Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne

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