In contrast to the picture conveyed by Dark Emu, the greater part of Aboriginal traditional methods of reproducing plant and animal species was not through physical cultivation or conservation but through spiritual propagation. This included speaking to the spirits of ancestors at resource sites, carrying out ‘increase rituals’ at special species-related sites, singing resource species songs in ceremonies, maintaining rich systems of totems for various species that were found in the countries of the totem-holders, and handling food resources with reverence.
It is clear from the evidence in this chapter that the practice of the spiritual propagation of species through ritual acts at particular sites ran from northernmost Queensland south, through southern Queensland and New South Wales to the lower Murray River, across most of the arid zone to the fertile south-west, and northwards through Western Australia to the Kimberley and parts of the Top End and the Gulf of Carpentaria.
The traditional rituals through which the ensuring of fertility took place are often called ‘increase ceremonies’ by scholars, although it is not an ideal term, as I discuss below. They are about maintenance, not the creation of more than usual.
The rituals were performed at particular locations. They have been reported from vast areas of mainland Australia, but not quite all of it. They were, however, pervasive. The most common features of the ‘increase ceremonies’ were the addressing of the totemic being in the site, and the ‘throwing’ or broadcasting of materials such as mud, sand, dust or stones so as to impregnate places elsewhere with the spiritual seeds of the resource, which would then become abundant once more. They were concerned with dissemination. Anthropologist Ken Maddock wrote:
hAn outsider might form the impression that Aborigines were parasites upon nature. On the Aboriginal view, however, nature and society were mutually dependent. The famous ‘increase’ rites performed in much of Australia were held to sustain the fertility of the species for which they were performed. In some areas rites specific to the various species were unknown, but men addressed themselves to a power or powers identified with fertility as such …1
Casual treatment of resources was much frowned upon by Wik people of western Cape York Peninsula, with whom I lived in the 1970s in bush camps and outstations. Newly killed animals were often spoken to with pity, if not regret. The carcasses of flying foxes that had been eaten had to be laid in a straight line on a piece of bark and disposed of carefully, not just hurled away. One day our party had dug yams at Uthuk Aweyn and as we were leaving the patch some teenage girls were making jokes about the long yam tubers they held. Senior man Alan Wolmby scolded them, saying in effect ‘Ke’a! Inth aak aweyn, wiintha!’ ‘Don’t do that! That’s something important, sacred/dangerous!’ Sculptures of these yams played a role in ceremonies, including house openings for the deceased (see below). Reverencing food sources was therefore not confined to special ‘Story Places’ where species were spiritually propagated by ritual acts.
Long yam carving for house-opening ceremony, near Aurukun, 1976. Francis Yunkaporta (holding yam), Peter Peemuggina and James Kalkeeyorta.
Spiritual propagation sites are common in both eastern and western CYP. In eastern Cape York, between the Olive and Stewart rivers, anthropologist Athol Chase, assisted by colleagues, mapped thirty clan estates and hundreds of sites with traditional owners in the wet season of 1975–76. He later described clusters of initiation sites in these estates, some of which were ‘manipulated through ritual’ to control the movements of species. For example:
At Kapikam muta (‘blue-tailed mullet’ [+ sit-down place]) for example, beating the rock with branches and ‘calling’, after putting underarm sweat on the site, will cause the species to congregate, but only when they are near at hand on their seasonal spawning run.2
A similar combination of speech and sweat as means of interaction with a sentient landscape is a major feature of anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli’s book Labor’s Lot, about the people of Belyuen in the Northern Territory.3 In both regions, but not universally in Australia, sweat communicates to the spirits of the Old People who you are; they are not just able to listen to you but also to smell you. In both regions sweat is often stirred into water while one is announcing or being announced as present. Your smell identifies whether or not you are a familiar of that place, and whether or not you belong to the place.
Anthropologist Lauriston Sharp, who lived in bush camps in western CYP in the early 1930s, recorded and described eighty spiritual propagation centres in the Coleman-Mitchell rivers area.4 He referred to ‘that aspect of their ritual life which theoretically supports the food economy, the annual ceremonies to increase natural species including those used as food’.5
Ursula McConnel, pioneering anthropologist of the Wik region to the north of the Mitchell River, published much detail on the sites where these rituals took place in the Wik countries.6 In Wik-Mungkan these spiritual centres are called awa (McConnel’s ‘auwa’) (see opposite). This is one example:
The Wik-nantyara have a yam auwa, where yams are said to have originated, consisting of a waterhole in a little creek which always remains sweet. It is said that the spirits of the dead go down into the waterhole and stop the salt water coming in to spoil the yams. Every year when rains begin, the ceremony of smoothing out the mud in the waterhole takes place. Mud is thrown about the sides of the waterhole and the place is tidied up. This ensures a good crop of yams in the coming season.7
In Wik traditions, McConnel recorded that species conservation went hand in hand with spiritual species reproduction:
These auwa or totem-centres are sometimes the nests and breeding places of the birds, animals and plants concerned …
Totemic centres, Wik region.
There is always water near by in the shape of river, creek, lagoon, waterhole, swamp or well at the bottom of which the pulwaiya [totemic being] resides and into which the dead of the clan are believed to go. This is perhaps why plants and animals are protected near the auwa of their representative totem and why the killing of an animal or the injuring of a plant near its auwa is not only strictly forbidden but believed to be attended by grave consequences.8
These were ritual acts, often including songs, that caused the activation of totemic sites by ‘stirring up’, ‘waking up’ or ‘spreading/throwing’ the essence of the species represented at a particular site.9 Not all such sites were to do with edible plants or animals. There are also sites for spreading diarrhoea, itchiness, blind boils, pre-seminal fluid, love affairs, greed, and so on. I have recorded many on site myself, as have colleagues. Our work mainly of the period 1969–95 yielded the mapping of fifty-three Wik totemic sites that were specifically used to reproduce and propagate a comprehensive range of animals, plants, human states, and natural phenomena.10
The most widespread activity that both women and men engage in at these sites of spiritual propagation in the Wik region is talking, often in a loud clear voice, and usually in the language of the location or a language its traditional owners would have understood. They are addressing the spirits of the site’s Old People. To address the spirits at such places and others is in Wik-Mungkan wik thaw, and in English ‘to talk language’. They address the spirits of their Old People both reverently and demandingly. This is demand-sharing with ancestors.11
A Wik barramundi maintenance site is shown in the photo opposite. This is a Story Place (eemoeth in Wik-Ngathan; awa in Wik-Mungkan) or sacred totemic site left behind by the Pungk Apelech brothers, who found barramundi (moenchenh) here as they created the spiritual landscape and its clan countries and languages in the northern coastal part of the Wik region. It is 2 kilometres inland from the Gulf of Carpentaria between the Kirke and Knox rivers, on the edge of a vast seasonal freshwater wetland. The focal point of the eemoeth is the two wells partly visible behind the tree. To ensure the reproduction of barramundi in the region, a person has to chop cuts into the trunk of the tree. This was described when we were there on 9 October 1977 by Isobel Wolmby, the senior member of the mapping party. The slender Ray Wolmby took a tomahawk and headed for the tree. He was pulled up sharply by Isobel, who said no, the ‘thrower’ of the barramundi site had to be thickset so the barramundi coming up would be nice and fat. So instead she ordered her more rotund brother, Rupert Gothachalkenin, to carry out the rite.
Barramundi maintenance site Moenchenh-nhiin, Wik region, 1977.
A different example from the same region is the magpie goose egg maintenance site between Love River and Knox River (see overleaf, top). The same kind of sympathetic logic applied to this engine of reproduction. While a senior man would cut a blaze in a nearby tree (see overleaf, bottom), the main ‘throwing’ of the site had to be done by women of proven fertility who had a strong link to the site. The swale (sand dune depression) holds many baler shells, which represent the eggs of the magpie goose. This large bird nests seasonally in untold thousands on the vast wetlands next to this sand ridge. On the occasion we mapped the site, on 28 October 1976, Marjorie Yunkaporta, a woman who had already borne nine children and whose paternal grandmother had been a traditional owner of the country in which the place was located, serviced the goose egg site. She did this by throwing debris and grass away from the ‘eggs’ (baler shells), rearranging the shells, and calling on deceased ancestors to once again supply goose eggs.12
Magpie goose egg maintenance site, Yaad, Wik region, 1976.
Johnny Lak Lak Ampeybegan cuts a blaze in a tree at a goose egg maintenance site, Wik region, 1976.
In the case of the moulting ducks species maintenance site Minhwiyumpen Nyiin on the upper Knox River, CYP, the increase rite requires women who have borne many children to chop the trunks of pandanus trees with an axe. As they do so they call out the names of swamps in the area. Mary Walmbeng and Dorothy Pootchemunka performed this rite on site in 1986, and it was recorded by David Martin (see page 2 of the picture section).13
Some Wik species maintenance sites could be equally ‘thrown’ by women and men. This included flora as well as fauna. For example, May-kuthel-aw is a species maintenance site for two varieties of swamp grass bulbs, on a sand ridge inland from Cape Keerweer. As part of the maintenance ritual, both men and women would dig out the hole with their feet while calling out to the ancestors.14
Cessation of species maintenance rites could cause the supply of that species to dry up. For example, bush-reared Wik woman Mary Walmbeng told Martin in 1986 that the yellow nonda fruit (may po’al; the sweet drink made from it is called may ow) had ceased being available in the Pu’iyang area since maintenance rites ceased being performed at Miilp (upper Knox River, Cape York).15
Among Wik people, there was also a customary but non-ritual practice carried out at swamps that was aimed at ensuring a big goose-egg-laying season. The first eggs laid at the start of the season were not collected. If they were, the other geese would be deterred from creating their nests there. As is so often the case, this example shows how spiritual maintenance and practical resource management combined to characterise the classical Aboriginal economy.
In the case of sacred sites with plant Dreamings, these rituals might be referred to metaphorically as spiritual gardening. In the Wik region, Koe’, on the north side of the Kirke River, is such a Story Place. It is a maintenance centre for the reproduction of may ka’err, the hairy yam (Dioscorea bulbifera). Koe’ is a tiny but dense scrub on a treeless plain. It is in such scrubs that yams of this kind were dug, leaving the stems intact to reproduce another time; I saw this done in the 1970s. These particular yams could be stored in the ground for several months, eking out the supply from Onchen, the season (roughly March–April) of hairy yam ripening immediately after the wet season, well into the year.16
Once again, the spiritual and the physical are here combined to create a unified system of resource maintenance. In many more cases, however, Wik maintenance rituals are the standalone and privileged means of keeping the country rich, with no physical accompaniment, and most resources were not stored.
In the 1970s I lived many months at outstations and bush camps in the Wik country south of Aurukun. My teachers were mainly people who had been born and raised in the bush, some to full adulthood. Apart from the practice of leaving yam stalks undisturbed while the tubers were removed (see Chapter 6 for more on this), I never heard of or saw any older practices that could be even remotely described as horticulture, agriculture or farming in the commonsense way those terms are used. Nor did McConnel in her time with people there, including living for many weeks beyond the reach of colonisation, in the 1920s and 1930s. Wik people did not grind seeds. McConnel’s incredibly comprehensive collection of Wik artefacts17 and my own careful reinvestigation of Wik material culture18 revealed no hoes or ploughs, not even any grindstones, and indeed almost no stone tools of any kind apart from axe heads imported from far away. However, I saw many sacred sites ‘thrown’ (thee’enh) so as to propagate the species they held as totemic beings.
Further south in Queensland, during her 1934 field work at Cherbourg, anthropologist Caroline Tennant Kelly recorded ‘[n]umerous accounts of increase ceremonies’. These related mainly to central and southern Queensland. She published three examples.19
The first was a rainmaking site in Kabi Kabi country. A clever man would cut pieces of the stem of a rare vine growing next to a cave on Mount Urah, and talk to Biral (the ‘all-father’). He would then throw a piece of the vine stem in the direction of the territory of friendly neighbouring tribes, calling their names as he did so.
Near Maryborough, the pendulous moss hanging down from a particular tree was burned by old men in order to make rain. On the Nebine River the first native bee was created by a bat, who then chased it all around Kuwamu country until it came to the cave Ungwari. From then on, the increase rite for bees was always performed at that cave.
In the 1950s, Gaiarbau (aka Willie MacKenzie, born c1873), a Duungidjawu man from south-east Queensland, recorded fulsome details about his people’s traditions with Lindsey Page Winterbotham, a GP. In his language, spiritual maintenance sites were called mowar, and Gaiarbau recorded details of maintenance rites for rain, kangaroos, carpet snakes, honey and eaglehawks:20 ‘All such ceremonies used to be performed a few days before they moved camp; and they expected, when in due course they returned to this old camping ground, that their requests would have been granted, and food would again be plentiful.’21
Anthropologist Rex Radcliffe-Brown did fieldwork in eastern Australia in the early twentieth century and found more such sites and rites in northern New South Wales in the countries of nine different linguistic groups. In Yukumbil (Yugambeh) these sites were called djurbil, and in Kumbaingeri (Gumbaynggirr) mirer or mirera; in Yegera (Yaygirr) they were yerkari.22 The maintenance sites he recorded were for kangaroo, wattle grub, native bear, locust, big lizard, opossum, wild honey, sleep, rain-serpent, rain, yams, hot weather, cold weather, wind, babies, emu, kangaroo rat, dingo, crab, codfish, perch, oyster, an unidentified shellfish species, an edible fruit called girguru (Gumbaynggirr), old-man kangaroo, female kangaroo, joey, storms, diarrhoea, dysentery, tiger snake, death adder, ghosts, edible grub, duck and dew-fish.23 In a study of the literature on Aboriginal ceremonies in New South Wales I once located a further nine literature references to what I called there ‘increase ceremonies’.24
Further south again, AW Howitt, writing about south-eastern Australia as he knew it in the nineteenth century, called spiritual maintenance ceremonies ‘charms to influence food-supply’.25 Increase sites appear, however, not to have been a salient institution in the Victorian region. Ian Keen’s 2004 survey discussed such places and rites for the Western Desert Pitjantjatjara people, the Wiil and Minong people of south-west Western Australia, the Sandbeach people (eastern Cape York) and the Ngarinyin of the Kimberley,26 but the Kŭnai people of Gippsland apparently lacked them. Through his role as an expert witness in a native title claim in Gippsland, Keen has comprehensive knowledge of Kŭnai traditions.
Further to the west in the south-east of Australia, Ronald Berndt recorded sacred rituals of the lower Murray River that were attended by both women and men, many of which he said were ‘of increase intent’.27
In a far more trying environment, the Western Desert region of Central Australia (see illustration on page 142 in Chapter 10), similar sites were described by anthropologist Robert Tonkinson as the ‘ritual “technology” through which [Gibson Desert men] claim to exert a measure of control over resource production and weather conditions’.28 Elsewhere in the desert country, anthropologist Nicolas Peterson referred to the equivalent ceremonies, including the mulga seed ceremony filmed by Roger Sandall, as rituals of ‘continued reproduction’.29 Examples of southern Western Desert ‘increase centres’ were published by Ronald and Catherine Berndt in their introductory text.30
The Lake Eyre region of Australia’s south-eastern deserts was another zone where spiritual propagation sites were activated. For example, near Kanowna is a cave containing bones of the extinct diprotodon, and the cave is a ‘sanctuary for the increase of the large carpet snake’ or woma. The ritual involved men singing songs within the hearing of women, and both women and men carried out actions at the site.31 There was also an ‘increase’ aspect to the emu cult ceremony called mindiri. Yawarawarrka people told AP Elkin in 1930 ‘that the due performance of the ceremony caused the emus to lay eggs and also to get fat, so that it is in some sense an increase rite’.32 The two places he recorded as sites where this ceremony was carried out, Cutrabelbo and Kudadjiri, were themselves mura (Dreaming) sites.33
In the same region, seeds of wirra (Acacia salicina) were pounded, one at a time, by special stones at a place where this wattle species was desired to be growing, and performers danced until the supply of seeds was used up.34 Another means of propagating A. salicina was to use a special white stone: ‘It represented the white inside of the seed and was planted where the wirra tree was wanted.’35 The symbolism was drawn from the germination of seeds, but the means of propagation was ritual use of stones, not the horticultural use of seeds.
Anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt, in his major study with the northwestern desert Warlpiri people in the 1950s, wrote that in addition to the effects of specific ‘increase ceremonies’ at particular sites, the ‘revelatory’ lodge ceremonies had an effect on species reproduction no matter where they were performed. The pre-circumcision kangaroo ceremonies affected the numbers of kangaroos everywhere in Warlpiri country.36 He added:
It is worth noting here that the term ‘increase’, although commonly used in the literature in relation to such rituals, is not strictly accurate. The participants are simply concerned to maintain the supplies of natural species at their usual level, to support the normal order of nature. Thus, rain ceremonies are not performed until late spring, when the first heavy cumulo-nimbus clouds appear in the northwest. The men do not believe that they can force the rain to fall at any time of the year: instead, they try to ensure that it will come in the appropriate season.37
Some languages contain special vocabulary for these rituals. For example, one of the Warlpiri verbs is ngarrmi-rni (transitive), which has been glossed as ‘to increase (species) by ritual’.38 In the Githabal language of the Warwick-Woodenbong district (southern Queensland, northern New South Wales), to cite another linguistic example, there is a specific term for ‘increase corroboree’, birrbayn.39
Botanist of Central Australia Peter Latz prefers the term ‘maintenance ceremonies’ for these forms of resource management:
To ensure the continued existence of these plants and animals, ceremonies must be carried out at these sites. These rituals are usually referred to as ‘increase ceremonies’, but as this term implies a progressive unnatural increase of the particular organisms, the term ‘maintenance ceremony’ is probably more apt. Maintenance ceremonies are regularly carried out throughout much of Central Australia for most of the plants discussed in this book.40
As we have seen, maintenance ceremonies and physical resource management were not mutually exclusive. To cite another example, Norman Tindale recorded that Pitjantjatjara people of the Western Desert performed ceremonies to ensure the birth of dingo puppies around May and June, but at the same time refrained from hunting the puppies so that ‘these unmolested dingo puppies become fat and soon provide a rich food for the winter months’.41
Among the most extensive descriptions of species maintenance rituals are those of the Arrernte area of Central Australia by Spencer and Gillen.42 They include witchetty grub, emu, mulga manna (lerp), water, kangaroo, irriakura tuber, longicorn beetle grub, bandicoot, hakea, plum, euro, lizard and snake. The various Arrernte words used to name these spiritual propagation rites include the verb ‘throwing’.43 This practice of spiritual broadcasting of species and other phenomena by ‘throwing’ is widespread in the record of classical Aboriginal Australia. In some cases, as described by Spencer and Gillen, species were not hunted until they had become abundant following the relevant ‘throwing’ ceremony. Yet again, spiritual propagation was combined with physical conservation.
Anthropologist Petronella Vaarzon-Morel was with Lower Arrernte women in the Simpson Desert in 2001 when they were at a sacred sugar lerp (manna) site. They cleaned around it and then rubbed the rocks in order to ensure continued supply of the lerp. North-west of there, she saw Warlpiri women rubbing sacred rocks at a rain site in order to bring rain. In both cases the women observed the strict protocol of ‘introducing themselves to the ancestral spirits of the country’.44
On the South Australian side of the Simpson Desert, people used to make representations of emu eggs using gypsum, the same material they used for widows’ caps (see below). The Old People would ‘sing’ these eggs at a ceremony intended to start the emus nesting.45 They also made gypsum representations of duck eggs.46 One side of such a coin is the maintenance of fertility of certain species for the immediate future; the other side is the conservation of the species over the long term.
Gypsum emu eggs sung to start emus nesting, Simpson Desert, South Australia.
The linguist and anthropologist TGH Strehlow described how the Arrernte people of Central Australia, among whom he had grown up at Hermannsburg Mission, prohibited all hunting and food gathering anywhere within the ‘sacred precincts’ of totemic centres. He referred to this as ‘the decisive economic influence of the [sacred sites] as functioning as game reserves within each [clan estate]’.47 He did not, however, have evidence that the sacred sites themselves ‘had intentionally been created as game reserves’.48
There again is the principle of merging the sacred domain with a pragmatic effect—a principle repeatedly applied in classical Australia and in some regions still applied.
Legendary ethnographer Daisy Bates (1859–1951) took a special interest in the spiritual maintenance ceremonies of the people of the south-west of Western Australia.49 She recorded rites for the reproduction of swans and swan eggs in the Gingin district, and for salmon in the Busselton district; for honey-bearing banksia flowers and edible jamwood gum in the Swan and Pinjarra districts, and for possums;50 and for kangaroo in the area north of Lake Nabberu.51 A long edible bean was increased by visiting the bean’s growing location in a dream, biting a bean and throwing the pieces about.52 In the Meekatharra district there had been a site for maintaining plain turkeys, but the custodians died out, and through lack of the rituals the turkeys were dying out as well.53
In the Kimberley region, Phyllis Kaberry found in the 1930s that spiritual propagation sites and rites were an important part of Aboriginal economy and religion, as also was ritual rainmaking.54 Of the former she said:
As the totemic ancestors passed through the country they left stones or sometimes a tree, each of which is supposed to contain the guniŋ [totemic essence] of some animal, bird, fish, reptile, tuber, and so on. These sites are called bud-bud at Forrest River, and wulwiny among the Lunga. By rubbing one of these or striking it with bushes and uttering a spell, the guniŋ will go forth and cause the species with which it is associated to go forth and multiply. The Aborigine [in this region] has no granaries, but he has, if we may use the term, these ‘spiritual’ storehouses, in that they insure him against starvation, and give him a sense of security and confidence in regard to his food-supply for the coming year.55
Kaberry also found that both women and men visited these ‘increase centres’ in that region.56
In a different part of the Kimberley, the western coastal area, species maintenance sites were known in Nyikina as malaji:
They are locations believed to be imbued with the spirits of specific natural species, plants, birds, animals, reptiles and insects, and also phenomena such as rain, storms, lightning, floodwaters or cyclones. The people in whose land these sites fall are responsible for the ceremonies that ensure that beneficial results lead to the seasonal renewal of game species and important plants or rain …57
Radcliffe-Brown recorded a large number of these maintenance rituals and sites in the northern parts of Western Australia in the early twentieth century. In one case they were spread over a large area from the western Kimberley in the north to the Murchison River in the south.58
Fellow anthropologists Ralph Piddington and AP Elkin separately published quite detailed accounts of ‘increase ceremonies’ in the Karadjari (Karajarri) area, just south of the Kimberley in the La Grange district of Western Australia.59 One of them was for the edible ground nut yarrinyarri or nalgoo, more widely known as yelka.60 In the photo opposite, women who have picked up pebbles from the site, where the pebbles represent yarrinyarri nuts, are throwing them to form heaps on the ground.61 The dust blows away as they do so. This is done when the westerly wind can carry the dust, so that ‘the spirit yerinyeri may be disseminated over the land’.62 It was also reportedly a general Aboriginal practice to avoid gathering these nuts at the time of year when they were germinating to create new plants.63 Yet again the spiritual worked hand in hand with the physical.
‘Increase ceremony‘ for yarrinyarri (nutgrass), north-west Australia.
South of there, in the Pilbara region, Radcliffe-Brown recorded many totemic increase centres in 1911 and referred to them by the local Kariyarra word talu (thalu), which has become used by scholars of other regions as well:
The talu is a spot set apart for the performance of totemic ceremonies … The purpose of the ceremonies is said to be to increase the supply of the animal, plant, or other object with which it is connected … The women of the clan take part in the ceremonies as well as the men.64
The talu sites were located where the relevant animal or plant was found to occur more abundantly.65
After I mapped over 200 named sites on the lower Daly River with Malak Malak people in 1979–80, it was clear to me that spiritual propagation or ‘increase’ sites, as against general fertility promoted by ceremonies, were rare in the area.66 We visited only one such site. At Wani-Woenoe, a yabby Dreaming place, Queenie Midinyan and Kitty Waliwararra collected rocks as they spoke to the place and identified themselves. They took the rocks to Wuliyana (Horseshoe Billabong) and activated the yabby totemic essence there by throwing them in. Senior Malak Malak man Jimmy Tapnguk told me the ritual was to ‘make ’im plenty prawn come’.67
Elements of ‘increase’ are reported for western Arnhem Land by the Berndts68 but again they are not prominent. South-west of there, Francesca Merlan reported a sacred blue-tongue lizard site on the upper Katherine River that was used for ensuring ‘fish and other bounty’ by speaking to it in the ecological agent’s language.69
In the Maningrida region north-east of there, Jon Altman described large regional ceremonies as having ‘perceived maintenance and increase functions’: ‘Regular performance of ceremonies is essential for the maintenance of the resource base and indirectly for the biological survival and reproduction of clan groups.’70
By contrast, for another part of north-central Arnhem Land, Lily Gurambara has supplied details of multiple ritual acts aimed at propagating species.71 People go to sites associated with particular plants and animals and throw stones, mud or sand, calling out to the beings to ‘Go! Go to [Place X]!’ The named places are specific sites in the clan countries (estates). Sand is thrown for stingrays, mud from the place Moyadjirrpa is thrown to propagate mussels, and soil from Dhuwa moiety estates is thrown to renew the crop of long yams. This practice occurs at places as far east as Milingimbi Island in Yan-nhangu country, which is at the western extremity of north-east Arnhem Land.
In south-eastern Arnhem Land the Nunggubuyu (Wubuy) people also practised the influencing of supply at specific sites, using a unique interjection to address the site: Jangu!72 This would happen at special ritual sites where diagrams were made in the ground. Although linguist Jeffrey Heath considered the abundance of food in the area rendered these rituals ‘relatively unimportant in this region’, he does not say unimportant compared to what, and the practice was there nonetheless.73 For example, a young man called Yurumura told Heath in Nunggubuyu:74
(About) that thing. They (people) go and look around. They catch no food. They go to that dreaming place. They go along and stop there. Then they break some branches (with leaves) off (trees).
They break off some branches. They go and do that, they rub the branches on it (dreaming, for example, a particular rock) with that branch. They rub it. They call out ‘Jangu! Make food abundant for us! Let there be a lot of food!’ They said that. ‘Jangu!’
Then they go into the water in a billabong. Then that (game, vegetable food, etc.) becomes abundant. They catch a lot of it. Long-necked tortoises, or sand goannas, or fish (whatever they want). There is plenty of food because they said ‘Jangu!’75
Nunggubuyu people also practised rainmaking and creating the northeast, north-west and south-east winds.76
For the region just north of there, north-east Arnhem Land, the evidence for specific increase sites and rites is at best sketchy, although there is a general fertility theme prevalent in major ceremonies, the key one having a name that is sensitive and that I do not use here. Lloyd Warner wrote of that region, where the clans have wide arrays of animal and plant totems:77
The Murngin [Yolngu] in their logic of controlling nature assume that there is a direct connection between social units and different aspects of nature, and that the control of nature lies in the proper control and treatment of social organization. Properly to control the social organization, the rituals must also be held which rid society of its uncleanliness. The society is disciplined by threat of what will happen to nature, the provider, if the members of the group misbehave. This brings on an identification of the social organization with nature, and they are treated as one and expressed as such in the rituals.78
He did not, however, report specific ‘increase sites’ at which species were propagated ritually.79
Ian Keen, who worked in the same region over forty years later, noted that ‘at least one “increase” site has been recorded in the country of Djinang-speakers’ at the western end of the region, but that the Yolngu philosophy was that the Dreaming (Wangarr), as one man put it, ‘provided game and vegetable foods as “a gift”’.80
Ronald Berndt, who carried out extensive fieldwork with people of north-east Arnhem Land and elsewhere, contrasted the localised and ‘compartmentalised’ increase ceremonies of Central Australia with ‘the northern pattern of general fertility’.81 Of those northern regions he also said:
The great fertility cults of the north and north-western-central part of the continent are designed to activate—through a combination of male and female elements—the natural forces surrounding man. Life is a continuing process of birth and re-birth, decay and revival, in nature, and in man. To ensure that this process is not jeopardized, spiritual intervention is necessary.82
South-east of that region, on the south-west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, John Bradley has long been learning from Yanyuwa and Garrwa people. They have taught him about the local spiritual propagation centres and how they were controlled by people of prestige who had the knowledge and local authority to activate them. The example he gives is the increase site for cycad nuts. He translated the following from Ida Ninganga, who told him this in 1988:
They would be asking him my brother, his name was Jayungkurri, they would ask him, ‘Make the cycad nuts come out in abundance, so next year there will be more, make it so there will be much food so we will not starve.’ He would say, ‘Mmm. Alright but you will get a sea turtle for me.’ They would say yes to that. Then he would go and get a stick, a small one, he would put his sweat from under his armpit on it, he would strike a cycad kernel and then he would throw it into the palm fronds, one here, another over there, yet another further away, all the way like that. When he threw the cycad kernel he would call out in the following manner, ‘Cycad kernel! Cycad kernel! May you become many! May there be an abundance!’ That was it, he would come back and they would give him a turtle, maybe a kangaroo, alright they would wait and next year there would be too many cycad nuts, nobody would go hungry …83
Given that the cycad nuts here are said to have been thrown onto the tops of plants already established, this ritual should not be confused with broadcast seeding.
Elsewhere Bradley said, ‘In many respects the Yanyuwa and Garrwa peoples do not see themselves as managers of the environment, but rather as peoples who are in constant apprehension and negotiation with it, following the Law established during the formative activities of the Dreaming.’84
Centres of what some would call ‘natural abundance’ are often given a special term in Australian languages, although the category ‘natural’ is foreign to Aboriginal tradition, given that everything is designed by the Dreaming. These places are called wirriwangkuma in Yanyuwa, which means ‘country where people can come together on a seasonal basis and expect to share in the resources that are abundant there’.85 Places of species abundance are referred to in Burarra as gumbomboli.86 In Wik-Ngathan a location with plentiful vegetable food is aak may mu’em.87 In the eastern Western Desert dialects, the prevalence of a species of plant in a particular area is indicated by doubling the name of the plant.88
While one might metaphorically call these places ‘gardens’, they are not sown plots, and they are not human creations.89 Their fertility is inherent.
East of Yanyuwa country is Mornington Island, where rituals are carried out by Lardil people ‘to ensure a supply or the increase of a resource’:
Kelly Bunbujee describes part of the increase ritual at the Wild Grape story place in his country: ‘… if you want black grapes to ripe, you brush them with bush, any bush’. Other ritual methods include hitting or poking a particular story place with a stick and shaking bushes at places. These actions are performed at the Barracuda, Mudcrab and Goanna story places, as well as many others.90
Paul Memmott has recorded eighty-six Lardil sacred sites ‘that were increase ritual centres for biological, meteorological and planetary phenomena’.91
Aboriginal traditional maintenance of the fertility of the biota in many different regions by spiritual means is ignored in Dark Emu. There is a brief mention of Keen’s 2004 study that showed how ‘economies were embedded in the prevailing kinship and cosmological systems of particular groups’ (page 136). Instead, Dark Emu’s focus is completely on material methods of species cultivation. Yet Aboriginal spiritual management of species fertility was clearly the dominant mode by comparison with physical species management practices. It was dominant, but the two were often complementary.
The earthly environment was not the only target of Aboriginal spiritual management. Nicolas Peterson witnessed a Warlpiri winter solstice ceremony in July 1972. The people sang songs before and after sunset: ‘The explicit purpose was to get the Milky Way to move across the sky more quickly and so reduce the length of the night.’92 I was once in a bush camp south of Cape Keerweer, CYP, where we were sleeping in the open, and an unseasonal thunderstorm began to break out during the night. The senior Wik man in the camp, Billy Landis Gothachalkenin, harangued the lightning and storm in no uncertain terms, to get it to stop. His sister Isobel Wolmby, on fearing approaching lightning during the wet season we spent based at Watha-nhiin Outstation in the same region, would take a sharp knife and slash the air in its direction, ‘cutting’ the dangerous flashes to make them stop.
And Wik people had a firm rule about digging wells: if people with no right to the country dug a well, it would cause cyclones supernaturally; and if anyone failed to refill a well after digging it, that also would bring down storms and cyclones. This influencing of the meteorological went hand in hand with a practice that prevented both trespass and the fouling of wells—another blending of the spiritual with the pragmatic.
Has Pascoe in Dark Emu simply reflected a modern Eurocentric attitude in which physical resource management is central, separable from the spiritual domain, and clearly the preferred medium for showing ‘advancement’ and ‘sophistication’ beyond ‘mere’ hunting, gathering, trapping and fishing?
If you’re looking for ‘sophisticated’ complexity in classical Aboriginal society, you will find it above all in the intricate webs of kinship and social structure; in the richness of the grammars of the languages; in the innumerable mythic narratives that bind place to place and engage the full range of the emotions; in the thousands of song series and the prodigious feats of memory by which they have been locally maintained; and in the elaborate intertwining of totemic religion, linguistic group organisation and land tenure systems.
In the deeper European past, species fertility was also heavily reliant on religious acts, such as sacrifices to the gods of various crops and domestic and wild animals, or monotheistic prayer. These mostly survive now only as folkloric memory gestures in the case of crop gods, or, more sincerely, in the case of, for example, Lutheran wheat farmers praying for rain. A secularised notion of Aboriginal cultivation, devoid of spiritual dimensions, did not exist in Australia before conquest.