[Note: Lukara is the Illoquara Water Hole, an Unmatjera witchetty grub totemic site south-east of Barrow Creek. In the myth attached to this place the same kind of destructive, cruel, or disgusting events seen in the other myths occurs again. The Aranda disliked openly discussing such revolting things, which they regarded as peculiar to an earlier, more primitive and more savage epoch than their own, and they took care to explain that such crimes in that earlier age were due either to grim necessity—as in the case of Karora, who was forced by the overwhelming pangs of his hunger to devour the animals of his own bandicoot totem, which had sprung from his own body—or else to the complete, primaeval ignorance of the offender of the identity of the injured persons—as, for example, in the case of Tjenterama, who was hurt by the gurra brothers because they mistook him for merely an ordinary sandhill wallaby. Another instance of the same kind is in the myth of Kaput Urbala (meaning “Black Head,” from the black head of the legendary serpent in the water-hole now known as the Jay Fish Hole, nine miles north of the Jay Creek aboriginal station). In it, two euro brothers [a euro is a species of kangaroo found in mountainous or hilly country; it is smaller than the kangaroo of the plains, has hairy rather than wooly fur, and unlike the kangaroo of the plains cannot move far from water]—who incidentally, were great benefactors of the Northern Aranda group, since they first gave the spear and spear-thrower to the tribe—were quite unintentionally guilty of slaying several of their own female and male relatives: their victims were browsing about contently in the shape of real euros, and the brothers did not realize their mistake until it was too late.
The native in actual life, on all occasions, completely identified everyone—himself or others—with that person’s totem: thus, a man who is the reincarnation of a bandicoot ancestor regards himself as a bandicoot, and the entire bandicoot species as his brothers. In the Lukara myth, the relation between a man and his totem is made quite clear.]
At Lukara the famous, on the brink of the great water-hole, in the very beginning, an old man was lying in a deep sleep at the foot of a witchetty bush. Ages had passed over him; he had been lying here undisturbed, like a man who is in a perpetual state of half-dream. He had not stirred ever since the beginning, he had not moved; he had always reclined on his right arm. Ages had rolled over him, in his everlasting sleep.
As he was nodding in perpetual slumber, the white tnjimeta [witchetty grubs] were crawling over him. They had always been on his body. The old man did not move, neither did he wake up; he lay there in a deep dream. The grubs moved over his whole body like a swarm of ants; and the old man now and then brushed a few of them off gently without waking from his slumber. They returned, however; they crept over his body, they bored their way in; he did not awaken; the ages rolled on.
And then, one night as the old man slept, reclining on his right arm, something fell out from under his right arm-pit, something shaped like a witchetty grub. It fell to the ground and took on human shape and grew apace; and when morning broke, the old man opened his eyes and gazed with astonishment upon his first-born son.
A great host of tnjimeta men was born in the same way. Their father never stirred: the only sign of consciousness that he ever gave was to open his eyes; he even refused all food which his sons offered to him.
The sons, however, busily proceeded to dig out witchetty grubs from the roots of the bushes nearby; and they roasted and ate them. They themselves sometimes felt the desire to become grubs again; then they would chant a spell, and so transform themselves into grubs, and re-enter the roots of witchetty bushes. Thence they would emerge again to the surface and assume human form once more.
One day, however, a stranger came from far-off Mboringka. The stranger beheld the great bundle of fat and juicy grubs which had been collected by the tnjimeta brothers of Lukara, and he lusted after them. The stranger—he, too, was a tnjimeta ancestor, only he had originated at Mboringka—offered his own bundle of grubs in exchange for the juicy Lukara grubs. But the stranger’s grubs were all long and thin and poor creatures. Scornfully the Lukara men thrust the proffered bundle aside with their digging sticks; they spoke no word. The visitor from Mboringka was offended; he boldly snatched up the bundle of the Lukara men, and rushed away in flight before they could prevent him.
In dismay the Lukara men returned to their sleeping father. The latter had sensed the loss of their bundle even before they arrived: he had felt a sharp pain in his body when the robber snatched the grubs away. Slowly he arose, and moved after the thief with tottering steps. But he did not recover the bundle; the thief carried them off to far-distant Mboringka. The father sank down, his body turned into a living tjurunga; the sons all became tjurunga; and the bundle of stolen grubs also turned into tjurunga.
[Note: This myth gives us the key to the real significance of tjurunga amongst the Northern Aranda. The sons and the witchetty grubs and the tjurunga associated with the witchetty grubs are one and the same thing, they are completely identified with each other by the native mind; they are all different forms of the intangible living something that is essentially the same in all cases. They are, namely, all visible embodiments of some part of the fertility of the great ancestor of the tnjimeta totem. The ancestor represents the sum total of the living essence of the witchetty grubs—both animal and human—regarded as a whole.
It is only natural then, that the ancestor should be regarded as immortal; it was unthinkable and surely impossible that the visible, tangible, corporeal expression of the sum total of living human and animal fertility should ever perish and vanish into nothingness. Hence no ancestor in these myths ever ‘dies’ in our sense of the term. His body merely undergoes a transmutation into something that will weather all the assaults of time, change, and decay. Today therefore natives still point out to each other the changed, immortal, life-holding bodies of an ancestor and his sons: they are now become rocks and trees and tjurunga. Wherever they wandered, they left behind them a trail of what we might call potential life-cells which are only waiting for an opportunity to assume some visible, corporeal form. If a woman crosses any of these old tracks, she is likely to conceive a child: the ancestor, or one of his sons, or one of the life-atoms that radiated from them on their wanderings, has entered into the body of the woman, craving reincarnation. If game is becoming scarce in a bad season, the native can create the animals that he needs with ease, simply by rubbing a portion of the rock representing the changed body of the ancestor with another stone: for every atom of that rock is a potential animal; the dust that flies from the rock and is scattered on the ground will stir into life when the next rains fall and bring up grass and flowers from the expectant soil. The same magical properties reside in those original tjurunga—usually stone—which are claimed by tradition to be the changed immortal bodies of ancestors and their sons. And this virtue extends also to all that they ever touched or handled before their final transmutation: their weapons and their implements, too, have become instinct with the germs of their totem’s life; they, too, are tjurunga. Hence all these tjurunga—of whatever origin they may be—are used freely in animal increase ceremonies.]