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 repelled the spirits. Grey reported the belief that one could fight off a nightmare by waving a firestick and reciting appropriate chants. Stokes told how fires warded off the malevolent spirits of the night. There were abundant myths to describe the consequences for those without fire.20
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
