Emu Man falls in love

by Yakiriya Molly Nangala, Lajamanu, 1984 

 

translated from Warlpiri with Barbara Gibson Nakamarra (1984, 1995) and edited for the CD-ROM Dream trackers (UNESCO, 2000) by Barbara Glowczewski

 

At Ngalikirlangu lived Emu, Yankirri, my Jukurrpa father. He was a single man hunter. One day he went eastwards, far, to Napperby cattle station, in the country of the Yanmadgeri people. He heard two Emus, a man and a woman, making a strange noise, humming like an engine! The emus are humming like that today, but my father said to himself,

'I don't like that,' and he went back to his country.

 

Another day he went north-west. I can't tell you what he found there, that is a secret. He had a lot of trouble and went back to Ngalikirlangu.

 

He left again, this time eastwards. He ran into a dry river-bed full of yunkurrmu mistletoe bushes. While he was eating the little red berries, he saw some footprints in the sand. Bending down to look at them he recognised the tracks of a woman, an Emu-woman, who, like him, had come to eat the berries. This happened at Jurlpungu, site of the mala Wallaby Dreaming.

 

 

2. The tracks

 

Emu goes back to his country, my country, he never stops thinking of that unknown woman. Finally he returns to the place where he had seen her footprints and follows her tracks. After a rest at Yarlukarri he arrives at Walinpirri. 

 

She is there, his right skin, Napangardi. He has been walking on her tracks. Together they go northwards and settle down at Ngungkurrmanu. They live there for a long time hunting in the area. Then they go further North, crossing the Yawakiyi Dreaming at Warntapari. After they quench their thirst in the big swamp over there.

'Let's go walkabout!' says Emu to his wife.

 

They followed the Yawakiyi Plum Dreaming.

 

 

3. Preparing the Miyaka Nuts

FILM

 

After their arrival at Warnirrijarra, they found some bushes with miyaka nuts. They picked them and piled them up on the hollow log of a tree used for making spears. They rubbed the nuts against each other to get rid of their white skin. Then they made them jump up on the log so that the wind blew away the dangerous substance that can make you blind. Then they crushed the nuts into a yellow powder and poured water onto it and made a paste which they ate.

 

At that place where Yankirri prepared the nuts for the first time, two rocks are the bodies of the couple bending over the two waterholes called Kirirparnta. We sing the miyaka nuts for Yankirri Jukurrpa, they are the karnta, women, and their yellow powder is karntawarra, like the yellow ochre we use for body painting.

 

 

4. Parnta and Yankirrijarra

 

Emu and his wife travelled again, passing by Nyukulku, site of the Wampana Wallaby Dreaming, and they stopped at Parnta, in the country of the Gall Dreaming. A big eucalyptus tree is marking their passage by the creek.

 

Further North they found a big waterhole where the Ngarrka Men Dreaming had come out of the ground with young marlulu from Kurlungalinpa going south-west. Kardiya call the place 'Six Miles' (that is, from Lajamanu). The place belongs to Emu and is called Yankirrijarra.

 

Once again Emu and his wife collected some nuts growing on bushes which were much higher than those down south. That's why we call them kinjirrka, long legs. These are similar to the female miyaka nuts, but they are male. 

 

 

5. The Emu Eggs

 

'This is a good place to settle down,' says Emu to his wife when they arrived at Parlakuna.

 

And she lays some eggs. He makes a big nest for her so she can brood on them. He takes off to get some food. He brings her ngardanykinyi berries and marnikiji black grapes.

Then it is his turn to sit on the eggs to brood while his wife goes in search for other things to eat. She brings him murnturru berries.

 

Father Emu is brooding the eggs. He is brooding and brooding, and with his foot he touches the shells one after the other and they open up. The nest is full of little emus. Mother Emu leaves again to look for berries and grapes for her children.

 

 

6. The salt water

 

As soon as the new-borns can walk, the whole family goes into the country of the Kurintji tribe. Two of the children, a boy and a girl, went underground there at a secret place and they came out at the salt water, and the sea by the town of Darwin.

 

The youngest of the family, Jampujampu the left-handed, travelled with one of his brothers. He was running without looking and pierced his neck on a little tree. We can't go close to that place, and I can't tell you about the secret mark it has got, due to Jampujampu's death. His brother turned his head, followed his tracks and went around the tree. Then he left towards the salt water, the sea by the the town of Port Keats where he sank in for ever. This part of the Emu Dreaming belongs to other tribes, like the Wardaman who live in Port Keats.

 

The rest of the family went inside the ground at the Parlakuna swamp. The children spread out in all directions on underground routes. And the parents went back south to Ngunkurrmanu, the country where they both had been living before undertaking this long journey.

 

 

Yawulawulu

by Nelly Napanangka, Lajamanu, 1984

 

translated from Warlpiri with Barbara Gibson Nakamarra (1984, 1995) and edited for the CD-ROM Dream trackers (UNESCO, 2000) by Barbara Glowczewski

 

STORY 1

Puurda came from the East, from Yawulawulu and he travelled to Talala. The vines were coming up and the roots were shooting underground, many of them, going towards Lajamanu. Small yams came out. These yams, the Japanangka, Napanangka, Japangardi and Napangardi saw all the Wirntiki Stone Curlew, and they went down in the ground. As they were going, the ground became soft.

 

STORY 2

They went to Munju. The food was spreading everywhere. The Yam people looked back at their country. My Dreaming, my Jukurrpa had grown everywhere, the Yam from Yawulawulu that belongs to the Japanangka, Napanangka, Japangardi and Napangardi.

 

STORY 3

My Jukurrpa also went to Yumurrpa. Not really the yam, but the yuparli leaves that gave birth to new yams. The root grew underground and went to Jukakarinya. Yam looked at the other one from far. He went on. The people from Yawulawulu continued their way, crossing Talala. Then they stopped for ever. They were tired from trying to go all over, everywhere. Our fathers Japanangka and Japangardi stopped. That is why Yumurrpa is not owned by us but by Jupurrurla, Jakamarra, Napurrurla and Nakamarra.

 

 

DREAMING

A VIRTUAL AND ACTUAL TIME-SPACE

 

A matrix of possibilities

 

The Warlpiri, like their neighbours, use the word Jukurrpa to denote the Ancestral totemic Beings, the myths that tell of their journeys and associated itineraries. The Dreaming is not a simple mythical Golden Age annihilating time, in which Aborigines would be fixed in a repetitive cycle. Rather, it is a space-time, a kind of permanence in movement, that integrates innovations by means of a pre-existing logical processes.

 

Innovations, which take the form of new rituals, new geographical landmarks and new systems of alliance, are part and parcel of the reproduction of society. Consequently, Dreaming brings about a dynamic process in the group, making it possible to maintain both an irreducible specification and a continuously renewed link between mythical and ritual elements and society. This is why Aborigines themselves consider the Dreaming to be their Law. It is a matter, not of a set of rules, but of an active process of forging social identity.

 

The Dreaming is a programme — not a stock of remembered models for organising society, but a matrix of combinatory possibilities.

 

Excerpt from Barbara Glowczewski, 1989.

 

 

The memory of the earth

 

All the sacred sites that Aboriginal people protect today are for them the traces, tracks or metamorphosis of the bodies of Ancestral Beings. These travellers with hybrid forms wandered on the earth before the humans, and they live for ever in what Australians now call the Dreamtime or the Dreaming. These expressions are often not well understood and are mistaken for a mythical time which would refer to an original past of the world. But with Aboriginal myths, one can see that they are not so much stories about the origin of things, as statements about a movement of transformations. These transformations, far from being restricted to an ancient mythical past, constitute in fact an eternal dynamic which, for the Aborigines, continues to act in the present the Ancestral Beings are not just simple mythical ancestors; they are active principles who participate in the becoming of things.

 

Aborigines do not live out of time or ignore the difference between past, present and future. Their perspective is different; it is closer to current astrophysical concepts in which time is a variation of space. Indeed, Dreamtime or Dreaming is a parallel time-space linked to life on earth in a relation of feedback.

 

Dreaming is not only a parallel dimension. It is also the source of Law for humans since it contains all the words and images from the eternal Beings. Aboriginal people talk about the Dreamings in the plural to designate these Beings, the names or totems they inherit from them, and the mythical stories which tell of their journeys and are re-enacted in their rituals.

 

In the case of the central and western desert tribes, these Dreamings are also geographical itineraries or trails which mark the events of the totemic Beings from site to site in this sense the Dreaming is the Law decreed by the earth. The English word 'dreaming' translates different indigenous concepts from different languages, such as the concept Jukurrpa, used by several desert groups, and which means ‘dream’ in Warlpiri.

 

The confusion between the concept of Dreaming and the dream experience has given rise to many misunderstandings, for example, the false notion that Aborigines do not differentiate between dreams and life. It is true that they do not draw the same line between so-called reality and dream, because dreams do not refer to the realm of the imaginary. In fact, people's dreams are read as a search for signs in the real world. People interpret dreams to guide themselves in everyday life, to read messages from the Ancestral Beings, to see and hear ritual innovations which take the form of new designs or songs, which are said to have been ‘forgotten’ and ‘found back’.

 

The Dreaming is thus a living memory that is collective and cosmological as well as personal. The dream has its own dimension and seems to maintain an active relation with the tangible world. Human acts are part of a ‘philosophy’ which states not a predestination, or an eternal repetition, but the rules of a game in which men and women are caught their freedom consists in playing different games which shape and transform their individual and collective life. In this sense, the Law of the Dreaming is a game whose rules are not immutable but can be modified within some limits.

 

Excerpt from Barbara Glowczewski, 1988.

 

 

A permanence in motion

 

Unlike the creation myths of other cultures, including Genesis, Australian myths are not about creation or the origin of things, but about making or transforming potential life and forms into real ones.

 

In many cases the totemic species are described not in the process of acquiring their actual features, but only as having been named by the heroes. Instead of being concerned by questions of the origins and ends of things, Australian Aborigines are concerned with metamorphoses and reproducibility.

 

From the Aboriginal point of view, named things and sites reveal the active presence of the Ancestral Beings, while man's association with these names and places reproduces the social order independently of the passing generations. In the final analysis, the power to name and localise does not belong either to mythic beings or to humans, but to something which existed before them and coexists with them, even though only the Beings can designate it. It is a permanence in motion, Jukurrpa, the Dreaming, represented by eternal heroes capable of turning their bodies into earthly matter, making themselves into unattainable images of a process of transformation.

 

Excerpt from Barbara Glowczewski, 1988, 1991.

 

 

Spirit-children

 

When people dream, their pirlirrpa leaves the body to travel in the time-space of different Dreamings and meet the Eternal Ancestors who are embodied in the sacred sites. The dreamers can receive from them revelations about the Dreaming-name and conception-place of a child to be born. Warlpiri people say that everybody embodies a Kurruwalpa, that is, a spirit-child who waits in a specific place to be born since the time he or she was dropped there by the Dreaming Ancestors. When a person passes by the tree, the rock or the waterhole where a Kurruwalpa lives, the spirit can choose that person as his or her future mother or father. Warlpiri people say that Kurruwalpa are ngampurrpa, ‘desirous’ of life. It is believed that at death Kurruwalpa return to their place and wait to be reborn again. Women and men Elders talk about the activities of their own preborn Kurruwalpa as of themselves. Most parents can recount dreams revealing the future Kurruwalpa identity of a son, a daughter or another relative (Barbara Nakamarra, May Napaljarri, Betty Nungarrayi).

 

Men and women can also dream of old and new songs, designs and dances coming from different totemic Beings Fire, Yam, Stone Curlew, Possum, Emu and Rain.