-:- little vision tricksters -:-
-:- transforming spooks - aboriginal dreamtime beings -:-
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“When he’s bright, we have rain. He is happy, we keep renewing him, smiling all the time” So says David Mowaljarlai, an elder of the Wunambal people of Donkey Creek in the Kimberley Range in northwest Australia, in commenting upon a rock painting of Gunduran, the Rain Dreaming spirit of his tribe’s religious thinking. “When they are dull, they are unhappy and we have droughts because people don’t come to paint them.”
These words typify perfectly the mode of Aboriginal thinking about the world, and, in particular, of the wandjina spirits so central to Wunambal religious life. Wandjina don’t just act as mankind’s allies or even merely their ancestors.
Two boys saw Dumby the Owl one time, and caught him. They plucked his feathers and tossed him into the air, shouting with glee ‘See how you can fly!’ This enraged Wojin, a powerful wandjina, who brought on a flood that drowned all the people except the two boys, who hid in a kangaroo’s pouch and survived.
In another story, Dumby himself had gone to the Council of Wandjina to complain of his mistreatment. ‘You growl the two boys’ he had asked of them and they had gone to various places to growl, where it rained and there was a great flood, killing many.
And wherever they went to growl, they left their tracks, which became tracks which the people use today. And when finally they came to the munmurra clan of the Wunambal people, they gave them the Title to those tracks. These were the people who later came to paint the wandjina – including the Rain Wandjina – at the site of Donkey Creek.
They represent the history, the beginning, the journey and the reason of the track. We must pick up everything from this track: animal, history, painting, images. All this – land ownership, history, painting, and everything we do – was brought here together at Donkey Creek.
'Yorro Yorro’
When one comes to a place like Donkey Creek in the Kimberley Range , one realises that the place is the latest manifestation of some sixty thousand years of continuous Aboriginal tradition and transmission of information. Arrayed on numerous rock faces and overhangs are paintings of wandjina – large eyed Dreamtime spirits who are the agents of creation.
By this is not meant that one single act of creation occurred at the beginning of time, but that the wandjina were and are recurrently engaged in permanent acts of continuous creation. And so, these paintings, which at one time are depictions of wandjinas and the very wandjinas themselves that they are supposed to represent, are continuously renewed by the munmurra clan of the Wunambal people.
We see the Rain wandjina, the Cloud wandjina, a row of Track wandjinas, the Cuckoo People, and ever more arrayed throughout the region of Donkey Creek. They are the original spooks.
As with all Aboriginal Dreamtime beings, they can effectively be regarded as a kind of Creator-Protector, setting the world into a particular order then preserving it and ensuring its well being through further acts of creation throughout time. This function is greatly aided by the regularly repainting and renewing (read: ‘re-creating’) of the wandjina images, an act of magic which ensures the continued preservation and existence of the world and those essential things – such as rain – which allow mankind to prosper. But these spirit-spooks are much, much more than this.
Since they are the ‘property’ of a particular clan of the Wunambal, they also signify land ownership. Actually, this is not strictly true – it might be more properly said that the presence of these wandjina as owners of the land allow the munmurra clan to be the land’s (and thus the wandjinas’) custodians. The clan’s history, genealogy and centre of spiritual life are thus recorded at Donkey Creek, with the wandjina as magical creator-custodians of every tradition that the people possess.
Repainting these images is an act of magic, of thanksgiving, of creation, of history, of ownership, and of genealogy.
This is the most profound mandala of understanding that surrounds beliefs in spooks that we have seen so far. In Aboriginal culture, the spirit-spook is apotheosised into the Master of All, ever-present in magical creation, both the story of the land and the land itself, both the thing represented and the truth of the thing itself, the magic and the history, the creator and the created.
Here, in the most ancient of hunting cultures, do we find what possibly may turn out to be an image of some of the earliest renderings of human beliefs in spooks. The traditions of the Aborigines are thought to stretch backwards in a relatively unbroken yet continuously developing tradition to the time when mankind first set foot in Australia sixty millennia ago. Thus, the histories recorded at places such as Donkey Creek may well be truly ancient.
And what form, at the base, does this rendering of belief take? The landscape itself as the essence.
Aboriginal myths are so deeply rooted in the landscape that to retell a story without passing through the very environment where the events are held to take place is almost meaningless. The general form is that a Dreamtime Being wanders around the unblemished landscape performing a few tasks and then transforms – into a rock, a river, or a symbol of land ownership. Very often the reason for the transformation of the Being is little more than it was the right time. The river needed to come into being, the rock needed to manifest, or the land itself needed to take on ownership.
This is exactly what happens with the myth of Dumby given above – the owl’s tortures have very little direct bearing on the result of the story, but merely set in motion a series of events which lead to Donkey Creek being transformed from a pristine land to a place that is owned. And it is by the presence of the wandjina spooks that this occurs continuously up to the present day.
Aboriginal myths do not appear to seek to explain why the natural world is the way that it is – why a rock is situated in a particular place or why a river takes a particular course – but instead seem to observe that the world is that way, and then draw up ritual charters which seat the people perfectly within their natural and sacred environment. And the wandjina spooks are central to this function.
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
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