Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne

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.

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      Smokes by Day, Fires by Night: Fire Regimes of Aboriginal Australia

      We perceived, that much pains had been taken by the natives to spread the fire, from its burning in separate places.