the actual fire ceremony, the torch fight, seemed to be regarded as a kind of “clearing” ceremony … Whatever else it was or was not, it was extremely wild and picturesque from start to finish.
—BALDWIN SPENCER, Wanderings in Wild Australia (1928)
FIRE WAS AS INTEGRAL to the mental as to the material existence of the Aborigine. It was a universal accompaniment to Aboriginal ritual, and it became itself on occasion an object of ceremony. Storytellers frequently incorporated fire into legends as a routine participant in the mythological life of the Dreamtime, as a common vehicle for the explanation of natural and spiritual phenomena, and as a presence that cried out for explication, for fire both divided and brought together. It differentiated the human world from the nonhuman, yet it bridged the mental world with the material. It made possible a cognitive corroboree of Aboriginal culture.1
Remove fire and that spiritual universe would collapse. Spiritual invention depended on a material context of heat and light; the social life that sustained cognition pivoted around a fire. Without campfires, there would be no evening storytelling. Without torches and bonfires, there could be no ceremonial community after dark. Without the protective radiance of the hearth fire, Aborigines were defenseless against the evil spirits that marauded the night in search of souls to devour. Fire was ubiquitous in Aboriginal ritual and myth because it was ubiquitous in Aboriginal life.
Yet those experiences and practices were only a beginning because the human revolution that fire helped make possible was ambivalent. Humans were not genetically programmed to start, preserve, use, explain, or otherwise live with fire, whose prevalence and power made it a profoundly varie-gated and even contradictory phenomenon, ideally positioned to explain and exemplify the specialness and ambivalence of human existence. So clearly, among the animals, was fire a uniquely human possession that its origins could be related to the origins of humans, and its exercise to the special duties and responsibilities incumbent upon humans. The possession of fire—at once both an extraordinary power and an exceptional danger—was an archetype for all human behavior.
Humans had to explain fire and to define its proper usage. They had to substitute cultural codes for genetic codes. They had to record their knowledge and experience in stories, songs, ceremonies, paintings, rituals. They had to construct and populate a moral universe that would both prescribe and proscribe behavior. Accordingly, Aboriginal societies evolved an elaborate mythology to explain creation out of an inchoate Dreamtime, to legitimate contemporary beliefs and behaviors, and to vivify the important rites of passage in the life of individual Aborigines, and for this endeavor fire was ubiquitous, both a means and an end of inquiry. In this way fire established new, symbolic relationships, its behavior following the fuels of metaphor, the litter of the subconscious. Old Australia and its fires entered a symbolic world whose ecology was vastly different from that which it knew in the bush, but one that also placed fire at its core.
ORIGINS
The ancestral Dreamtime was at least partially conceived and animated by fire. As a context, fire invited contemplation, and as an object, it demanded explanation. The reverie induced by fire helped transport narrators back to the Dreamtime; staring into flame brought magicians to a trance from which they could communicate with the spirit world; the vital stories of creation and existence were almost always retold or reenacted around a fire. It is too much to argue, as Bachelard has for humans in general, that fire was the originating phenomenon of mental activity, “the first phenomenon, on which the human mind reflected.” But one could agree with him that the “mind in its primitive state, together with its poetry and its knowledge, had been developed in meditation before a fire.” The Dreaming was likely illuminated, if not inspired, by fire.2
The pervasiveness of fire in Aboriginal Dreaming reflects the pervasiveness of fire in Aboriginal life. Fire practices created a repertoire of actions and effects that could be transfigured into stories and symbols. But once in this cognitive realm humans could reassemble the pieces according to other kinds of logic. They could establish new patterns that relied on emotional or symbolic associations, without analogues in actual life; like a collage, they could alter the individual parts to make a larger truth, a new register of meanings. From this register came a cognitive universe that told the Aborigine who he was, and a moral universe that informed him how he should behave. Through its metamorphosis into a parallel mental universe, the significance of fire in Aboriginal Australia expanded far beyond its presence in the landscape. “Fire, and its benefits,” Ainslie Roberts concluded, “was possibly the richest Dreamtime heritage of all.”3
Common fire practices become common features of Dreamtime stories. Hunting fires, for example, appear frequently. In the tale of Wirroowaa, a mob of giant kangaroos (perhaps an echo of remembered monsters that populated the Pleistocene bestiary) attacks humans until fire drives them off. Thereafter humans keep fire in the hollowed base of old gums. Lungkata the blue-tongue lizard puts his firestick to spinifex to drive out his defiant sons. After Wyungare, the hunter, keeps the two wives of Nepele, Nepele avenges himself by igniting a magic fire outside their shelter, a fire that subsequently pursues them to the waters of Lake Alexandrina. Bullabogabun fires an enormous tree in which Karambil has taken refuge. The carpet-snake people, angered at the selfishness of Lunkana, the sleepy lizard man, set fire to his shelter and he dies in flames. Women, in particular, use fires to burn out anthills and to flush out bandicoots and other creatures from cover. Often they attempt to hide their fire, even from their husbands, and are killed for their selfishness. When Wildu, the eagle, seeks revenge, he causes a rainstorm to drive the offending creatures into a cave, then blocks the entrance with grass and branches and sets the pyre alight. Though most animals escape, the crows and magpies emerge with black plumage. Two women destroy Thardid Jimbo, the “enemy of man,” by luring him into a cave, then plastering the entrance with fire. When Thardid Jimbo tries to flee, he is consumed in the flames.4
The most interesting motif among the fire myths—one again associated with hunting—is the identification of fire with birds. In some cases, fire is invoked to explain unusual plumage such as the ebony feathers of crows, magpies, and black swans, or the red tail-feathers of the finch and red crest of the cockatoo. But the major raptors, the eagles and kites (and sometimes the crow), are envisioned themselves as fire preservers and fire users. As often as not it is a bird that first knows how to make fire or that captures fire for humans or saves fire from some sinister creature determined to extinguish it. The image clearly originates from the frequent appearance of such raptors at savanna fires, where they scavenge for meals. Often the fire-clutching eagle or hawk of myth drops his firestick into grass, which carries fire everywhere.5
Such escaped fires are common, and their practical moral obvious. They testify, first, to the danger of fire. In one of the most fully developed fire myths, Goorda the fire spirit abandons the heavens and descends to earth like a meteor or lightning flash. But as soon as Goorda touches the grass, it flames, and the fires sweep the horizon and kill a group of boys, waiting to be circumcised, who have crowded into a bark hut. Both Goorda and his human friends have to work out a protocol so that fire may be used, not feared. Once the secret is transmitted, Goorda returns to the stars.6
Escaped fires explain also how fire became so prevalent in the landscape and among people. In this case a stolen fire or a hastily dropped firestick engulfs the countryside, and what had been jealously hoarded now becomes widely available to everyone. Fire enters the trees, which absorb its spirit and rerelease it when properly rubbed. If a firestick fails, a new fire can be extracted from nature. Another variant is to insinuate fire into the basal cavities of large trees, where it is sheltered from the rains. Similarly, digging sticks and spears—capable of spouting fire from their broken ends—act as surrogate firesticks. It is as though, having once been hardened by fire, they have assimilated a fire spirit and can regurgitate it later. The story of Kondole tells how this selfish man hid his firestick rather than share it at a corroboree. After he was changed into a whale, the fire escaped and entered into the grass tree, whose glow advertised its
