The Edge of Memory

by Patrick Nunn

  52 This and the previous quote come from Carnegie (1898: 17).

  53 Much of this information comes from the excellent review of desert Aboriginal water management by Bayly (1999, Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia). He includes a more graphic account of frog-water-drinking from the 1930s: ‘My amazement reached a climax when he [an Aboriginal escort] seized the frog, placed the head-end in his mouth and squeezed its body. And while he squeezed he drank! It was not a mere sip, either; I should say the fluid he swallowed would have been sufficient to fill a teacup. As he drank, the old fellow looked at me out of the sides of his eyes in a very quizzical way; and when he had drained this most remarkable goblet to its last drop he smacked his lips afresh and exclaimed “Bullya Marra” [“Good! Good!”]’ (p. 23). When the frog’s water was all drunk, the rest of the frog was duly eaten.

  54 Referring to the Aboriginal people of the Western Desert, Scott Cane found that ‘almost every Aboriginal person I have spoken to can recall times when they were close to death – or members of their immediate family had died in attempts to find water’ (p. 157 in Meeham and White 1990).

  55 And most Aboriginal communities did live well for most of the time before 1788 in Australia. I note the comment of anthropologist Donald Thomson about the Pintupi (Bindibu) people of the central desert of Australia, apparently one of the harshest environments the country has to offer, that they ‘have adapted themselves to that bitter environment so that they laugh deeply and grow the fattest babies in the world’ (Thomson 1975: 4).

  56 In February 2016, Severe Tropical Cyclone Winston – the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the southern hemisphere – tore a track through the islands of Fiji and Tonga, leaving massive destruction in its wake. A friend told me what happened in one of the affected villages in Fiji. The people were gathered around a radio listening to official warnings about the cyclone’s path, on the basis of which they decided not to evacuate the community to the caves inland. At the time, meteorologists thought the cyclone was moving away from the area where the village is located. But the older people in the village thought otherwise because the birds were flying unusually close to the ground, a traditional precursor of an approaching hurricane. Science was favoured by the village decision-makers and, when the cyclone was found to have changed course, razing the village, it had a human impact that might have been avoided had tradition been favoured over science. I am grateful to Dr Lavinia Tiko for this story.

  57 Modelling suggests that the ice-age population of Australia may have fallen overall because of aridity (Williams, 2015, Quaternary Science Reviews). It is certainly clear that people at this time (14,000–28,000 years ago) abandoned vast tracts of land where they had formerly lived because of the lack of water, shifting to better watered refugia like the Murray-Darling River Basin and south-west Tasmania. Over several millennia (5,000–11,000 years ago) after the end of the last ice age, Australian Aboriginal populations grew in every part of the continent as both temperatures and rainfall increased.

  58 An intriguing question is whether the Aboriginal groups that reoccupied formerly abandoned areas of Australia knew that their ancestors had lived there – and had kept that knowledge alive during the millennia they spent in refugia – or whether they merely saw the formerly unoccupied environments becoming habitable and moved there. The most parsimonious explanation – the type science invariably favours – is the latter, but in the light of the likelihood that Aboriginal stories can survive for 7,000 years or more (see Chapters 3 and 4), we should perhaps not be too quick in dismissing the former.

  Chapter 3 : Australian Aboriginal Memories of Coastal Drowning

  1 Australia’s snake species are many and disproportionately venomous. There are about 140 species of land snake and many are deadly, even though they account for a mere 4–6 deaths each year. An Australian Geographic article on the topic can be found at http://tinyurl.com/o6v45aa.

  2 This argument hinges on the plausible idea that the Rainbow Serpent represents an amalgam of observations of ‘snakes slithering away from drowning landscapes, rainbows overhead and strange “new” creatures such as pipefish washed ashore’ (Tacon, 1996, Archaeology in Oceania, p. 117), a metaphor that helped people make sense of the rapid changes to the landscape they were witnessing.

  3 At Delphi, the priestesses of the Oracle sat above cracks in the ground from which these gases (rich in CO2-H2S or ethylene or CH4) rose, going into trances and purporting to predict future events. Geologists who examined the site found that no gases are escaping today, but that its structure shows that they once did, earthquakes periodically altering the circulation and storage (in shallow chambers) of gases produced from movements of hydrothermal fluids deeper within the Earth’s crust. It is probable that the Delphic Oracle remained in place for the few hundred years that it took for a particular ‘gas-exhaling chasm’ to empty itself. This study was carried out by Luigi Piccardi who, together with Bruce Masse, deserves credit for helping make the topic of geomythology respectable among scientists, through a dedicated session (standing-room only!) at the 2004 International Geological Congress and publication of a derivative volume (Piccardi and Masse 2007).

  4 This is the main focus of my 2009 book, Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific, which reviews stories about ‘vanished islands’ from many Pacific Island cultures, concluding that many represent memories of actual events. Some of the most plausible are the disappearances of the islands of Teonimenu and Vanua Mamata in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu (South-west Pacific) respectively (Nunn 2009).

  5 Loch Ness lies directly above the most seismically active part of the Great Glen Fault, one of the most active in Scotland. When there are earthquakes in the area, the surface of Loch Ness is often agitated, waves being created that may have been mistaken for the thrashing of a sea monster. This explanation is strengthened by noting that the earliest Latin descriptions of the appearance of the ‘dragon’ in the lake noted that it was accompanied ‘with strong shaking’ (cum ingenti fremitu) and disappeared ‘shaking herself’ (tremefacta).

  6 See Ross (1986, Oral Tradition).

  7 From p. iii of Dawson (1881).

  8 All quotes in this paragraph are from Volume 1 of Matthew Flinders’s journal, A Voyage to Terra Australis (Flinders 1814). He first entered Spencer Gulf on 9 March 1802 and left it 11 days later. The night before, there was an eclipse of the moon and one wonders whether the Narungga associated this with the arrival of the Investigator, an event that would come to profoundly challenge their view of the world and their situation within it.

  9 This story was sung in 1928 by a Wirangu woman named Susie from Denial Bay (Eyre Peninsula), and is recorded on p. 16 of Cooper (1955).

  10 This account is from pp. 168–169 of Smith’s 1930 book. There is reason in this instance to suspect that Smith plagiarised the work of David Unaipon, a tireless promulgator of Aboriginal culture (Krichauff 2011).

  11 One detailed account was collected by anthropologist Charles Pearcy Mountford from the Adnyamathanha (Aboriginal) people living at the Nepabunna Mission in the Flinders Ranges (South Australia) in 1937. It states that Spencer Gulf ‘was once a valley filled with a line of fresh-water lagoons, stretching northwards for a hundred miles or more. Each lagoon was the exclusive territory of a species of water bird. One lagoon belonged to the swans and the ducks, another to the grebes and the cormorants, still another to the water-hens, coots and reed-warblers. The trees belonged to the eagles, crows and parrots, while in the open country between the lagoons lived emus, curlews and mallee fowls. Further out were the animals, the dingoes and many kangaroo-like creatures, and in the thick grass by the waters were the snakes, goannas and lizards’ (Roberts and Mountford 1989: 18).

  12 All quotes in this paragraph are from p. 18 of Roberts and Mountford (1989).

  13 Native to Australia, willie wagtails (Rhipidura leucophrys) are birds that often appear in Aboriginal stories of different kinds, perhaps because they always seem
so busy and sing so uniquely.

  14 The quote in this paragraph comes from p. 172 of Smith (1930), while the idea that flooding of Spencer Gulf restored harmony between the competing groups of animals comes from Roberts and Mountford (1989), who probably derived their version of this Narungga story from a different source to that of Smith.

  15 This and the previous quote are both from Volume 1 of Flinders (1814). ‘Naive’ fauna such as Flinders found on Kangaroo Island do indeed indicate a lengthy period of evolution without predators, as he surmised. Initial discovery by humans of many isolated oceanic islands also met with similar creatures, whose inability to recognise and avoid human predators invariably led to their extirpation or even extinction.

  16 When Ronald Lampert started his PhD on the archaeology of Kangaroo Island in the 1970s, ‘the problem had all the characteristics of a classic mystery story: a large offshore island without people, separated from the mainland nearly 10,000 years ago, yet with abundant evidence for a prehistoric population’ (Lampert 1981: 1).

  17 There are at least two extant accounts, collected independently, written down in the nineteenth century (Meyer 1846, Taplin 1873), and several more recent in date. The most comprehensive is that of Berndt (1940, Oceania), which was collected in the 1930s from the Jaralde people living in the lowermost part of the Murray River. The text in Chapter 3 includes elements from several versions of the Ngurunduri story.

  18 The only direct indigenous version of this story to be written down, by David Unaipon in the 1920s, paints a different picture, in which Ngurunduri is portrayed as a good man whose affections were captured by two devious maidens he rescued from their imprisonment in a grass tree near Lake Albert. While Ngurunduri was temporarily absent, they caught and ate forbidden fish, for which he decided they should be punished. So they ran away from him (Unaipon 2001).

  19 If this seems implausible, consider that Aboriginal women of that time had a different way of bathing from men (Berndt, 1940, op cit, footnote 36). Women often played ‘water games’ that involved hitting the water with the flats of their hands; ‘she then very quickly uses her index finger, poking it in and out of the water she has divided, the result being a popping sound’ (p. 179) that can sometimes be heard far away.

  20 Quote from p. 181 of Berndt (1940, op cit). Other expressions of this key fact state that these events happened ‘when the island was connected with the mainland [via] a strip of land’ (Unaipon 2001: 131), or that ‘Kangaroo Island … was separated from the mainland only by a line of partly submerged boulders’ (Roberts and Mountford 1989: 24), or that there was a shallow channel between the two, an isthmus in some accounts, across which a person could wade (Reed 1993, Parker 1959).

  21 These words are from the Jaralde account given in the 1930s (Berndt 1940, op cit, p. 181). A story collected in the 1920s states that Ngurunduri began singing the Wind Song when his wives were halfway across. ‘Pinkell lowar mia yound, Tee wee warr, La rund, Tolkamia a tren who cun, Tinkalla! (Fall down from above, oh thou mighty Wind; swiftly run and display thy fleetness! Come thou down from the Northern sky, oh water of the deep! Come up in a mighty swell!)’ (Unaipon 2001: 132).

  22 From p. 57 of Taplin (1873).

  23 From p. 181 of Berndt (1940, op cit).

  24 From p. 182 of Berndt (1940, op cit).

  25 This and all other quotes about MacDonnell Bay come from pp. 22–23 of the book by Smith (1880).

  26 In addition to being used the seeds and roots of wattles (acacias) as food, the gum that many exude was used as a traditional medicine by Aboriginal Australians and was also a sweet treat for children.

  27 The most comprehensive account of the geological history of Port Phillip Bay is that by Holdgate and others (2001, Australian Journal of Earth Sciences), while the issue of whether it dried up several millennia after the sea level had reached its present level is addressed by a similar group (2011, Australian Journal of Earth Sciences).

  28 The quote is from p. 193 of Georgiana McCrae’s biography (Niall 1994). It is likely that her main informant was Benbenjie, the ‘premier huntsman and fisherman’ of the Bunurong, who became her ‘particular friend’ and helped her compile a dictionary of the Bunurong language.

  29 From p. 176 of McCrae (1934).

  30 Both quotes from p. 12 of Hull (1859, Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines, 1858–9 (Victoria).

  31 Quote from p. 49 of Rogers (1957).

  32 This may be a memory of a river flood (‘rolling down’) that drowned Port Phillip Bay, rather than inundation by the ocean or, more likely, a fusion of memories about change and causes that renders the extant story slightly ambiguous. This quote is from pp. 47–48 of Massola (1968).

  33 Aboriginal Tasmanians were among the worst treated in the early decades of colonial Australia and were once thought to have died out with the death of Truganini in 1876, although this view was clearly wrong (Ryan 2012). In 1831 it was reported that Aboriginal people from Tasmania’s east coast stated that ‘this Island was settled by emigrants from a far country, that they came here on land, that the sea was subsequently formed’ (Robinson 2008: 514, ML.A7085.2).

  34 The quote is from pp. 267–268 of Fison and Howitt (1880). The finest turndun or bullroarers were made from cherry-tree wood and were used in men’s initiation ceremonies in Aboriginal Australia, to which women and uninitiated children were not privy.

  35 From p. 101 of Tench’s (1793) A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. In a footnote Tench stressed his point. ‘The words which are quoted may be found in Mr Cook’s first voyage, and form part of his description of Botany Bay. It has often fallen to my lot to traverse these fabled Plains; and many a bitter execration have I heard poured on those travellers, who could so faithlessly relate what they saw.’

  36 The two quotes in this paragraph come from pp. 11 and 14 of the story of the Gymea Lily in the chapter by Bodkin and Andrews in the collection by Kuhn and Freeman (2012). This crimson-flowered plant, Doryanthes excelsa, is endemic to coastal areas around Sydney.

  37 This story is part of an account by Bruce Howell in the 2016 volume of the Sutherland Shire Historical Society Bulletin entitled ‘The Man They Called Mister (An Aboriginal Man living on Gunnamatta Bay in the 1920s)’, which is based on conversations with James Cutbush in December 2015 that in turn recalled stories told him by his father Bill Cutbush, who spent his childhood in the area in the 1920s, befriending the man they called Mister.

  38 Bailer shells (Melo sp.) are marine molluscs, often beautifully decorated, that can reach more than 40cm (16in) in length and have been commonly used in Australia and elsewhere for bailing water from canoes.

  39 Quote from pp. 17–18 of Noonuccal (1990).

  40 Bopple bopple trees are likely to have been either Hicksbeachia pinnatifolia or Macadamia integrifolia, both of which bear edible fruits/nuts, making them of particular interest to children.

  41 The details in this paragraph are paraphrased from the account of Thomas Welsby (1967: vol. 2, 34), who probably collected this story himself.

  42 This possibility is raised by O’Keeffe (1975, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland), who also concedes that Cook’s apparent observation of a single island ‘may have been an illusion caused by the angle from which he viewed the place’ (p. 85).

  43 At the time of Cook’s observations of Moreton and North Stradbroke Islands in 1770, the world was still in the grip of the Little Ice Age – most studies consider that it spanned about ad 1400–1800. During the Little Ice Age the sea level in this part of the world was lower than it is today during the Little Ice Age (Nunn 2007), so it is possible that the two islands were joined at this time.

  44 This story is recounted by Dixon (1972: 29).

  45 See Dixon (1980: 46).

  46 Details from Gribble (1932), the quote from p. 57. Another version of this story (McConnel, 1935, Art in Australia), collected independently from the same area in the 1930s, notes that Goonyah (Ngúny
a) had been using fish poison, probably from the leaves of Derris trifoliata, to catch fish: a practice often frowned upon in subsistence societies because it kills fish indiscriminately and can pass on the toxins they absorb to people who consume them.

  47 For example, Dixon’s Yidinjdji informant Dick Moses explained that Goonyah (Gunya) placed a sacred woomera (spear-thrower) in the prow of his boat to attempt to ‘calm the waves’, but to no avail. ‘Bamaay ginuuy daguulji/banaang miwalnyunda gadangalnyuun/; [The sea was coming in bringing with it] the three people and the canoe. The water was lifting up and bringing in [the canoe with the people in it] … Balur ganaanggarr jarraal/banaagu wanggungalna/budiilna bana/; [They] stood the curved woomera up in the prow [of the boat], to calm the water, to make it lie flat’ (Dixon 1991: 92). In this story, we find echoes of the attempt by the English king Canute to command the waves to stop rising and, more pragmatically, an early account of people’s increasing efforts to halt the encroachment of the sea onto the land.

  48 From pp. 348–349 of McConnel (1930, Oceania). A related story comes from the Dingaal Aboriginal people, who occupy the Cape Flattery area about 200km (125 miles) north of Cairns, and have traditional title claim to Lizard Island (Dikaru), a high granite island just over 30km (19 miles) north-east of Cape Flattery and sheltered by the Great Barrier Reef to the east. Gordon Charlie, a Dingaal spokesman, ‘says that his direct ancestors once walked to the island from Cape Flattery. When the sea levels rose and the Aboriginal people could no longer walk there, they paddled their canoes from island to island to reach it’ (Falkiner and Oldfield 2000: 9).