Down he came. He missed. He flew up.
“Wirid, wirid, wirid!” They argued again.
“I’m not giving you fire. You are only a little man. Me, I’m a big man. You eat raw!” That is the way we had been going to eat.
The rainbow bird was angry. “Why do you knock me back all the time?”
The crocodile turned about. Snatch! The rainbow bird had the firesticks! Wirid, wirid, wirid! Away he flew. The crocodile could do nothing. He has no wings. The rainbow bird was above. “You can go down into the water,” he called. “I’m going to give fire to men!”
The rainbow bird put fire everywhere—in every country, in every kind of tree (except the pandamus). He made light, he burned, he cooked fish, crocodile, tortoise.
The crocodile had gone down into the water. The two had spread out.
“I’ll be a bird. I’ll go into dry places,” the rainbow bird called out. “You can go down into the water. If you go in dry places you might die. I’ll stay on top.”
The rainbow bird put the firesticks in his behind. They stick out from there now.
That was a long time ago.12
In attempting to reconstruct an ancestral supermyth from recorded fragments, Kenneth Maddock uses the above story as a myth of reference. With its allusion to jet planes, the story has obviously acquired recent embellishments, and with its reliance on crocodiles and a division of the world into wet and dry, it clearly identifies itself with the Australian tropics. But its themes and story line are ancient, with strong parallels in myths told throughout the region, and with fainter, metastructural echoes in fire origin myths told elsewhere in Australia and throughout the globe.
The fundamental concern of such stories is what the possession of fire means to humans. Fire differentiates humans from other creatures, and it demands that a moral code be prescribed to guide its usage among humans. Fire brings power. If misused, if not shared, fire must be removed from its possessors and given to others. Once shorn of fire, a creature descends to a lower scale of existence. It occupies earth or water, while the fire possessor climbs to the sky; it lives a more debased life, while that of the fire keeper aspires to a nobler code. For humans, the first necessity is to acquire fire, and then to distribute it among themselves.
For these stories, too, there is a practical basis. The extinction of fire is such a catastrophic, dehumanizing loss that people must be willing to share their fire with those who need it. In wet times, a fire once extinguished may be difficult to rekindle. Robinson, for example, described how he carefully put out the native fires he found so that dispirited Tasmanians would have to approach his band for new fire and, one presumes, a lesson in Christian theology.13
Two women were cutting a tree for the purpose of getting ants’ eggs, when they were attacked by several snakes. The women fought stoutly, but could not kill the snakes. At last one of the women broke her fighting-stick, and immediately 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
