added to this information a memory he had of an old-time hunter who captured a giluri-giluri and took her as his wife.
He told me: “That old fella proper clever longa head. He see track where mermaid one time sit on river bank. He make deelun (bush rope) and hide himself. When that giluri-giluri come up from water he throw sand on her because she slippery like fish, and he grab her and tie her to tree like dog.”
The mermaid fought her captor, Wullagun said, trying to claw her way free and wailing piteously. The warrior treated her with patient kindness, brought her food and made a small fire at night for her to sleep beside. Her confidence won, the pair became husband and wife and wandered away together inland.
“Hey, wait a minute,” I interjected. “Mermaids don’t have legs, so how did she walk?”
Wullagun explained, matter of factly: “That old man know right magic song. He make big fire and hold fish part of girl over flame and sing him properly way. That fish tail melt off and girl got legs underneath.”
Miraculously transformed, the mermaid lived quite happily with her husband for some years until one day they arrived at a large river. While her spouse and children slept, she went to have a drink and, seeing her reflection in the water, was reminded of her origin. She dived into the murky depths and disappeared for ever.
Among the Nungubuyu people of Arnhem Land’s south-eastern coast was born an albino child to full-blood Aboriginal parents. The event received national press coverage at the time and the medical elite expressed their views on the matter, offering their pet genealogical theories to gaping journalists. To the tribal people, however, the birth of a pure white Aboriginal girl caused no surprise or discussion. The baby, they claimed, was a descendant of the giluri-giluri; one of her ancestors had a mermaid wife and ever since in that particular family line had occasionally emerged a child with pale white skin.
There is much in Aboriginal antiquity to be serious investigated, not for any shoddy sensational purpose, but for the reason that unique knowledge might well be gleaned from the exercise. Myth is often steeped in truth. Having no written literature, perhaps this was a medium through which the Aboriginal retained his record of the obsolete and exceptional.
© J.S.
