The Biggest Estate on Earth

by Bill Gammage

  A fatalist theology is hard to undermine. Christians generally manage it by aggressive missionising and the plenty of western goods. This rarely impressed Aborigines. Few if any troubled over the question others ask westerners: ‘Why do you have more than us?’ They knew why—the Dreaming made it so (ch 11).

  All Australia obeyed the Dreaming.4 By world standards this is a vast area for a single belief system to hold sway, and in itself cause for thinking Australia a single estate, albeit with many managers. Australia included Tasmania, which some say did not have the Dreaming, but when the last full-blood person in Tasmania died in May 1876, outsiders had no notion of a Dreaming on the mainland either. Tasmanians managed land as mainlanders did (ch 6–8), and with similar mindsets. Oyster Bay people called gum trees ‘countrymen’, other groups claimed other trees, and people told Robinson, ‘Moinee was hurled from heaven and dwelt on the earth, and died and was turned into a stone and is at Coxes Bight, which was his own country . . . Laller a small ant first made the natives.’5 In what records survive of Tasmanian practice, in their links and duties of care with named animals and places, in their taking plant and animal names, in their belief in the transmigration of souls, in their kangaroo, emu, fire, wind and horse dances, and in their ancestral paths apparently like the songlines which mesh the mainland, Tasmanians thought like mainlanders.6

  A songline or storyline is the path or corridor along which a creator ancestor moved to bring country into being. It is also the way of the ancestor’s totem, the geographical expression of the songs, dances and paintings animating its country, and ecological proof of the unity of things. Strehlow quoted many central Australian songs illustrating this. A verse for winnowing nut grass bulbs is:

  With lowered heads, those yonder are holding aloft;

  With heads tilted sideways, those yonder are holding aloft.

  This evokes winnowing ancestors, and living women holding coolamons high to shield their eyes from dust, and nut grass ready for harvest when its seed heads droop and tilt sideways.7 Part of a native cat ancestor song is:

  The ringneck parrots, in scattered flocks —

  The ringneck parrots are screaming in their upward flight.

  The ringneck parrots are a cloud of wings;

  The shell parrots are a cloud of wings.

  Let the shell parrots come down to rest —

  Let them come down to rest on the ground!

  Let the caps fly off the scented blossoms!

  Let the blooms descend to the ground in a shower!

  The clustering bloodwood blooms are falling down —

  The clustering bloodwood blossoms, nipped by birds.

  The clustering bloodwood blooms are falling down —

  The clustering bloodwood blossoms, one by one.

  When bloodwoods blossom, clouds of ringnecks nip them, and shell parrots take advantage of this on the ground. The song ensures that the cycle continues, reflecting the truth that the universe is made and needs ritual to maintain it.8

  Every particle of land, sea and sky must lie on a songline, otherwise an ancestor can’t have created it and it could not exist. Songlines threaded Australia, linking ‘people of many local groups . . . separated by great distances’,9 sometimes thousands of kilometres. The native cat song went across language boundaries through the Centre at least to Port Augusta (SA). Another song ran from the Kimberley to the Centre, south to Port Augusta, then west to Albany and beyond. A third went from the Kimberley to Uluru to Cairns, though it may have lengthened recently. In 1882 Carl Lumholtz heard the same song in different languages on the Herbert (Qld) and 800 kilometres south at Rockhampton.10 Without knowing the language people still recognised their song and its dances, because each had independent ‘embedded characteristics’: painting design, colour or symbol, and song melody, rhythm or pitch. To survive its continental journey each song must in theory be exactly repeated in at least most of these ways, because it came from the Dreaming, and its creator ancestor is listening.

  Being born on or near a songline decides a person’s most important totem, and being taught part of a song or dance legitimates being on the country it describes. People learn their songs, dances and country in minute detail. From far away they can discuss a tree or soak and who is responsible for it. Senior people who learn more song expand their geographical and spiritual knowledge and acquire more rights to responsibilities, including the duty of singing country into life, sometimes beyond their boundaries. In turn a properly sung song’s plains, hills, rocks and waters care for its people and animals. Songlines are places of refuge, of comfort, of communion. They affirm a powerful message: the universe is one; all creation has a duty to maintain it; at the risk of your soul, keep things as they are.11

  All things have a soul. Overlanding on the Murray in 1838, Joseph Hawdon

  was much amused in the course of the day with the simplicity of four or five Blacks who were standing together whilst a number of the cattle were walking towards the spot they occupied—snorting as they drew nearer to their black observers. It was quite evident that the Natives looked upon the oxen as rational beings, for they gravely saluted them with their usual friendly salutation of ‘Bo-Bo-marurood’ (go! go! we are friendly) and waved green boughs at them in token of peace. The cattle not at all appreciating these marks of respect continued to move onwards, when the poor fellows were obliged to run off, not daring to wait the nearer approach of visitors so rude and unceremonious.12

  People know three truths about the soul. First, it confers shape. Human, animal or plant, something unseen passes recognisable features and personality from parent to child. This is the soul. Thus everything with shape has a soul: plants, animals, rocks, wind, fire. If the soul leaves, the body dies and loses shape, but the soul remains in living offspring. In this way it continues forever, taking shape in later generations as in earlier, though since time is irrelevant not necessarily in that order. In some languages, especially in the south, the word for ‘soul’ and ‘flesh’ is the same, a reminder that flesh is a temporary chariot of a soul eternal.13

  Second, since in death things lose shape, shape signifies life, so all things with shape must be living, and all life must have a soul. How otherwise could things get and lose shape? If a thing exists it has a soul, so it can choose to help or hinder. This is why ritual matters. Correct ritual persuades a soul or spirit to help.14

  Third, since souls transcend time and death, and since like creator ancestors their number can’t be infinite, there is no reason why a soul which confers one shape might not confer several, no reason why a soul leaving a fire need pass only to another fire, or a soul from one human pass only to another. On the contrary, a soul’s ability to move from one chariot to another gives creation order and cohesion. It moves through the particular community of natural and supernatural things created by the same ancestor in the Dreaming. It makes each part dependent on it and each other for their existence. It makes them a congregation.

  A congregation forms a totem. Souls deny time; totems assert place. In English ‘totem’ can mean just a badge, but for Aborigines it is a life force stemming from and part of a creator ancestor. An emu man does not have emu as a mere symbol: he is emu, of the same soul and the same flesh. He must care for emu and its habitat, and it must care for him. He is of its totem, not the reverse, and normally he can no more kill it than murder his grandson or grandmother—and since time is irrelevant he risks both if he does. A man ‘born along the track of . . . the wallaby, might say, when seeing a wallaby, “that is me, that wallaby, that is me”’,15 or ‘that is my father’.16 Ted Egan’s brilliant song ‘Poor feller my country’ begins,

  Once when I’m young boy

  Old man tell me

  ‘Always look after

  This you country.

  You are a river

  You are the sea

  You are the rocks, boy,

  This you country.’17

  In March 1854 William Thomas

 
was out with a celebrated Western Port black tracking five other blacks. The tracks had been lost some days at a part of the country where we expected they must pass. We ran down a creek; after going some miles a bear made a noise as we passed. The black stopped, and a parley commenced. I stood gazing alternately at the black and the bear. At length my black came to me and said, ‘Me big one stupid; bear tell me no go you that way.’ We immediately crossed the creek, and took a different track. Strange as it may appear, we had not altered our course above one and a half miles before we came upon the tracks of the five blacks, and never lost them after.18

  Everything has a totem: people, animals, stars, flu, lice, dust, frost, wind. Fire is an important totem, which people must consult before unleashing. Dogs have totems, and like humans ‘are expected to conform to the rules on incest, adultery, and choice of partner generally, as laid down in the Dreamtime. The indiscriminate sexual behaviour displayed by dogs is a source of frequent embarrassment and annoyance to their owners.’19

  Totem members are responsible for each other more than for the rest of creation. Wenten Rubuntja explained,

  My Altyerre Dreaming comes from Mpweringke [Burt Well, north of Alice Springs] because I was ‘found’ there. I am boss for Mpwere [Maggot] Dreaming. My worship is maggots and witchetties and flies . . . and itchy grubs—those hairy caterpillars that line up—and those angente [sawfly] grubs that attach themselves in a mass to the river red gum trees. Those trees can’t be cut down or there will be lots of maggots—maggots everywhere.20

  At Sydney after 1788 the most determined resister of the English was Pemulwuy. He was not from Sydney Cove, but an inland group near Georges River. Why should he take on the strangers? Because his totem, like his name, was bhimul, earth. That was what he was defending. Again, the longest war any people fought against settlers was on the Hawkesbury. There in 1788 people now called Dharug received Governor Phillip hospitably, but in the 1790s his successors began concentrating farms on the flats. ‘Dharug’ may mean yam. The Hawkesbury’s yams were a major totem and a staple famous among distant people. Governor Hunter may have glimpsed this when he wrote in 1793 that the Dharug

  appeared to live chiefly on the roots which they dig from the ground; for these low banks appear to have been ploughed up, as if a vast herd of swine had been living on them. We . . . found the wild yam in considerable quantities, but in general very small, not larger than a walnut; they appear to be in the greatest plenty on the banks of the river; a little way back they are scarce.

  The farmers took land, yam, totem and trade. The clans fought back for 22 years, until all were dead or hiding. Few Europeans understood why they fought so hard, but the yams say.21

  They say not only, perhaps not mainly, because they were food. They were totem allies needing help. Central Australian women recently demonstrated the power of this affinity when shown a model cash crop:

  seeing bush tomatoes growing in neat horticultural rows was disturbing. Bush tomatoes, as with everything else in the world, are supposed to be made through ceremony, not grown by people . . . these captive plants may have seemed to the women to challenge the proper order of the world; in short, to be sacrilegious . . . these are not just foods: they are bound up in stories of creation, in kinship, and in multiple layers of personal and collective memory . . . bushfoods are an inseparable part of themselves.22

  Beyond particular totem bonds is a duty to all creation. On the Hawkesbury yam men may have decided whether to fight, but others fought with them. Totems share the Dreaming, so all are responsible for all. Totems of disease, rain and fire obviously affect everyone, but all totems do in some way. By singing their totem songs, people play their part in maintaining creation for all. Everyone thus venerates and depends on the totem idea, and is blended into an inter-dependent universe.23

  Totems are a central organising principle. Kin are recognised, marriage usually restricted, and population controlled by totem rules; messengers state their totem not their name; strangers recognise soulmates if their totems are the same or allied; in hard times people can find refuge with totem kin outside their country; even among enemies a person tries to save the life of a totem brother or sister; when people meet the most important answer to that universal question, who are you?, is the totem. Totems still regulate behaviour, openly in the north, coded as surnames in the south. That they retain such power conveys how life shaping they were in 1788.

  They are more complex than outlined here. Details vary regionally, for example on whether people may kill or eat their totem. People and places have more than one totem, and all totems have allied totems, as they must if people are to represent all creation. West of Kununurra (WA), Mandi told Bruce Shaw,

  My other, blackfeller, name was Munnai (Munniim). My father put that, from the Dream now. He saw the water bubbling, moving all the time while the sun shone on it. In language you called it munniim-munniim: light on quiet water . . . And you know Grant’s wife . . . ? Her father’s name, Budbirr, was given to me by my father because I was his ghost, his spirit come back . . . Flying fox is one of my Dreams, and . . . a bird like an owl . . . and Yiralalam the Dream for that tree belonged to my father . . . When the father passes away the son takes over his Dreaming.24

  All these totems must survive, and be in balance.25

  Since creator ancestors made all the land, no land can be wilderness. It is made and has a Dreaming, or it does not exist. People see in land, sea and sky proofs of the Dreaming and their own past and future. Every hill, plain, rock and tree is alive with story and imagery, and filled with presences. The land is a spiritual endowment far more important than any economic value it might have. Travelling with two senior men near Lake Eyre, Isabel McBryde ‘was constantly impressed by how different were the landscapes . . . [we] were observing. Theirs were numinous landscapes of the mind, peopled by beings from an ever-present Dreaming whose actions were marked by the features of the created landscape . . . a landscape “mapped by stories”.’26 Strehlow described

  the overwhelming affection felt by a native for his ancestral territory. Mountains and creeks and springs and water-holes are, to him, not merely interesting or beautiful . . . [but] the handiwork of ancestors from whom he himself has descended. He sees recorded in the surrounding landscape the ancient story of the lives and the deeds of the immortal beings whom he reveres . . . The whole countryside is his living, age-old family tree. The story of his own totemic ancestor is to the native the account of his own doings at the beginning of time, at the dim dawn of life, when the world as he knows it now was being shaped and moulded by all-powerful hands. He himself has played a part in that first glorious adventure, a part smaller or greater according to the original rank of the ancestor of whom he is the present reincarnated form . . . Gurra said to me: ‘The Ilbalintja soak has been defiled by the hands of the white men . . . No longer do men pluck up the grass and the weeds and sweep the ground clean around it; no longer do they care for the resting place of Karora . . . [but] It still holds me fast; and I shall tend it while I can; while I live, I shall love to gaze on this ancient soil.27

  Such love helps immeasurably in meeting the Law’s demand to leave the world as found, but as Gurra said, this does not mean leaving things untouched. On the contrary, the cycles of life and season change constantly, and a manager’s duty is to shepherd land and creatures safely through these changes. Eddies they may be, but they are part of the Dreaming and must be cared for. This might require dramatic or spasmodic change (burning forests, culling eels, banning or restricting a food), and it certainly demands active intervention in the landscape. Ancestors do this still, obeying the Law and seeking balance and continuity. Humans should do no less. Land care is the main purpose of life.28

  Law protected land and property. Stone tools are common today because people rarely carried them, instead leaving a kit at each halt. Until 1788 they were safe. In 1882 Augustus Gregory said, ‘A native discovering a Zamia fruit unripe will put his mark upon it an
d no other native will touch this; the original finder of the fruit may rest perfectly certain that when it becomes ripe he has only to go and fetch it.’29 Near Brisbane in 1828 Fraser saw

  three sticks fixed in the ground forming a triangle, and fixed at the top by a cord, and on which was placed a sheet of bark, and on seeing something suspended under cover of the bark, Capt Logan pointed it out to us as being a place where they deposit their Kangaroo Nets (Dilly Bag) and superfluous Elemans [shields], Chisels, etc. etc. until they return to that district again, it being considered the greatest breach of Faith in this District to touch any of them . . . On examining the contents of this depot, I found it to consist of a Kangaroo Net fifty feet long, and five and a half in width, made of as good twine as any European net but much stronger, and put together in a manner which would do credit to any professed networker, a Fishing Net of the finest material stained black, forming when in the water, an inverted cone seven feet long, a Dilly, a Luggage Bag, which the females carry, this is formed of the leaves of a species of Santhorhea [Xanthorrhoea] strong enough to hold anything.30

  Sturt thought it ‘a remarkable fact that we seldom or never saw weapons in the hands of any of the natives of the interior’.31 Mervyn Meggitt found ‘little reason for all-out warfare between communities. Slavery was unknown; portable goods were few; and the territory seized in a battle was virtually an embarrassment to the victors, whose spiritual ties were with other localities.’32