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