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Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore of "Settled" Australia Author(s): Philip A. Clarke Source: Folklore, Vol. 118, No. 2 (Aug., 2007), pp. 141-161Published by: on behalf of Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30035418Accessed: 04-03-2016 11:27 UTC
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Folklore 118 (August 2007): 141-161
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore
of "Settled" Australia
Philip A. Clarke
Abstract
Early European records of indigenous Australian mythology describe the
activities of Ancestral Creators and spirits. British colonisation was intense in the
southern temperate regions, which became "settled Australia." Here, Aboriginal
mythology has undergone significant transformations in response to major social
and cultural changes. Knowledge of Creation myths has declined, although
contemporary Aboriginal people have maintained and developed a rich folklore
centred on spirits and ghosts. While the Australian anthropological literature
acknowledges the important religious dimensions of Creation myths, studies of
the secularised folklore of indigenous communities living in rural and urban areas
have been largely neglected. This paper investigates the roles of Australian
Aboriginal mythology in recent indigenous and non-indigenous cultures within
temperate Australia.
Introduction
The Aboriginal cultural landscape of the past was richly imbued with meaning,
not just with the topographical evidence of the former deeds of Ancestors, but by
the perceived occupation of beings, such as spirits and ghosts. As with people,
plants and animals, these beings were considered to display behaviours that were,
to some extent, predictable. Spirit and ghost beliefs contain encoded knowledge
about culture and landscape. Since European colonisation, the worldviews of
indigenous people living in the "settled" regions of Australia have become heavily
influenced by European cultures (Berndt 1980, map 1.1; Kolig 1981; 1989; Swain
and Rose 1988; Swain 1991; 1993). While many local Aboriginal cultures have
declined due to the growth of pan-Aboriginality, indigenous people have actively
formulated notions of identity that include special spiritual bonds to the land
(Beckett 2000). Even in landscapes transformed by European settlement,
contemporary Aboriginal people use knowledge of Dreaming Ancestors, ghosts
and spirits, to help them to make sense of events occurring in their environment
(Povinelli 1993). The syncretism of tradition has led to the demarcation between
indigenous and non-indigenous folklores in Australia becoming blurred.
This paper explores links between the early historical recordings of indigenous
mythology and the more recently recorded Aboriginal ethnographic material
concerning spirits and ghosts. Consideration is given to European-Australian
appropriation of indigenous folklore, as well as to the impact of this process upon
recent Aboriginal beliefs and traditions. I gathered the ethnographic data
provided here on spirit and ghost beliefs during anthropological, historical and
geographical fieldwork in southern Australia since the early 1980s, chiefly while
ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/07/020141-21; Routledge Journals; Taylor & Francis
a 2007 The Folklore Society
DOI: 10.1080/00155870701337346
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142 Philip A. Clarke
working with the South Australian Museum (Clarke 1991; 1995; 1996a&b; 1997;
1998; 1999a&b; 2001a; 2003a&b). For the purposes of this paper, temperate "settled
Australia" is defined as the region south of an imaginary line drawn between
Sydney in the east and Perth in the west.
European Accounts of Aboriginal Spirits
When Europeans first arrived in Australia they found that Aboriginal people
regarded themselves as already sharing the landscape with many spirits-far
more than can be discussed in depth here (Clarke 1999a; 2003a, 22-4, 99 and 192;
2003c). Unlike the Ancestral Creators, whose presence is chiefly indicated by what
they left behind when the Creation period ended, the spirits were believed to exist
alongside present-day people. Some spirits were greatly feared, as it was believed
that they preyed upon humans. The missionary, George Taplin, explained that
Ngarrindjeri people in the Lower Murray region of South Australia believed in a
"wood demon," which "assumes any shape he pleases; sometimes he is like an old
man, at other times he will take the form of a bird, or a burnt stump, and always
for the purpose of luring individuals within his reach, so that he may destroy
them" (Taplin 1879b, 62). Other spirits were thought to have had major roles in
relation to the human afterlife. It was widely believed by Aboriginal people across
southern Australia that "devil bird" spirits, particularly in the form of owls, were
spirit messengers and carriers who, with the aid of flight, have access to the
"Skyworld" or "Land of the Dead" (Dawson 1881, 49, and 52-3; Smith 1930, 342;
Berndt 1940, 460-1; Clarke 1999a, 159-62).
There is an abundance of early records concerning Aboriginal beliefs in the
existence of water spirits from temperate Australia. In European accounts relating
to south-eastern Australia, these spirits are generally classed as "bunyips,"
although this masks the considerable variation to be found in the original spirit
beliefs of the region (Gunn 1847; Barrett 1946; Massola 1957; Beatty 1969, 43-6 and
77-80; Wignell 1983; Mulvaney 1994; Smith 1996; Clarke 1999a, 156-9; Holden
and Holden 2001; Hawkins 2002). [1] This Australian-English term has been
traced to western Victoria, where banib was recorded as an amphibious spirit-
being in Wemba Wemba and Wergaia Aboriginal languages (Hercus 1986, 256;
Ramson 1988, 109; Dixon, Ramson and Thomas 1992, 109-10). Some water spirits,
termed "bunyips," have been described as animal-like, appearing in a form
resembling that of giant birds or starfish, while others were considered to be
predominantly humanoid creatures.
The northern limit of most "bunyip" accounts from European settlers is the
Murray River, beyond which mainly more arid country stretches. Bobbie Hardy,
for instance, claimed that in western New South Wales there were "haunts of evil,
where the Aborigine dared not venture. Sometimes malevolence lurked in the
very waterholes. The bunyip frequented in several along the Murray, but never
ventured up the Darling-it had terrors of its own" (Hardy 1969,16). The Nyungar
people in southern Western Australia also believed in a class of water spirit called
marghet, which, according to one account, was a male with short feet, large head,
and a big mouth with many teeth (Hassell 1936, 703). Reminiscent of the "bunyip"
belief in the East, they were said to live in deep lakes and pools, and pulled people
underwater by their feet whenever they could.
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Folklore of "Settled" Australia 143
Many of the spirits recorded by Europeans have a human-like appearance. In
Nyungar folklore, for example, mischievous spirits taking the shape of men
would chase people, who could escape by running past water, which stopped
the spirits as they were believed to become transfixed by their reflections (Bates
1992, 19). A popularised example of Aboriginal spirit-men is the large ape-like
"yowie" monsters from northern and eastern New South Wales (Smith 1996,
149-50, 152-3, 155-6 and 159-64). [2] Human-like spirits-such as the thin
mimih of western Arnhem Land (Berndt and Berndt 1970, 18, 51 and 192; Taylor
1996, 183-9), and the mamu "devils" of the Western Desert (Douglas 1988, 28 and
56; Arthur 1996, 45-6)-also feature in Aboriginal folklore outside the southern
Australian region [3]
Aboriginal Responses to New Things
The category of spirits expanded soon after the Europeans arrived, with
Aboriginal people reasoning that the British settlers they met were either spirits or
human ghosts (Dawson 1881, 105-6; Howitt 1904, 442-6; Clarke 1999a, 154-5;
2003a, chapter 12). Indigenous Tasmanians referred to Europeans by words that
when translated meant "white devil" (Backhouse 1843, 181-2). In south-western
Victoria, the early colonist, James Dawson recorded that:
The first white man who made his appearance at Port Fairy ... was considered by the
aborigines to be a supernatural being; and, as he was discovered in the act of smoking a pipe,
they said that he must be made of fire, for they saw smoke coming out of his mouth. Though
they were very ready to attack a stranger, they took good care not to go near this man of fire,
who very probably owed the preservation of his life to his tobacco-pipe (Dawson 1881, 105).
On the frontier, Aboriginal people frequently treated the first Europeans they
saw as dead kin returning from the grave with their rotting skin peeled off and
underlying white flesh exposed. In southern Western Australia, Nyungar people
used their word for the spirits of dead people, djanga, for all Europeans (Tilbrook
1983, 9; Von Brandenstein 1988, 108 and 111-12; Bates 1992, 16). [4] Aboriginal
terms still used across southern South Australia for "white people," such as
krinkeri, goonya and guba, appear to have referred to "ghosts" in their source
languages. [5] Beyond the settlement frontier of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries in New South Wales, Aboriginal people sometimes took
escaped British convicts they met to be the "ghosts" of their own returned relatives
(Boyce 1970, 21-3).
The first Aboriginal observers of mobs of wild cattle, which often moved ahead
of the advancing frontier of European settlement, considered them from the
perspective of their own spirit beliefs. Taplin recorded an Aboriginal account of
two stray bullocks that had once travelled downriver from runs in New South
Wales, and eventually reached the Lower Murray region of South Australia
(Taplin 1879a, 3). The Ngarrindjeri people considered these cattle to be "demons"
and called them wunda-wityeri, which apparently described them as spirits with
spears on their heads. Such beasts were much larger land animals than any other
species present in the terrestrial Australian fauna just prior to British settlement.
From an Aboriginal perspective, many of the animals that they feared were
potential spirits. Aboriginal people in south-western Victoria thought that the first
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144 Philip A. Clarke
horses brought in by Europeans were "bunyips" (Dawson 1881, 99). It has been
suggested that among the early impacts of British colonisation upon Aboriginal
Creation mythology in south-eastern Australia were the introduction of "Mother
Earth" Ancestors and a greater prominence given to existing male "High Gods"
(Swain 1991; 1993). This expansion in worldviews, during a period of a massive
decrease in indigenous population levels in temperate Australia, may be seen in
terms of an Aboriginal apocalypse.
In Aboriginal Australia, strangers within communities have often been
suspected of being sorcerers. This phenomenon was reinforced by British frontier
expansion commencing in the late eighteenth century, which highlighted
differences between insiders and outsiders. Aboriginal people in "settled" areas
feared "wild" people coming across the frontier to enchant them. The later waves
of people who "came in" to live on mission stations were often greatly feared as
"wild blackfellows" by the descendants of Aboriginal people who had moved
there earlier (Foster, Monaghan and Mfihlhiusler 2003, 83; Taplin 1879b, 133-4
and 141; Troy 1994, vol. 2, 779). On the colonial frontier, increasing death-rates in
the Aboriginal population due to the introduction of European diseases, such as
smallpox and influenza, were often thought by the people concerned to be due to
power-struggles between sorcerers. In 1859, Aboriginal people living among
European settlers at Port Elliot, south of Adelaide in South Australia, attributed
their own rapidly-declining numbers to sorcery from neighbouring Aboriginal
groups, and would not believe otherwise when spoken to by a missionary (Taplin
1859-1879, 17-18 August 1859). The colonists and the colonised had possessed
different models of what was happening and why.
In response to intense contact with Europeans, indigenous oral histories have
incorporated many colonial events and people. In the folklore of the Aboriginal
people in northern Australia, the infamous Victorian bushranger "Ned Kelly" and
the Christian "Jesus" are said to have visited them during the "killing times"
(massacres) of the frontier period, and that they took the side of indigenous land
"owners" in opposing the white invaders, represented by maritime explorer
"Captain James Cook" (Maddock 1988; Sutton 1988, 256-7 and 262-3; Rose 1992,
186-202). Similarly, there are accounts recorded from Aboriginal people during
the nineteenth century in New South Wales of "Queen Victoria" granting them
reserves as compensation for their lands being taken away by settlers (Rowley
1970, 135; Rowse 1993, 13-16). In Melanesia, such colonial stories form the basis of
"cargo cults," comprised of believers, originally inspired by the arrival of military
supplies during World War II, who used rituals believed to bring in consumer
goods by sea or air (Lattas 1992). They show the unequal relations existing
between European colonisers and indigenous people. In the context of Aboriginal
Australia, they are traditions relating to indigenous experiences of British
colonisation.
European Responses to Aboriginal Beliefs
The confusion caused by new phenomena was not restricted to just Aboriginal
observers, however. Settlers were often willing to believe that Aboriginal fears of
spirits were related to what they, as Europeans, would eventually discover to be real
organisms. The contemporaneous nature of Aboriginal beliefs in spirits contributed
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Folklore of "Settled" Australia 145
to European assumptions that some of them were cryptic species that would one
day be found. From the 1840s, newspapers in south-eastern Australia contained
many references to "bunyip" spirits as living animals (Ramson 1988,109). At Mount
Gambier, in the south-east of South Australia, it was reported by a colonist in 1852
that "When the monster of the bulrushes made his appearance, the blacks on the
bank ... set up a fearful yell ... The animal was about 12 or 14 feet [about 3.7 to 4.3
metres long] and I suppose must be a bunyip, so long supposed to be a creation of
the native's imagination" (South Australian Register, 30 December 1852, 3). Two
years later, it was claimed by another European that, after an alleged sighting at
Melrose in the southern Flinders Ranges of South Australia, "respectable people"
had seen bunyips in large waterholes of the colony, and that "intelligent blacks" had
confirmed their existence (South Australian Register, 25 January 1854, 3).
European-Australian accounts of strange water-based animals were not
restricted to the frontier period, as some came later from ethnographic recorders.
In 1860, Taplin claimed to have heard the booming of the local version of the bunyip,
called a mulyawonk, in the Lower Lakes of the Murray River (Taplin 1879a, 62). [6]
He records:
The blacks say that the Moolgewanke [mulyawonk ] has power to bewitch men and women and
that he causes disease by the booming noise which he makes. I am now convinced that the noise
does come from the lake. They say that Mr Mason [a police trooper] shot at one over on Pomont
[Pomanda] and it made him ill afterwards by its power. They say he is very much like a pungari
(seal) but has a face with a menake (beard) like a man (Taplin 1859-1879, 2-3 July 1860).
Some writers linked these accounts with already-known animal species. In 1846,
the geographer George Windsor Earl speculated that "certain monster amphibia"
known to New South Wales and South Australian Aboriginal people were
possibly dugongs, which he had encountered in the north (Earl 1846, 248-9).
Other scholars theorised that the sightings in New South Wales might be of
crocodiles, and in Tasmania possibly seals that had strayed inland (Barrett 1946,
26, 87-92; Mulvaney 1994, 37-8; Holden and Holden 2001, 7). The finding of large
fossil bones, from what were then undetermined species, might also have
generated reports of sightings, as may have sounds from swamp birds. The
booming call of bitterns has led to them being referred to as "bunyip-birds" in
parts of New South Wales (Barrett 1954 cited in Dixon, Ramson and Thomas 1992,
110). The natural build-up and release of swamp gases, and shifting underwater
sands, may also account for a few "bunyips" (Cleland 1912). I am aware of local
European-Australian folklore suggesting that, before the widespread river
damming in south-eastern Australia, large marine animals, such as sharks, seals
and small whales, occasionally travelled along inland waterways, particularly
during high summer tides when low river levels allowed an influx of seawater.
Encounters between inland Aboriginal groups and these marine animals may
have been another source of "bunyip" appearances.
European scholars have long recognised that hunters and gatherers possessed a
wealth of environmental knowledge; this was confirmed in the late nineteenth
century when Australian Aboriginal people, as specialist collectors, helped to
solve the zoological puzzle of whether the platypus and echidna, as monotreme
mammals, actually laid eggs (Robin 2000). The indeterminacy of indigenous
folklore is such that, while some accounts of strange beings that Europeans
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146 Philip A. Clarke
received from Aboriginal people have turned out to be related to living animal
species, others have remained solely within the domain of indigenous folklore.
The pressure to reconcile the divergence between indigenous and non-indigenous
accounts of the landscape is still felt in some quarters. In the late twentieth century,
museum-based researchers speculated on whether the "bunyip" of south-eastern
Australia was actually the duck-billed platypus (Tindale and Pretty 1980, 50).
Scientific explanations of ancient times have also worked to resolve the
indeterminacy of Aboriginal spirit beliefs. The museum-based researcher,
Norman B. Tindale, argued that Aboriginal myths of "little folk" were oral
accounts of an early "pygmoid race" of people who were believed to have been the
first human colonists of Australia, arriving over thirty thousand years ago (cited in
Clarke 1999a, 151).
Within the corpus of popular Australian folklore there are many stories that
focus on the interaction between European-Australians and indigenous
peoples (Beatty 1969). With some of them, both the colonisers and the
colonised are among the believers. An example of such folklore is the escape
of Aboriginal women from white sealers by swimming the Backstairs Passage
in South Australia about 1830 (Ely 1980; Clarke 1998, 24-28). Similarly, there
are the accounts of the stranding of Eliza Fraser among northern Queensland
Aboriginal inhabitants in 1836 (Schaffer 1993). A Central Australian example is
that of the sole survivor from the missing and "massacred" Leichhardt
expedition, who was reported to have survived, and believed to be living
within an Aboriginal community several years after the party disappeared in
1848 (Connell 1980, chapter 9). Nineteenth-century settlers believed that
Aboriginal people were holding a white woman captive somewhere in the
Gippsland forests of eastern Victoria (Darian-Smith 1993). Historians refer to
these accounts as "captivity narratives." While the facts behind them are often
elusive, they portray, nevertheless, the brutality of the early frontier contact
between Aboriginal people and Europeans. In contemporary Australia there is
a rich oral history concerning the massacres of indigenous peoples (Milliss
1992; Clark 1995; Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck 2001; Schlunke 2005).
European-Australians have drawn upon Aboriginal myths for their plots in
fiction written largely for non-Aboriginal audiences. These deliberate "borrow-
ings" by popular literature are often liberally blended with European folklore. In a
southern South Australian example, popular writers have developed Europea-
nised versions of the Oorundoo (sometimes called Ngurunderi) myth,
presumably to make it more appealing to their readership. There are many
ethnographic recordings of this male Ancestral Creator of the Murray River
(Clarke 1995). The late nineteenth-century teacher and magazine publisher, James
Bonwick, wrote a more popular form of it:
The Murray dragon, Oorundoo, first caused that great river to flow. Having fallen out with his
two wives, who must have been dragonesses of a huge size, and not accustomed to water
exercise, that Blue Beard of New Holland constructed two lakes, at present known as lakes
Victoria [ = Alexandrina] and Albert, so that he might effectually drown his partners, who had
actually attempted to elope from him with somebody else (Bonwick 1870, 204).
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Folklore of "Settled" Australia 147
While making the folklore of another culture more accessible, the inclusion of
comparative material as creative bricolage cannot occur without some importation
of foreign ideas and concepts as well.
The scale of alteration with European renderings of Aboriginal myth varies
considerably, and ranges from just giving it a European voice to replacing key
parts with new elements that significantly alter the structure and meaning of the
mythology. For the lay readership there are many popular books that draw upon
Aboriginal mythology (for example, Parker 1896 [1953]; Smith 1930; Isaacs 1980;
Reed 1980). In the 1930s, a group of poets led by Adelaide-based writer Rex
Ingamells became known as the Jindyworobaks, a name that was reputedly
derived from an Aboriginal word meaning "to join" (Ingamells and Tilbrook 1938;
Ramson 1988, 335). Their aim was to free themselves from Northern Hemisphere
influences, and, in attempting to do this, they actively incorporated indigenous
themes into their writings. The lack of distinction between writers and their living
sources of ethnographic information has sometimes confounded the investigation
of cultural influences. For instance, the author William Ramsay Smith, appears to
have largely produced his published account of Australian Aboriginal folklore,
with some modification in detail, from material recorded for this purpose by a
Ngarrindjeri man named David Unaipon (Smith 1930; Clarke 1999b, 61; Unaipon
2001; Shoemaker 2004, chapter 2). In much of the popular literature incorporating
Aboriginal mythology, however, the uncertainty over the original sources of
ethnographic data, along with the tendency to remove references to specific sites
and practices, usually militates against its academic use in describing local
Aboriginal cultures and their landscapes.
Indigenous folklore has been appropriated for many cross-cultural situations.
Aboriginal traditions remain a source of evidence for researchers, calling
themselves cryptozoologists or cryptonaturalists, who argue that at least some
records of spirit beings are connected to living animal species still unknown to
science (Smith 1996; Tim the Yowie Man 2001). Aboriginal mythologies are heavily
utilised in tourism ventures that draw upon local histories. Brief accounts of
Aboriginal Creation and spirits appear on national park interpretation-panels, in
order to give some balance to the predominance of explanations of the land based
upon the physical environment and local European-Australian histories. In the
early 1980s, wormlike models of a river spirit, called a "river bunyip" in
Australian-English, were made into a coin-operated tourist attraction at Murray
Bridge in the Lower Murray, South Australia. Notably, local Aboriginal residents
informed me that they did not support this interpretation, because their own
bunyip, the mulyawonk, has a more human form. Throughout the 1990s,
government agencies used the "bunyip" as a billboard cartoon character to
make the public aware of the importance of maintaining water quality in the
Murray-Darling Basin.
Much Aboriginal folklore has been incorporated into the curricula for
indigenous studies within the Australian education systems (Education
Department, South Australia 1990; 1991; Jacob 1991; Dent 1993; Department of
Education, Tasmania 2001). Myth has been a useful vehicle for primary-school and
secondary-school students when investigating pre-European-style cultures and
traditions. In recognition of prior indigenous ownership of Australia, govern-
ment-funded museums and art galleries have provided exhibitions celebrating the
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148 Philip A. Clarke
hunting and gathering phase of cultures of regions that are now part of "settled
Australia" (Clarke 2000; Cochrane 2001). In the realm of popular Australian
culture over the past decade, European-Australian images of bunyips and yowies
have appeared in cartoons, advertisements and websites. They have even been
made into confectionary. Indigenous traditions have been, and continue to be,
major influences in the development of a more generalised folklore that
Australians project to the rest of world. In popular world culture, the Australian
Aboriginal bunyip and yowie spirits sit alongside the Irish leprechaun and North
American sasquatch.
A Recent Account of Aboriginal Beliefs
The "spirit" category, as described in this paper, covers a wide range of disparate
Aboriginal beliefs, although most of the spirits dealt with are either greatly feared
or at least regarded as a nuisance. Terms for spirits used in Aboriginal English
across Australia include "witch" (or "witj-witj") and "devil" (or "debbil-debbil"),
particularly when referring to spirits with human-like characteristics. Some spirits
are considered to be shape-shifters, and believed to take on the form of large or
deformed people, as well as of animals-such as big black dogs and eagles-or
even whirlwinds and mists. Aboriginal accounts of spirits are still commonly
mentioned in everyday situations and have a lived social function. According to
the southern Aboriginal people I have worked with, most spirits were said to
cause great apprehension or at least to be unwelcome. As generalised "bad" spirits
they are classed as moolthapi in the present-day Aboriginal English spoken in
southern South Australia (Taplin 1879a, 46-7, 133, 135 and 140-2; 1879b, 62, 129
and 138; Smith 1930, 349; Berndt and Bemdt 1993, 205-6, 234-5, 288-9 and 425-7;
Clarke 1999a, 151 and 162; Hercus 1999, 14 and 172; Foster, Monaghan and
Miihlhliusler 2003, 50). [7] Many of the spirit accounts I have recorded are of a type
that adults within the indigenous community use as threats towards children in
order to help control their behaviour, while the perceived activities of ghosts
makes sense of particular unusual incidents. I find that Aboriginal fears of sorcery
are still frequently expressed, even now, while erratic bird-behaviour is often
taken as an ill omen. Among the Aboriginal people in the Lower Murray region
today, when the ritjruki (willie wagtail bird) is seen to be engaged in peculiar
"dancing" behaviour, and if calls from mingka birds (frogmouth and owls) are
heard, these are considered bad omens.
Contemporary Aboriginal people, and at least some European-Australians,
inform me that they believe ghosts are the spiritual remains of people who were
once alive. In the case of southern Aboriginal people, they have told me that
during the period immediately after death, the person's spirit is torn between the
desire to stay with loved ones still alive and the imperative to return to the Spirit
World where it merges with the Ancestors. In remote parts of northern Australia,
mortuary rituals and name-avoidance customs are still routinely practiced. In
part, these are aimed at ensuring that during the transition of the spirit to the
"Land of the Dead," sometimes called the "Skyworld," there are no ghosts left
behind in the land of the living (Clarke 2003a, 25-9, 46-7, 97-8 and 182-3). The
spirits of the dead are still said to be able to have an impact upon human lives. It
has been recorded from the north-west of the Northern Territory and from western
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Folklore of "Settled" Australia 149
Central Australia that Aboriginal people believe ghosts deliver spiritually
powerful songs to certain song-men through dreams (Wild 1987; Marett 2000).
Such songs are a significant element in the lives of contemporary Aboriginal
people in these regions, particularly for those who are now living away from their
traditional country.
It cannot be assumed that it is always the recorder of an Aboriginal myth who
borrows from non-indigenous folklore, as the indigenous informant also does
this occasionally. Examples from my fieldwork conducted from the 1980s are
Aboriginal storytellers comparing the mingka bird with a "phoenix," and the
"bunyip" with the "Loch Ness Monster." As Aboriginal worldviews have
expanded, commencing with British colonisation, elements from the mythologies
and histories of different cultures have been brought together through the process
of syncretism, and presented in new formulations of folklore. The entry of
Aboriginal people into the intercultural sphere has led them, in more recent times,
to choose European-style art as a means of communicating their culture to
outsiders (Clarke 2001b, 111-12; 2003b, 100; Morphy 1998, chapter 7). Indigenous
artists have typically drawn upon themes derived from their own rich folklore as
appropriate subjects on which to base their artwork.
A great deal of imaginative and creative thinking with regard to the
supernatural realm has occurred in both the indigenous and non-indigenous
spheres in Australia. Interpretations of southern Aboriginal folklore have played
major roles in the course of particular heritage disputes in the late twentieth
century, arising from the development of purported cultural sites (Fielder 1989;
Churches 1992; Tonkinson 1997; Weiner 1999). Aboriginal folk traditions, such as
those concerning the "bunyip" and the "yowie," have entered the realm of a more
generalised and secularised folklore shared with European-Australians, a fact that
has assisted their transmission within the Aboriginal community throughout the
years since British colonisation commenced. The resonance between Aboriginal
and Australian-English folklores promotes cultural exchanges, although
contemporary indigenous people highlight their own possession of more detailed
spirit knowledge-which I suggest is in order to assist them in maintaining their
cultural distinctiveness from European-Australian culture.
Water Spirits
The consistent theme of most Aboriginal "bunyip" descriptions recorded during
my fieldwork was the threat of capture these spirits were thought to pose to
children who strayed too close to the water's edge. Most twentieth-century reports
reinforced the perception of the "bunyip" as a symbol of the dangerous nature of
the southern inland waters. In the Lower Murray region, the Yaraldi informant,
Mark Wilson, claimed in the 1930s that the "bunyip" (mulyawonk) would lay
submerged in the shallow waters near the edge of the lake waiting for human
victims (Wilson no date). He stated that its long trailing hair looked like waterweed
in the water. The mulyawonk was said to be highly attracted to the smell and taste of
fish and duck grease, especially when children were washing their hands in the
lake after a meal (Berndt and Berndt 1993, 203). The existence of mulyawonk spirits
remains a talking point for Ngarrindjeri families from the Lower Murray,
and particular river reaches are regarded as their "homes" (Clarke 1999a, 156-9).
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150 Philip A. Clarke
As with indigenous plants and animals that became locally extinct after European
intrusion, Aboriginal people consider that the mulyawonk had suffered from major
changes in the landscape. Mark Wilson reasoned that paddle steamers on the river
had caused their destruction (Wilson no date). Similarly, in 1991 the Ngarrindjeri
man, Henry Rankine, gave an account of a violent clash between a riverboat
captain and a mulyawonk (Rankine 1991, 122). While the "bunyip" has become part
of a pan-Australian folklore, it is still part of the corpus of belief and tradition that
support a regionally specific Aboriginal cultural identity, especially in places like
the Lower Murray
Little People
South-eastern Australian Aboriginal communities have oral traditions that are
rich in stories concerning terrestrial human-like creatures, generally called "little
men" (Clarke 1999a, 151-4). In the course of my fieldwork I noticed that there was
considerable variation in Aboriginal descriptions of the "little men," even when
received from storytellers from the same community. They were said to appear in
many different colours, such as yellow, green, red, white and grey, but never black.
The "little men" are generally known as kintji to Aboriginal people in southern
South Australia (Berndt and Berndt 1993, 208; Clarke 1999a, 151-4). [8] In the
accounts of kintji sightings that I collected from Ngarrindjeri people, they were
said to appear alone or in pairs, and to be hunting around swamps at dusk or
dawn. It was claimed that these spirits have their "homes" on high ground, such
as on the tops of sand dunes, cliffs and hills. The kintji were said to frighten and
torment people at night with their strange noises. It was part of local Aboriginal
folklore that early-twentieth century hunters would leave one of their shot ducks
behind to appease the "little men," before returning home.
The kintji spirits appear to be analogous to the kintjira spirits, which are thought
by the Adnyamathanha people of the Flinders Ranges in the Mid North of South
Australia to fetch the spirits of the recent dead to the Spirit World-which is also
known as the "Land to the West" or Kintjura (Smith 1879, 88; Berndt and
Vogelsang 1941, 9; Elkin 1937, 279; McEntee and McKenzie 1992, 34). [9] In western
Victoria and south-eastern South Australia, Aboriginal people believe in "little
men" known as natja, which were described to me as "red hairy men" that look
"like monkeys or orang-utans" (Hercus 1986, 271; Clarke 1999a, 154). [10]
Contemporary Aboriginal people have drawn upon their folk traditions to
help them make sense of the world in which they live. In 2004, there was extensive
media coverage of the palaeontological discovery of skeletal remains in Indonesia
that have been described as a new species of small extinct hominid, dubbed
"hobbits" (Mayell 2004). Members of the Aboriginal community in southern South
Australia have responded to this, in conversations with me, by suggesting that
scientists had found evidence that would support the authenticity of their own
beliefs concerning the existence of "little men," as well as the leprechauns of Irish
folklore.
Sorcerers
Recent Aboriginal folklore about sorcerers transcends the distinction between
living people and spirits. Since the settlement of Australia by the British, and the
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Folklore of "Settled" Australia 151
subsequent decline of traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, southern Aboriginal
people have generally considered sorcerers in their area to exist as spirits, which
are not directly connected to people living within their community, or linked to
anyone recently deceased. From my experience, the sorcerers are widely known as
koratji in the Aboriginal English of south-eastern Australia, and are usually
described as "traditional hit-men." [11] Europeans writing about Central
Australian Aboriginal cultures have used an equivalent term-"kadaitja"-to
describe malignant spirits and sorcerers, a term now incorporated into Australian-
English (Ramson 1988, 354-5; Delbridge et al. 1997, 1161). [12]
Nowadays, southern Aboriginal people refer to sorcerers as "feather-foots," a
description relating specifically to "kadaitja shoes" that were traditionally made
from emu feathers and human hair-string (Douglas 1988, 39, 89, 101 and 165;
Ramson 1988, 242; Arthur 1996, 31-2; Delbridge et al. 1997, 771 and 1161). This
footwear reputedly leaves no track on the ground, and is greatly feared because of
its use by men ritually prepared for revenge expeditions and sorcery. As is widely
known by Aboriginal people and European-Australians alike, the sorcerer's kit is
also said to include pointing-bone daggers used to "bone" their victims (Ramson
1988, 489). Southern Aboriginal people believe that many of the elderly
"traditional" Aboriginal men from remote northern communities are "feather
foots," and that they possess the ability to travel about in spirit form. In earlier
times, there were numerous local names for sorcerers across Australia. They are
still called thampamalthi, and their sorcery activities are referred to as thampin by
the contemporary Aboriginal community of the Lower Murray region (Taplin
1879b, 138). In Aboriginal English the sorcerers are also known as "kidney-fat
men" or "kidney fatters"-referring to ritual practices of symbolically removing
the victim's kidney fat (Howitt 1904, 367-76; Arthur 1996, 38). In northern-
Australian communities, Aboriginal "doctors," who are also sometimes called
"clever men" or "powered men," are still consulted as healers when dealing with
cases of suspected sorcery (Elkin 1977; Arthur 1996, 21-2).
Generalised fears of sorcery have persisted to the present day among many
southern indigenous communities, and it is thought that sorcerers, as spirits, have
"come down from the north" to punish someone, particularly for cultural
indiscretions. For instance, a southern Aboriginal man, who once had an
unsanctioned relationship with a Western Desert woman, lived in constant fear of a
visit by a koratji. This was the reason given by him for constantly changing his
abode over a number of years. During my fieldwork, Aboriginal people were
careful to dispose of their cut hair in the house stove, and not leave it out in the open
where a sorcerer or "devil bird" might take it for the purposes of enchantment.
Whether or not people such as sorcerers and healers are considered to be wholly
humans or spirits, what Aboriginal people living in rural southern Australia today
know about them is linked to their "traditional" pre-European past. The fact that
knowledge of sorcery practices has persisted among the Aboriginal community
across Australia is probably due, to some extent at least, to its being independent
of the activities connected with initiation ceremonies-which have declined in
many regions. Even when the cultural details of sorcery are no longer generally
known in the local Aboriginal community, members will still tend to voice a
strong fear of sorcerers. That Europeans have had a fascination with "witch
doctors" and "sorcerers" is demonstrated by the wealth of recorded ethnographic
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152 Philip A. Clarke
material pertaining to "magic" collected by them from the Aboriginal people
(Spencer and Gillen 1899, chapter 16; Cawte 1974; Elkin 1977).
Personal Spirits and Ghosts
It is evident from historical sources relating to southern Australia that Aboriginal
people believed there was a powerful element of the human spirit that, for most
individuals, lay dormant in them throughout their lives (Dawson 1881, 50-1;
Howitt 1904, 434-42; Bates 1992, 18). This belief is still to be found in some
communities today-Aboriginal people in the Lower Murray and south-eastern
South Australia still refer to this part of their spirit as prupi (Taplin 1879a, 3, 91 and
131; 1879b, 126,129,138 and 147; Berndt and Berndt 1993, 204-5 and 424-5). In the
1980s, I was told by certain Aboriginal people that they could call upon their own
prupi as a living spirit or "helper," to attack others. Since the mid 1990s I have
heard a few Ngarrindjeri people using miwi as word for a human soul, although I
consider their use of this term to be derived from an ethnographic publication in
which it appeared (Berndt and Berndt 1993, 133-4).
Gupa spirits or ghosts are quite distinct from the prupi. Across southern South
Australia, a gupa is considered to be the spirit of a deceased person, of any cultural
background, and is typically observed at night around buildings and other human
constructions. [13] A gupa is said to appear either as a shade in human form, or as a
spirit light. Both prupi and gupa, therefore, are treated as different from the
category of moolthapi spirits, which have a completely separate identity from
humans. Although gupa spirits cause distress for the living, it is said, that,
eventually, "the spirit of the dead rests with the old people." In this context,
the term "old people" is used to refer to all generations of people within the
community that have now passed on.
Contemporary Aboriginal people claim that, when someone had recently
suffered a violent or untimely death, the spirit of the deceased might be seen as a
gupa walking around houses and along roads during the night. They also state that
on particular sections of roadway they can hear a hand knocking on the car
window as they drive past in the dark. It is an Aboriginal belief that dogs possess a
heightened sense of the presence of ghosts and spirits. They also claim that when
their dogs are agitated by a gupa, the owners may also see the ghost by holding a
dog from behind and peering out between its ears. Many historical places
regarded by Aboriginal people as culturally significant, such as missions and
massacre sites, are treated as being haunted.
When a gupa has reportedly been seen, it often creates the need for Aboriginal-
community discussions concerning the relevance of the sighting. These tend to
focus on the significance of the location and on the relationships of the observers
with any recently deceased person. The process of interpreting reported gupa
sightings generally also involves trying to link them to any recent conflict or
tension concerning local Aboriginal affairs. Gupa sightings lead to discussion of
community social problems. For example, intermittent moving lights seen during
the night on the outskirts of an Aboriginal settlement that I regularly visited were
equated by residents with tragic and unsavoury events that had occurred there,
such as the recent death by suicide of a young man, and the illicit use of drugs by
visiting youths. It was believed that the lights were spirits that had either caused
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Folklore of "Settled" Australia 153
bad things to happen, or that were attracted to places where such things had
occurred. As a malignant influence upon living people, these spirits acted like the
dancing min-min or will-o' the wisp-type of lights that Aboriginal people and
European-Australians have reportedly observed in remote desert regions (Beatty
1969, 80-1). During field work I carried out in 2001-2, I discovered that Wonggai
people of the Northern Goldfields in central Western Australia believed dancing
lights seen on the plains at night were malevolent spirits, who enticed people
further into the desert before disappearing, and leaving their victims stranded.
Scholars believe that the Australian-English word "min-min," which apparently
pertains to the "mysterious debbil-debbil glow," is derived from a western
Queensland Aboriginal language term (Ramson 1988, 396; Dixon, Ramson and
Thomas 1992, 195 and 223).
Not all contemporary ghost sightings in southern Australia are necessarily seen
as negative. Aboriginal people consider that the dead often appear to close family
members and friends to console them. Deceased relatives who appear in dreams
are described as "protectors" of their kin. Although there is a widespread belief
among southern Aboriginal people that ghosts exist, the interpretation of a
particular alleged sighting often remains open, with no single explanation being
favoured by the whole community. The degree to which Aboriginal people
consider themselves to be Christians does not seem to overly impact upon the
strength of their beliefs in ghosts or other spirits. Aboriginal people believe that
most European-Australians are not in tune with the Spirit World; that is, they are
oblivious to the presence of spirits. In spite of this, Aboriginal accounts of gupa
spirits in southern South Australia were frequently connected with "white
people." Similarly, during the 1970s, in the indigenous Cape Barren Island
community of Tasmania, ghost stories involving both European-Australians and
indigenous people were recorded as a prominent part of local oral history
(Mollison 1974, section 7.8). During my fieldwork in Aboriginal communities
across southern Australia, ghosts have been talked about as everyday occurrences
rather than being considered an extraordinary event.
Ghost beliefs influence Aboriginal behaviour and impact on local affairs.
In southern South Australia, the fear of gupa spirits is the basis for Aboriginal
community prohibitions on visiting cemeteries from dusk to dawn. It is believed
that spirits hovering in the vicinity of graveyards at night might follow human
visitors back to the abodes of the living, and cause problems there. It is also thought
that a gupa, because of its confused existence, needs a physical carrier in order to
stray. In one community, the belief that ghosts can be inadvertently carried was
expressed in the reluctance to take soil from a cemetery, or its vicinity, back into the
main settlement, since it was thought that a gupa might be unknowingly brought
back with it. In the course of my fieldwork in southern South Australia I was told of
several incidences, as recently as the 1960s, of Aboriginal children straying into pre-
European Aboriginal burial grounds and coming into physical contact with
"merraldi bones" (human skeletons). In order to ritually cleanse these children of
gupa spirits, which may have become attached to them, they were "smoked" by
their "uncles" over a fire loaded with aromatic green eucalyptus leaves.
In recent times, Aboriginal funerals in temperate Australia have generally taken
place along the lines of European-Australian practices, although with some
modifications. A southern Aboriginal funeral practice, which was still ongoing in
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154 Philip A. Clarke
the 1980s, was for the hearse carrying the deceased's body to be left, for a few
minutes, outside his former dwelling, with all the car doors open, before
proceeding to the cemetery. On one occasion, as the coffin containing the deceased
was carried out of the church, two Aboriginal men walked alongside the bearers
while playing an Aboriginal instrument, the didgeridoo. [14] In both cases,
some of those attending said that these were necessary precautions, in order to
ensure that the spirit of the deceased followed its body, and, in particular, that
they prevented it from lingering within the community. Even the spirits of people
who were well liked when alive are treated as a potentially dangerous gupa
when dead.
Discussion
Arising from the British colonisation of Australia, southern indigenous people
have incorporated many new ideas and objects into their lives, and further
developed these while building new relationships with transformed landscapes.
In the face of significant pressures thrust upon them to "assimilate" into the
broader European-derived culture, they have had to maintain and build their
identity in an environment of cultural transition (Beckett 1988; Keen 1988; Trigger
and Griffiths 2003). There are people in "settled Australia" who, in recent times,
have rebuilt an indigenous identity, by drawing aspects of it from pre-European
Aboriginal groups from which they are descended. Over the past few decades,
indigenous people around the world have sought to reconnect with their past,
often with the aid of historical and anthropological records (Clifford 1988).
One of the results of my fieldwork was the discovery that Aboriginal folklore
concerning spirits within southern Aboriginal communities has continued to be
passed on to the present day. Secularised elements of Aboriginal folklore persist
in indigenous communities, and specific knowledge of it is used for identity
building. Belief in spirits and ghosts, although in modified form, still impacts on
Aboriginal social lives. In common with the rich Creation mythology of the past,
much of this surviving folklore is intimately connected to land. Australia's
southern indigenous people have, to the present day, maintained a feeling
of belonging to their country, albeit based upon relationships with the
environment that are influenced by the European-Australian cultures with
which they interact and, in a broader sense, of which they are a part (Beckett 2000).
European-Australians have incorporated aspects of indigenous mythology
into a growing body of broader-based Australian folklore. More recently, they
have also embraced mythology as means of gaining a greater understanding
of Aboriginal culture, and of increasing their awareness of heritage values
embedded in the landscape. The resonance between recent indigenous and non-
indigenous folklore in Australia is such that it is no longer practicable to treat them
as totally separate entities. Indigenous views of spirits are problematic for the
modern western separation of the past, present and future.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Robert Foster, Amanda Nettelbeck and two
anonymous reviewers for their comments upon drafts of this paper.
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Folklore of "Settled" Australia 155
Notes
[1] The "bunyip" is also written "bunyup."
[2] The "yowie" term is believed to be derived from yuwi, a "dream spirit" of the Yuwaalaraay
people in north-eastern New South Wales (Ramson 1988, 761; Dixon, Ramson and Thomas
1992, 111).
[3] Mimih is sometimes written "mimi."
[4] Djanga is written in many ways, such as "jengar," "junga" and "tjanka."
[5] An earlier recording of krinkeri is "grinkari," listed by Taplin (1879a, 37 and 128) as meaning
"the dead" in the Ngarrindjeri language of the Lower Murray. In the Banggarla (Parnkalla)
language of Eyre Peninsula, Schiirmann (1844, Part 2, 21) recorded "kunyu," meaning "dead,"
which is possibly a related word to goonya. In the Aboriginal languages of the West Coast of
South Australia, guba, also written "kupa" and "gupa," refers to "dead" and "white fellow"
(Black 1917, 5; 1920, 91; Platt 1972, 9, 60 and 65).
[6] Mulyawonk is also written "muldewangk," "mulgewongk," "muldjewangk," "moolgewanke"
and "multyewanki."
[7] Moolthapi is also written "melapi," "melape," "mulapi," "maldhabi," "melapar," "muldarpe,"
"mull darby" and "mool-thar-pee."
[8] Kintji is also written "kindji" and "kindja."
[9] Kintjira is also written as "kinchirra," while the Kintjura is also spelled as "Kindjira" and
"Kindara."
[10] Natja is also written "ngatjinbut," "ngadje" and "ngada."
[11] Koratji is also written "koradji," "koradgi" and "kuratji." The koratji name is possibly derived
from the term garraaji, recorded as an Aboriginal "doctor" in the Dharruk language of Sydney,
New South Wales (Ramson 1988, 354; Dixon, Ramson and Thomas 1992, 155-6 and 213;
Delbridge et al. 1997, 1189).
[12] The "kadaitja" is probably based upon kwertatye, from the Arrernte languages of Central
Australia (Dixon, Ramson and Thomas 1992, 156-7; Henderson and Dobson 1994, 454 and
698). The "kadaitja" is also written "kurdaitcha," "kadaitcha" and "kadaicha."
[13] Gupa is also written "kuba," "kupa," "coopa" and "guba." See note [5].
[14] The didgeridoo or drone pipe was not part of the pre-European material culture of southern
Australia, having spread there from northern areas, such as from Arnhem land (Clarke 2003a,
102-3).
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Biographical Note
Philip Clarke is currently Head of Anthropology at the South Australian Museum, where he was formerly
Principal Curator of the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery. His research interests are in cultural
geography, material culture and the ethnosciences. He has published widely in Aboriginal art and mythology,
and Australian ethnobotany.
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