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7

Fires of the Dreaming

Goorda then led the men away from the blackened area and showed them the secrets of fire … “This is fire,” he said. “Guard it carefully so it will serve you and not devour you.”

—RECORDED BY LOUIS A. ALLEN, “The Coming of Fire: the Goorda Myth”

… the actual fire ceremony, the torch fight, seemed to be regarded as a kind of “clearing” ceremony … Whatever else it was or was not, it was extremely wild and picturesque from start to finish.

—BALDWIN SPENCER, Wanderings in Wild Australia (1928)

FIRE WAS AS INTEGRAL to the mental as to the material existence of the Aborigine. It was a universal accompaniment to Aboriginal ritual, and it became itself on occasion an object of ceremony. Storytellers frequently incorporated fire into legends as a routine participant in the mythological life of the Dreamtime, as a common vehicle for the explanation of natural and spiritual phenomena, and as a presence that cried out for explication, for fire both divided and brought together. It differentiated the human world from the nonhuman, yet it bridged the mental world with the material. It made possible a cognitive corroboree of Aboriginal culture.¹

Remove fire and that spiritual universe would collapse. Spiritual invention depended on a material context of heat and light; the social life that sustained cognition pivoted around a fire. Without campfires, there would be no evening storytelling. Without torches and bonfires, there could be no ceremonial community after dark. Without the protective radiance of the hearth fire, Aborigines were defenseless against the evil spirits that marauded the night in search of souls to devour. Fire was ubiquitous in Aboriginal ritual and myth because it was ubiquitous in Aboriginal life.

Yet those experiences and practices were only a beginning because the human revolution that fire helped make possible was ambivalent. Humans were not genetically programmed to start, preserve, use, explain, or otherwise live with fire, whose prevalence and power made it a profoundly varie-gated and even contradictory phenomenon, ideally positioned to explain and exemplify the specialness and ambivalence of human existence. So clearly, among the animals, was fire a uniquely human possession that its origins could be related to the origins of humans, and its exercise to the special duties and responsibilities incumbent upon humans. The possession of fire—at once both an extraordinary power and an exceptional danger—was an archetype for all human behavior.

Humans had to explain fire and to define its proper usage. They had to substitute cultural codes for genetic codes. They had to record their knowledge and experience in stories, songs, ceremonies, paintings, rituals. They had to construct and populate a moral universe that would both prescribe and proscribe behavior. Accordingly, Aboriginal societies evolved an elaborate mythology to explain creation out of an inchoate Dreamtime, to legitimate contemporary beliefs and behaviors, and to vivify the important rites of passage in the life of individual Aborigines, and for this endeavor fire was ubiquitous, both a means and an end of inquiry. In this way fire established new, symbolic relationships, its behavior following the fuels of metaphor, the litter of the subconscious. Old Australia and its fires entered a symbolic world whose ecology was vastly different from that which it knew in the bush, but one that also placed fire at its core.

ORIGINS

The ancestral Dreamtime was at least partially conceived and animated by fire. As a context, fire invited contemplation, and as an object, it demanded explanation. The reverie induced by fire helped transport narrators back to the Dreamtime; staring into flame brought magicians to a trance from which they could communicate with the spirit world; the vital stories of creation and existence were almost always retold or reenacted around a fire. It is too much to argue, as Bachelard has for humans in general, that fire was the originating phenomenon of mental activity, “the first phenomenon, on which the human mind reflected.” But one could agree with him that the “mind in its primitive state, together with its poetry and its knowledge, had been developed in meditation before a fire.” The Dreaming was likely illuminated, if not inspired, by fire.²

The pervasiveness of fire in Aboriginal Dreaming reflects the pervasiveness of fire in Aboriginal life. Fire practices created a repertoire of actions and effects that could be transfigured into stories and symbols. But once in this cognitive realm humans could reassemble the pieces according to other kinds of logic. They could establish new patterns that relied on emotional or symbolic associations, without analogues in actual life; like a collage, they could alter the individual parts to make a larger truth, a new register of meanings. From this register came a cognitive universe that told the Aborigine who he was, and a moral universe that informed him how he should behave. Through its metamorphosis into a parallel mental universe, the significance of fire in Aboriginal Australia expanded far beyond its presence in the landscape. “Fire, and its benefits,” Ainslie Roberts concluded, “was possibly the richest Dreamtime heritage of all.”³

Common fire practices become common features of Dreamtime stories. Hunting fires, for example, appear frequently. In the tale of Wirroowaa, a mob of giant kangaroos (perhaps an echo of remembered monsters that populated the Pleistocene bestiary) attacks humans until fire drives them off. Thereafter humans keep fire in the hollowed base of old gums. Lungkata the blue-tongue lizard puts his firestick to spinifex to drive out his defiant sons. After Wyungare, the hunter, keeps the two wives of Nepele, Nepele avenges himself by igniting a magic fire outside their shelter, a fire that subsequently pursues them to the waters of Lake Alexandrina. Bullabogabun fires an enormous tree in which Karambil has taken refuge. The carpet-snake people, angered at the selfishness of Lunkana, the sleepy lizard man, set fire to his shelter and he dies in flames. Women, in particular, use fires to burn out anthills and to flush out bandicoots and other creatures from cover. Often they attempt to hide their fire, even from their husbands, and are killed for their selfishness. When Wildu, the eagle, seeks revenge, he causes a rainstorm to drive the offending creatures into a cave, then blocks the entrance with grass and branches and sets the pyre alight. Though most animals escape, the crows and magpies emerge with black plumage. Two women destroy Thardid Jimbo, the “enemy of man,” by luring him into a cave, then plastering the entrance with fire. When Thardid Jimbo tries to flee, he is consumed in the flames.⁴

The most interesting motif among the fire myths—one again associated with hunting—is the identification of fire with birds. In some cases, fire is invoked to explain unusual plumage such as the ebony feathers of crows, magpies, and black swans, or the red tail-feathers of the finch and red crest of the cockatoo. But the major raptors, the eagles and kites (and sometimes the crow), are envisioned themselves as fire preservers and fire users. As often as not it is a bird that first knows how to make fire or that captures fire for humans or saves fire from some sinister creature determined to extinguish it. The image clearly originates from the frequent appearance of such raptors at savanna fires, where they scavenge for meals. Often the fire-clutching eagle or hawk of myth drops his firestick into grass, which carries fire everywhere.⁵

Such escaped fires are common, and their practical moral obvious. They testify, first, to the danger of fire. In one of the most fully developed fire myths, Goorda the fire spirit abandons the heavens and descends to earth like a meteor or lightning flash. But as soon as Goorda touches the grass, it flames, and the fires sweep the horizon and kill a group of boys, waiting to be circumcised, who have crowded into a bark hut. Both Goorda and his human friends have to work out a protocol so that fire may be used, not feared. Once the secret is transmitted, Goorda returns to the stars.⁶

Escaped fires explain also how fire became so prevalent in the landscape and among people. In this case a stolen fire or a hastily dropped firestick engulfs the countryside, and what had been jealously hoarded now becomes widely available to everyone. Fire enters the trees, which absorb its spirit and rerelease it when properly rubbed. If a firestick fails, a new fire can be extracted from nature. Another variant is to insinuate fire into the basal cavities of large trees, where it is sheltered from the rains. Similarly, digging sticks and spears—capable of spouting fire from their broken ends—act as surrogate firesticks. It is as though, having once been hardened by fire, they have assimilated a fire spirit and can regurgitate it later. The story of Kondole tells how this selfish man hid his firestick rather than share it at a corroboree. After he was changed into a whale, the fire escaped and entered into the grass tree, whose glow advertised its presence. The firedrill made from the grass tree recovers that hidden fire.⁷

But not all creatures know how to get fire or how to keep it. In most origin myths, the possession of fire is the guarded secret of a creature who does not deserve it—a reptile like a lizard or a crocodile or, if a mammal, an aquatic dweller such as a water rat—a character hopelessly, recklessly selfish who refuses to share his fire and who lives in a nonflammable environment. Through the cunning and daring of his rivals, or his own carelessness, the fire hoarder loses his fire—but not before a final defiance in which he attempts to extinguish fire once and for all by tossing it into water. Thus Kanaula tries to end a corroboree by leaping into the sea with the fire, until Unwala impales his hand temporarily with a spear and Mulara flies to the scene and retrieves the firestick. Mulara then drops the firestick into pandamus, which flares and saves fire from extinction. An analogous version has Kunmanggur, the Rainbow Serpent, attempt to punish humans for their wickedness by retiring to the waters with the final firestick. At the last second Kartpur seizes the subsiding firestick and sets the grass alight, and fire is broadcast throughout creation. When the fire of Goodah, an evil magician, is pirated away, he attempts a retaliation by causing rain, and only the storage of fire in the basal cavities of large gums prevents a total loss. Birikbirik, the plover, acts quickly to rescue fire from Gumangan, the crocodile, who in a temper tantrum seeks to extinguish his firesticks in a river. The stories not only reestablish the proper relationship between human and nonhuman, but that between fire and water.⁸

The ritual uses of fire in caves, at night, and around gloomy waterholes—not every waterhole, only a select group—originate in the value of fire for illumination. Fear of ambush, alarm over poisonous snakes that might be trod upon accidentally, difficult footing in unburned vegetation all made a torch an act of prudence. But these fears attached to others, to a generic apprehension of darkness as a place of evil spirits who could be held at bay only by torches or fire. While Eyre noted that “all tribes of natives appear to dread evil spirits … [that] fly about at nights,” fire “appears to have a considerable effect in keeping these monsters away, and a native will rarely stir a yard at night … without carrying a firestick.” Grey reported that “if they are obliged to move away from the fire after dark,” they will “carry a light with them and set fire to dry bushes as they go along.” Angas observed that “their belief in spirits is universal; hence their dread of moving at night, unless provided with a firestick or torch.” More recently Gould observed the matter-of-fact way in which “women going out for firewood or water at dusk usually set fire to the vegetation along the way to illuminate their way to and from camp.” By such means cognitive and behavioral fire practices converged.⁹

Other legends identify the heat and light of fire with the sun and sometimes with the stars. In some, earthly fire leads to heavenly fire. Thus the sun and moon are the firesticks of Wuriupranill, the sun-woman, and Japara, the moon-man, each cycling the world in their own time. The first man, Purukupali, discovers fire accidentally and gives it to others with the instructions that they never allow it to expire. An emu egg hurled against a pyre built by Gnawdenoorte, the Great Man’s Son, kindles the light of day. The firestick of Koolulla, before he drowns, scatters embers skyward to make the stars. In most myths, this celestial fire is returned to an Earth—or at least to humans—that lacks it. Spears, boomerangs, and throwing sticks capture fire, a symbolic variant on fire hunting. From the Murrumbidgee region, an origin myth, closely following real conditions, relates how the magician Goodah captures lightning as it strikes a dead tree, then uses the captive lightning as a kind of personal firestick. When his selfishness becomes intolerable, a whirlwind sweeps Goodah’s fire and scatters it around the countryside where it quickly becomes common property.¹⁰

More important than joining the lights of heaven and earth, fire myths and fire rituals joined the spiritual and the physical; they married the great moieties of Aboriginal existence. Much as it made the world habitable, so fire made it understandable. Fire helped explain the colors of animals, the heat and light of celestial objects, the distribution of species, the warmth of the human body, the wondrous process by which fire may be extracted from wood. Fire’s power made it useful as a dramatic plot device. Even more, fire helped explain motives; it exposed character. By their relationship to fire, creatures are revealed as brave or pusillanimous, generous or selfish, obedient or defiant. By their use of fire, humans reveal themselves as either responsible or evil.

A reciprocity existed between the two worlds. What was abstracted into myth returns, rereified in practice. But in this fire cycle, the end is different from the beginning. When humans took fire out of the landscape, they passed it through a mental—a spiritual—world before returning it to the land. Anthropogenic fire had to reconcile both universes. Those myths and rites helped guide the proper use of fire by shaping fire practices around waterholes, campsites, hunting grounds, and along the corridors of the Dreamtime. As nomadic Aborigines traced and retraced the ancestral pathways of their Dreamtime totems, the legendary paths etched on their stone churingas took on a material existence in the Australian landscape by trails of fire and smoke. As they told and retold the saga of creation, each tribe holding a fragment of the master myth cycle in the form of a bushfire song, the rhythms of Australian fire took on a new cadence. If fire transported Aborigines into the Dreamtime, it also superimposed elements of the Dreamtime onto Australia. Fire ecology acquired symbolic dimensions; fire history, new depth of metaphor; fire practices, new codes of behavior. A fiery land became a burning bush.

MYTHIC FIRE

In the early Dreamtime the creatures of the world did not look as they do today. These disordered animals eventually gathered in the country of the Rembarrngas, where Nagorgo, the Father, examined them and proclaimed, “You are not proper people and not proper animals. We must change this.” With his firestick he lit a ceremonial fire that spread and spread until it encompassed the world. It swept over all the creatures. It burned the earth and the stones. After the fire passed, the creatures and the humans assumed their present forms and characters.¹¹

In Aboriginal myths fire, once freed, spreads widely and impregnates woody flora and other phenomena. The fire spirit is not an exclusive possession of humans, but only humans have the capacity to invoke it and the necessary knowledge to preserve it, and only humans need to explain fire and to incorporate it into ritual. This special attribute, however, is enough to cause the natural world and the human world to diverge. Humans cannot renounce fire and still remain human, yet they must reconcile fire practices with both realms of existence. Because the possession of fire fundamentally changed the world, the behavior of humans toward fire becomes a moral paradigm for the behavior of humans toward one another and toward the rest of the natural world.

The crocodile possessed firesticks. The rainbow bird would ask for fire, but was knocked back every time. The rainbow bird was without fire: he had no light, slept without a camp fire, ate his food (fish, goanna lizards, mussels) raw.

The rainbow bird could not get fire because the crocodile was “boss” for fire and would knock him back.

“You can’t take fire!”

“What am I to do for men? Are they to eat raw?”

“They can eat raw. I won’t give you firesticks!”

The crocodile had fire. No man made it. The crocodile had had fire from a long time ago. Then the rainbow bird put fire everywhere. Every tree has fire inside now. It was the rainbow bird who put the fire inside.

The rainbow bird spoke. “Wirid, wirid, wirid!” He climbed into a tree, a dry place, a dry tree. Down he came, like a jet plane, to snatch the firesticks, but the crocodile had them clutched to his breast. Again and again the rainbow bird tried.

“You eat raw,” the crocodile told him. “I’m not giving you fire.”

“I want fire. You are too mean. If I had had fire I would have given it to you.

“Wirid, wirid, wirid, wirid!” Down he came. He missed. He flew up.

“Wirid, wirid, wirid!” They argued again.

“I’m not giving you fire. You are only a little man. Me, I’m a big man. You eat raw!” That is the way we had been going to eat.

The rainbow bird was angry. “Why do you knock me back all the time?”

The crocodile turned about. Snatch! The rainbow bird had the firesticks! Wirid, wirid, wirid! Away he flew. The crocodile could do nothing. He has no wings. The rainbow bird was above. “You can go down into the water,” he called. “I’m going to give fire to men!”

The rainbow bird put fire everywhere—in every country, in every kind of tree (except the pandamus). He made light, he burned, he cooked fish, crocodile, tortoise.

The crocodile had gone down into the water. The two had spread out.

“I’ll be a bird. I’ll go into dry places,” the rainbow bird called out. “You can go down into the water. If you go in dry places you might die. I’ll stay on top.”

The rainbow bird put the firesticks in his behind. They stick out from there now.

That was a long time ago.¹²

In attempting to reconstruct an ancestral supermyth from recorded fragments, Kenneth Maddock uses the above story as a myth of reference. With its allusion to jet planes, the story has obviously acquired recent embellishments, and with its reliance on crocodiles and a division of the world into wet and dry, it clearly identifies itself with the Australian tropics. But its themes and story line are ancient, with strong parallels in myths told throughout the region, and with fainter, metastructural echoes in fire origin myths told elsewhere in Australia and throughout the globe.

The fundamental concern of such stories is what the possession of fire means to humans. Fire differentiates humans from other creatures, and it demands that a moral code be prescribed to guide its usage among humans. Fire brings power. If misused, if not shared, fire must be removed from its possessors and given to others. Once shorn of fire, a creature descends to a lower scale of existence. It occupies earth or water, while the fire possessor climbs to the sky; it lives a more debased life, while that of the fire keeper aspires to a nobler code. For humans, the first necessity is to acquire fire, and then to distribute it among themselves.

For these stories, too, there is a practical basis. The extinction of fire is such a catastrophic, dehumanizing loss that people must be willing to share their fire with those who need it. In wet times, a fire once extinguished may be difficult to rekindle. Robinson, for example, described how he carefully put out the native fires he found so that dispirited Tasmanians would have to approach his band for new fire and, one presumes, a lesson in Christian theology.¹³

Two women were cutting a tree for the purpose of getting ants’ eggs, when they were attacked by several snakes. The women fought stoutly, but could not kill the snakes. At last one of the women broke her fighting-stick, and immediately fire came forth from it. The crow picked up the fire and flew away with it. Two very good young men, named Toordt and Trrar, ran after the crow and caught him. In a fright the crow let fall the fire, and a great conflagration followed. The blacks were sore afraid when they saw it, and the good Toordt and Trrar disappeared. Pund-jel himself came down from the sky and said to the blacks, “Now you have fire, do not lose it.” He let them see Toordt and Trrar for a moment, and then he took them away with him, and set them in the sky, where they now shine as stars. By and by the blacks lost the fire. Winter came on. They were very cold. They had no place where they could cook their food. They had to eat their food cold and raw like the dogs. Snakes also multiplied. At length Palyang, who had brought forth women from the water, sent down Karakarook from the sky to guard the women. She was a sister of Palyang … a very fine and very big woman, and she had a very, very long stick, with which she went about the country killing a multitude of snakes, but leaving a few here and there. In striking one snake she broke her big stick, and fire came out of it. The crow again flew away with the fire, and for a while the blacks were in great distress. However, one night Toordt and Trrar came down from the sky and mingled with the blacks. They told the blacks that the crow had hidden the fire on a mountain named Num-ner-woon. Then Toordt and Trrar flew upwards. Soon Trrar returned safely with the fire wrapt up in bark, which he had stripped from the trees … Toordt returned to his home in the sky and never came back to the blacks. They say he was burnt to death on a mountain named Mun-ni-o, where he had kindled a fire to keep alive the small quantity he had procured. But some of the sorcerers deny that he was burnt to death on that mountain; they maintain that for his good deeds Pund-jel changed him into the fiery star which white men call the planet Mars. Now the good Karakarook had told the women to examine well the stick which she had broken, and from which had come forth smoke and fire; the women were never to lose the precious gift. Yet this was not enough. The amiable Trrar took the men to a mountain where grows the particular kind of wood called djel-wuk out of which firesticks are made; and he showed them how to fashion and use these implements, so that they might always have the means at hand to light a fire. Then he flew away upwards and was seen no more.¹⁴

Set in Victoria, this myth has shed many of its Arnhemland characters and its sharp contrast between wet and dry. There are emotive surrogates—the snake, for example, replaces the crocodile—and other elements of Aboriginal life are explained, principally the division of labor by which women maintain fire and men make it. Overall, the story is a rich mythopoeic ensemble, a register of codes and symbols, that recommends it as a myth of reference for southern, drier Australia. Other variants have the women attempt to hide their discovered fire, a deed for which they are punished.

The dissolution of Aboriginal Australia meant as well the disassembling of the Dreaming. The old dialectics disintegrated. What they had bonded together broke; what they had separated merged. Fires that should have burned expired, and fires that should have traced the corridors of the Dreamtime ran wild. The Dreamtime fire became a nightmare.

RITUAL FIRE

Nearly every rite had its fire. Campfires, torches, smoking fires, even bushfires accompanied virtually every ritual just as they accompanied virtually every aspect of Aboriginal material existence. Often they were a practical necessity, essential to provide the heat and light without which ceremonies could not proceed at night or to help heal ritual cuts or to prepare food or other implements. The principal colors used for ritual decoration mimicked the colors of fire—white (ash), ocher (flame), and black (charcoal). Occasionally fire was itself the object of ceremony. But regardless, fire rites helped shape the social world as fire practices did the natural world. Between the spiritual and the material world, between the Dreamtime and the present, fire was alternately weld and barrier. As individuals and as tribes retold their history, fire was there.

The retelling began at birth. Often a woman in labor would squat over a small fire to facilitate birthing. After birth she would hold a baby over a smoking fire. The smoke helped dry the mucous membrane and sealed into the body the life spirit. Similar rites of purification by fire and sealing by smoke were repeated at each important life passage, in a sense signifying a rebirth into each new status.¹⁵

As males came of age, they underwent a sequence of rites which concluded with circumcision and often subincision. After ritual cutting and bleeding they stood over a fire, which putatively helped the healing. At other critical stages the boys had to stand over a smoking fire or on hot coals in the expectation that the steam—arising from soaked lily leaves or dampened grass on heated stones—would pass from anus to mouth and cleanse the inner self. The act recapitulated the birthing fire. After its purification and sealing, the initiates learned the first of the sacred songs and saw some of the sacred totems, including the bushfire song and the fire totem. Among desert tribes participants threw firesticks into the night prior to circumcision.¹⁶

When initiation was complete, the young male could marry. In the simplest ceremony the bride came to her husband’s campfire. Other ceremonies could be more elaborate, with differing roles for fire. Ramsey Smith described a marriage ceremony celebrated at midnight that centered around a huge campfire. A procession, in which each family member carried a firestick, brought the bride to the bonfire. The two families converged at a point where they placed their firesticks together—literally joining the two family fires. The respective uncles of bride and groom addressed them. “Children, the fire is symbolical of the severity of the law … As fire consumes, so will the law of your fathers destroy all who dishonour the marriage-bond.” ¹⁷

Adult ceremonial life was rarely without fire in some form. Corroborees—manifest by large congregations of Aborigines at night—danced and sang around enormous fires. The reverie of fire assisted communication by shamans with the spirit world. Cleansing ceremonies, at which participants were brushed with or passed through smoke, were common to prevent illness and to prepare for the acceptance of foods. In ritual dances fire could stand for a variety of totems, from the wild turkey Nganuti to the rock python Muit. Many reenacted totemic myths and often incorporated fire practices, such as a fire drive, within an elaborate choreography that could last for days. Thus there were ritual fires to hunt kangaroos, brush turkeys, even quail, sometimes in company with hawk totems. The fire drive lends itself, much like smoke and steam, to a symbolism of purging. Typically, participants sublimated the drive into torches, although Smith documents a case in which the bush was fired all around.¹⁸

Perhaps the most famous of fire-related ceremonies was the one performed by the Warramunga, photographed and recorded by Baldwin Spencer—a scene “most grotesque and, at the same time, picturesque.” The dances and preparations went on for days, but the culminating scenes involved two furious episodes of active fire. The first incident occurred as a group placed torches against a giant wurley in which a company of men sat. The men fled; the entire congregation danced; and then another group picked up lighted branches and scattered burning embers from them over themselves and the rest of the company. One moiety, the Kingilli, draped itself in bundles of eucalypt twigs, then formed a procession and encircled the other moiety, the Uluuru. The Uluuru stripped those branches off and tossed them into large fires.¹⁹

The second episode came at the climax. After the men coated themselves with mud and white pipe clay they ignited a dozen giant torches of eucalypt branches (each perhaps four meters tall), and a “general mellee” ensued. What the first incident had restricted to a petite rain of embers now became a downpour. “The smoke, the blazing torches, the showers of sparks falling in all directions and the mass of howling, dancing men, with their bodies grotesquely bedaubed, formed a scene that was little short of fiendish.” It was not possible, Spencer admitted, “to find out exactly what it all meant,” but it seemed to be regarded as a general “clearing” ceremony, a ritual cleansing of enmity among the tribal members, a rebirth from an immersion in smoke and fire.

This sense of fire as a protector and purifier was rife in Aboriginal life and legend. The world teemed with evil spirits that caused nightmares, infested the living with illness and death, and snatched away the life spirits. The prime evil took many forms—the dingo Mamu, the spiny Nadubi, and the enormous serpent known variously as Gumba, Jinga, Waugal, Moulack. Humans were most vulnerable when alone or in dark places like caves or waterholes or, of course, at night. But fire repelled the spirits. Grey reported the belief that one could fight off a nightmare by waving a firestick and reciting appropriate chants. Stokes told how fires warded off the malevolent spirits of the night. There were abundant myths to describe the consequences for those without fire.²⁰

The winds were under the power of Wurramugwa, the night spirit. Without them the monsoon rains did not come and the people faced famine. The woman Dagiwa consulted the magician Barunda who instructed her how to reach the great rock that is the home of Wurramugwa. The journey was dangerous, and Dagiwa was warned never to leave the light cast by her fire or Wurramugwa would kill and eat both her and her child. That night the voice of Wurramugwa sang out from the darkness. It insisted that the woman lie with him. She paused, lingering in the shadow line between fire and night, before the leaves on the bloodwood tree warned her to return. They explained that if she would cut the tree, the monsoon wind, which was in them, will be released. But there was danger everywhere—in the river, from the crocodile and the jellyfish; in the darkness, from Wurramugwa. She could not leave her fire. Dagiwa stoked her fire with grass. The smoke drove away the evil spirits. Then she carried her protective firestick home. The next day her husband returned and cut the tree and liberated the monsoon winds.²¹

Death completes the ritual cycle. Mortuary fires both treated the dead and protected the living. The function of the funerary fire is to segregate the living and the dead. Thus both bright and smoky fires are lit—in some cases to drive away the lingering spirit of the recently dead and prevent its reinvasion of the body; in other instances, to propitiate the dead, which lack fire; and in other cases, for reasons that the participants themselves hardly understand or decline to divulge. Thus Lloyd Warner describes a funeral ceremony in which the mourners, with firesticks, march in two lines, containing the departed spirit between them. The leader then seizes a firestick and displays the fire, an act intended to drive the spirit of the dead away from the living. “It is thought by some that this is for the good soul and by other informants that this is for the bad soul, and by some it is not believed at all.”²²

The last rites involved more than a symbolic exorcism, however. Funerary fire practices included burning graves prior to disposal of the body, burning after the body had been placed into the grave, firing reeds that had been laid into special designs, and maintaining fires around the gravesite “for the special use of the departed.” The latter practice was intended to discourage the spirit of the dead from returning to the hearth fires of the living. William Buckley, however, told of a burial he saw in which “a ring” was made “by clearing away, and lighting fire.” The ashes were scraped over the grave, and “whenever they pass near these graves they re-light the fires” in the belief that when they “come to life again,” they will need the fire. Mourners often built fires and brushed their bodies with smoking branches in an apparent act of ritual cleansing; failure would leave the dead to haunt the region and scare off game. In some instances a wife would rub her body with charcoal, both as a sign of death and as a symbol of spiritual sanitizing.²³

Burial usually meant cremation, most widely practiced in the southeast and Tasmania, where several Europeans witnessed it. The Baudin expedition to Tasmania discovered recent cremations, and some of the Aboriginal mounds the English found around Sydney Cove were crematoria; Moore described the practice around the Swan River colony; Angas reported it in South Australia, where “the natives … burn their dead by placing them in hollow trees in an erect position, and covering them with leaves and dry sticks,” they set “fire to the whole.” Backhouse described how a pyre was constructed and the tribal sick were gathered around it. The resulting fire not only burned away the body and prevented reinfection by the departed spirit, but the dead woman would return to “take the devil out of” the assembled sick. The ashes of the dead were collected, a portion to be smeared on the faces of the mourners each morning. Others reported a similar practice among the Tasmanians in which the ashes would be worn as an amulet to ward off evil spirits. At Mount Gambier tribes deposited ashes in a tree hollow. And Bennelong, that infamous experiment in European-Aboriginal relationships, cremated his wife, then interred her ashes in a grave.²⁴

Such funeral fires complete a life cycle of rites that began with birthing fires. The spirit that the one sealed in, the other now sealed out. They bring full circle, too, the life saga of Aboriginal Australia. The oldest human fossils on the continent are the interments at Lake Mungo. The first to be uncovered, and the most ancient—Mungo I, the remains of a slender woman—bear the unmistakable signs of cremation. The remains had been burned, the bones broken, and the ashes and crushed bone deposited in a grave near the pyre. The charcoal is a convenient dating horizon, and the preserved remains a cross-cultural linkage between the Dreaming and modern science. That the earliest presence of Aborigines is a hearth and the earliest human skeleton a ritual cremation—that fire should bridge two alien societies—is something the Aborigine would have instinctively understood. As amulet and artifact, those ancient ashes continue to join, even as they divide, the living and the dead.²⁵

TWILIGHT OF THE DREAMTIME

All peoples have fire myths and fire rituals, and neither in structure nor in theme are the fire legends and rites of Aboriginal Australia unique. What makes the fires of the Dreaming special is what makes the fire regimes of Australia special, their context—their pervasiveness, the unusual-combinations they concoct, the singularity of their presence. In the sacred as in the secular realms fire was at once subtle, varied, and prominent. Reviewing the cognitive role of fire among Aborigines in southwestern Australia, Hallam identified a “complex of ideas” that included “sky-sun-moon-stars-crystals-fire-birds-tree-earth-cave-womb-blood-red-firestick-serpent-water-fertility.” A natural response is to ask what is not included. The catalogue may be best understood, however, as testifying to the symbolic as well as to the practical prevalence of fire.²⁶

There is one master myth of great antiquity and power, however, that highlights how the natural conditions of Australia could combine with the Aboriginal imagination to explain fire and its meaning to humans. This is the myth of the Rainbow Serpent. Variants are found everywhere in Australia, but it may be no accident that the two points of entry into the Sahul—through New Guinea and through the western deserts—pass through regions unusually abundant in reptilian fauna. Snakes, in particular—large pythons and poisonous vipers—were both food and enemy, at once both fascinating and hideous. They appear in the mythology of most cultures, and much of their symbolic potency may trace back to the genetic memory of mammals. What is unusual about Australia is how the serpent and fire came to be associated.

In the Dreamtime when the earth was young and people had not yet come to be lived Kunmanggur, the first ancestor. He had the form of a python. His home was in a deep pool on top of the mountain, Wagura. By day he rose from the depths of the waterhole and lay coiled in the sunshine, his scales glowing with all the colors of the rainbow. Then one day he decided to create people.

He fashioned a didjeridu and when he blew on it, out came creatures and a boy and a girl. He changed himself into a man and instructed the children how to behave and sent them out to populate the land. Kunmanggur decided to live among his people. He took a wife and fathered two daughters and a son. He instructed the two daughters in the power songs but his son, Jinamin, who displeased him, he taught nothing.

When the daughters had grown, they set out to the camp of their mother to find husbands. Though it was forbidden, Jinamin desired them for himself, intercepted them in their journey, and forced himself upon the younger, Ngolpi. The two sisters try to drive Jinamin away with magic and watch him plunge over a cliff to the rocks below. They report what had happened to Kunmanggur. Jinamin, however, did not die, and when he returned to camp, Kunmanggur welcomed him and warned him to stay away from his sisters. Then he arranged a corroboree.

Kunmanggur blew his didjeridu. The people danced around a great bonfire. After the last dance, the fire dance, Jinamin thrust his spear into Kunmanggur. Before he fell to the ground, Kunmanggur smashed his magical didjeridu. Jinamin leaped into the sky and became a bat. Kunmanggur recovered, though the wound did not heal and he weakened daily. He taught the sacred songs. Then at a place called Toitbur, a deep pool, he announced that he would leave and take with him fire, “so that the people will know they have done wrong.” But before the firestick disappeared under the waves, Kartpur snatched it and set the countryside ablaze so that fire could not be removed again.

Kunmanggur sank into the water and became again the Rainbow Serpent. He fashioned stones into spirit children. Thereafter, when women wanted children, they would journey to the pool, set bushes on fire, and strike the stone figures.²⁷

It is an archetypal myth, only one of whose themes is the permanent acquisition of fire by the earth and humans. What is perhaps most interesting is less its narrative line or its moral prescriptions for intrafamilial behavior than its symbolic division of the universe into two realms. It is as though the mythological world, like Aboriginal society, were segregated into two great moieties whose interactions had to proceed according to a carefully ordained protocol justified in myth and encoded in ritual. On one side was fire, and on the other the serpent. Though antagonistic, incompatible, they remain symbolically and emotionally linked in a dialectic of life and death. Evil lurked in the wet and the dark, the hidden waterhole and the sinister cave. Good went with the dry, the light, the open landscape. Where the great serpent is unwanted, fire is used to drive him off; and where the intent is to propitiate the serpent, fire is withheld. In many Aboriginal paintings the same iconography, a wavy line, applies equally to serpent and to fire.

The use of the serpent captures other archetypal images and symbolic meanings that are not evident in the fire origin myths of other peoples with their appeal to birds and bunnies, clever coyotes, and defiant Titans chained to Mount Caucasus. That dialectic endowed the mythology of Aboriginal fire with a special power. It divided the universe into the burned and the unburned, and it granted to humans alone the power to shape that universe guided by their ancestral totems and songlines. Through fire they projected their power, recreating an ancestral Dreamtime; with fire, they protected themselves from the terrors beyond. But this intellectual pyrophilia also had its fatal flaw. The secular was not divided cleanly into two moieties, and fire was not the exclusive property of the Aborigine.

When the white invaders appeared, they too had fire. They used it not against the Rainbow Serpent but against the Aborigine. Their firesticks imposed a new dialectic and defined a new geography. The power of Aboriginal fire apparently lost its potency. This nightmare of death and loss could not be dispelled by a waving firestick. Fire—the defining technology of humanity, the great shield against the terrors of evil—became a weapon of destruction against Aboriginal society. The Dreamtime ended, as it began, in a world-consuming flame.