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Many Australian tales are about the bad behaviour of primordial allodynamic beings whose actions in illo tempore were fateful for their mortal animal descendants and so set counter-examples for subsequent human comportment. There is thus an implicit distinction between animals’ inherited natures, which they are little able to alter, and human character, which mankind by careful attention to the lessons of the narrative tradition may so direct as to avoid the miseries of the primal allodynes. The aboriginal allodynes are imagined still to exist, but having become otiose, they no longer participate directly in the affairs of a present world. These features permeate both classes of collected native Australian oral tradition, both the professionally and the amateurishly recorded texts.
The Aranda myths in this set of Australian readings, from central Australia, are the ‘real things,’ in contrast to the Euahlayi stories from Katie Langloh Parker’s aborigines on Bangate Station in eastern Australia, which Parker did not actually collect from her informants, but only retold.
The note at the head of the Lukara Myth is important, as is the myth itself, for understanding how ancestral preternaturals, with their rebarbative behaviour, originated totems, and how totems were important in Aranda (as in other) ‘blackfellow’ (i.e., aboriginal) cultures. Animal tales in Eastern Hemispheric traditions may originally have had similar implications.
Observe how, in the myth of Karora and his sons, another piece from the northern Aranda, a totemic ancestor (of the bandicoot) sleeps perpetually, and must be awakened to enact the events that originate the totem. This is obviously the case also of the old man asleep at the foot of the witchetty bush in the Lukara myth, and implicitly of the ljaltakalbala serpent in the Emianga myth. All three of these Northern Aranda stories entail emergences—see the texts for the details. In the Australian traditions, emergences were piecemeal, whereas in the Jicarilla Apache texts they were unitary; but the stories from those two remotely separated regions clearly agree in tracing the origin of ‘people’ of every kind to an emergence from the ground; and the pre-emergent condition is in the Australian aboriginal traditions as in the Jicarilla: a state of stupor or sleep.
The tnatantja is an aboriginal Australian manifestation of the Two Trees: it has both green and hewn reflexes: it is first hewn, then green in The Theft of the Tnatantja. In the bandicoot myth of Karora and his sons, it is green as opposed to the hewn wood of the bull-roarer.
Narahdarn the bat experiences the same loss at the green wood as does Wurrunna in the Euahlayi story of the seven Maya-mayi sisters. He, however, though he (and not his wives) is the hewer at the green tree, cuts them instead of the wood. This you will have recognized as a terrible mistake—the would-be bridegroom must master wood in the interest of his intended bride, and he must have a power of discrimination sufficient to differentiate well between the wood and his wife. Narahdarn fails this one of the four tests-of-the-bridegroom, and so of course fails of marriage, in a manner that should remind you of the African tale “Silence Katubi.” The two women correspondingly meet a truly vicious monster under a green food-tree, who at first seems to offer the prospect of nourishing them (with the honey), but who then contradictorily destroys them instead. Needless to say, having failed the two tests of discrimination and of mastery-over-wood, Narahdarn never gets the chance to prove himself with respect to either water or prodigious amounts of food or food-animals.
Notice that the Bilbas of this story are bandicoots—marsupial sand-hill rodents—so that once again there was a marriage of high (bat) and low (burrowing rodent) that was no more viable in this story than the marriage of Wayamba and Goo-goor-gaga—turtle and bird—in that other tale from the Euahlayi.
The tales noted in the texts (in parentheses under their titles) as ‘Euahlayi’ were gathered by Catherine (Katie) Langloh Parker. See the Life and Times of an Australian Collector concerning the date, circumstances, and character of her retellings. The tales noted (in parentheses under their titles) as ‘Northern Aranda’ were collected in Central Australia by T(heodor) G(eorge) H(enry) Strehlow, a prominent Australian linguist and musicologist. The text of the “Emianga Myth and Song” is extracted from his book Songs of Central Australia, Sydney - London - Melbourne - Singapore, 1971; the other four are from his earlier book Aranda Traditions, Melbourne, 1947.