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 and set the countryside ablaze so that fire could not be removed again.
Kunmanggur sank into the water and became again the Rainbow Serpent. He fashioned stones into spirit children. Thereafter, when women wanted children, they would journey to the 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.
8
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.
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