1998
The night sky was not an unusual topic in narratives or myth cycles. It was an extension or specific elaboration of the landscape, deemed especially significant in places because many of the creative ancestral beings, having performed or enacted their dramas on earth, had withdrawn to the sky and were believed to be eternally represented there. However, sky-residing ancestral beings were intrinsically linked to earthly forms and vice versa.
Many of the narratives recorded actual events or activities, large and small, routine and extraordinary. Each area, clan and language group had its own, albeit interconnected, sets or cycles of narratives, each with its own songs, dances, rituals, art and decoration. So the stories that have survived and made their way into modern literary forms are but a few, not unlike fragmentary parchment papers long dispersed from ancient texts. They are parts of larger narrative cycles that sought not only to describe and record, but also to inspire, torment and comfort. They gave meaning, passion and significance to each and every life and life-form. They acted as analogy, parable and metaphor, their symbolic meanings changing, re-charging and re-forming with different contexts and settings. According to American cosmologist Harrison, ‘myths come to us as a legacy of priceless gems prized from their cosmic settings. Usually a myth has been recut and remounted more than once in the course of time. A full understanding of myth requires the reconstruction of the universe in which it originated, even of the intermediate universes that modified and transmitted it, and an accurate interpretation is rarely if ever possible.’
Myths, like the people who inhabit them, also belonged to the environment or country from which they came. David Lewis describes how he became aware of this: ‘Travelling with Loritja (Luritja) in their own country . . . practically every place had its Dreaming, its story, its associated subsections and appropriate ceremonials. Most rock formations and waters were stations on long mythological tracks. With Wintinna Mick in the Simpson Desert the position differed only in that his people had migrated eastward comparatively recently into what was, properly speaking, Aranda and Arabana country. He was reluctant to tell me the myths, and I find his choice of words revealing: I am Antikarinya. The stories belong to the Aranda and Arabana country (Lewis’ emphasis). In other words, the myths were an integral part of the landscape itself.’
Night Skies of Aboriginal Australia: A Noctuary,
Oceania Monograph 47, University of Sydney, 1998