47 Australian Aboriginal Religion

K. Maddock

The vast island continent of Australia was thinly peopled by a few hundred-thousand dark-skinned hunters and gatherers when British settlement began in 1788. James Cook, who had sailed up the east coast eighteen years earlier, wrote that they might ‘appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans’.

Today’s Aborigines, who comprise one or two per cent of the Australian population, are diverse in character and situation. Many follow an essentially European mode of life, speak only English and biologically are less than half Aboriginal. Others are purely Aboriginal, speak several Aboriginal tongues and pursue a way of life based partly on hunting and gathering. Such diversity results from the forces and pressures exerted through colonisation and from their uneven impact in different areas.

Knowledge of what can loosely be called Aboriginal religion relies on observations since 1788. The Aborigines knew no writing and any earlier sojourners among them left no records, so greater time depth can be obtained only by inference from what has been learned during the past two hundred years. But attempts at reconstruction run into the difficulty that Aboriginal religious practice has greatly changed over that period— vanishing altogether in some areas, showing signs ofnativism or Christian influence in others and generally adapting itself to new political and socio­economic circumstances.

For example, our best accounts include those of A.W. Howitt, who worked in south-east Australia late last century, and of his contemporaries Baldwin Spencer and FJ. Gillen, who worked together mainly in the Northern Territory.

No unity of faith or practice existed among Aborigines in a sense comparable to what is found in any of the great divisions of Christianity or Islam. Aboriginal horizons were highly circumscribed—a person’s social universe might comprise five hundred or a thousand souls, beyond whom lived people of whom little was known but much might be suspected. Except in more arid parts, an Aboriginal’s life would have been largely spent in a tract of a few thousand, or perhaps only a few hundred, square miles. Should we not speak, then, of there being many religions, just as there were hundreds of languages? Perspectives were also very limited in a time sense. Genealogical memory and memories of past events usually ran back no more than two or three generations. Earlier than that, or separated from it by an indefinite lapse of time, lay the creative period when nature and culture were fashioned by a multitude of beings who, commonly half-human and half-animal but with supranormal powers, made a mysterious appearance from beneath the earth or from the sky or from distant horizons before vanishing. This was not creation out of nothing, for something already existed, but it lacked form and active life, being pictured perhaps as a watery expanse or a waste of level ground.

A paradox can readily be seen in Aboriginal refigion (or religions). On the one hand, spatial and temporal perspectives were very restricted, but on the other hand, Aborigines throughout Australia’s three million square miles were joined by their shared ancestry and by their long isolation from the rest of the world. We must therefore recognise that chains of connection ran in every direction and back to time immemorial, even if the Aborigines themselves did not know it. So, even granting that it is more accurate to speak of religions than of religion, we can reasonably expect common religious features. Also we can expect that divergent features will, in many cases, prove to be historical variations on indigenous themes.

E. A. Worms, a Roman Catholic priest, has made the most determined modem effort to distil the essence of Aboriginal religious belief and practice. He sees the religions of the continent as forming an organic whole, characterised by eight common features:

1. Absence of esoteric doctrine;

2. Belief in a personal sky-being;

3. Belief in auxiliary spirits, often the sons of the sky-being, who taught sacred rites and gave sacred instruments;

4. Belief in holy objects left behind by the sky-being, in which his power is contained;

5. The use of liturgical drama to renew and symbolise the sky-being’s creative acts;

6. The practice of initiation, including tests of hardship;

7.

8. The existence (presumably within each community) of a leading liturgist or medicine-man.

Considered in the light of all the fieldwork carried out in Australia, Worms’s list is too specific to be accepted as valid, though Worms himself might have defended it as an enumeration of the shared features of the religious complex out of which the present-day Aboriginal religions have developed. A personal sky-being, for example, is known in many areas, most notably in the south-east, where he is depicted as an All-Father, human in form, mighty in power and continuing to take an interest in life on earth, even though he has withdrawn to the sky. In particular, he was associated with the Bora ceremonies, at which he might make a personal appearance. But in other areas no such outstanding being is known or else the most obvious counterpart is female (the All-Mother of some northern areas) and is associated more with the earth or the water than with the sky (she may, for example, be identified as a rainbow serpent who admittedly appears in the sky—as a rainbow—but more usually dwells in fresh water).

To take another example, Worms is right to recog­nise the importance of spirits who gave sacred instruments or taught sacred rituals (the intimate connection between the two is shown in the fact that the name of a ceremony is often the name of the instrument used in it, such as gong or bullroarer). But they cannot always be seen as relatives of the sky-being (or his counterpart). Thus myths of the Gunabibi, a major north­ern ceremony, credit it in some areas to a human-like father and son and to a pair of snakes, while in other areas the leading mythical figures are a pair of human-like sisters and a snake. None of these beings has any special associa­tion with the sky.

Worms allowed for the obvious differences among Aboriginal religions by distinguishing what he called ‘incidental accretions’. They include such features as the prevalence of secondary spirits and of snake and other animal symbolism and the exclusion of women from much of the men’s ritual.

Worms’s approach has been little emulated, though the time is now ripe for fresh attempts making use of the mountain of information collected by field workers over the last two decades. So far the more usual approach has been in accord with W.E.H. Stanner’s view that the best avenue for the understanding of Aboriginal religion is through the study of the surviving regional cults (or ceremonies). In them we see religion in action.

The rich perspectives opened by this approach are well shown in W. Lloyd Warner’s classic monograph on the Murngin of north-east Arnhem Land. In the late 1920s, the time of his study, they were performing these major ceremonies (as well as a number of others of lesser scope):

1. Djungguan;

2. Gunabibi;

3. Ulmark;

4. Marndiella;

5. Dua moiety’s Narra;

6. Yiritja moiety’s Narra.

Each ceremony is a complex whole, including a series of ritual acts and dances, a series of songs and a set of ritual parapher­nalia. It is performed at grounds constructed for the purpose and is associated with a body of myth—and hence with the world-formative deeds of the creative period. Religious performance cannot be isolated from the social system, for the roles which actors play are allocated according to important social divisions—of sex, for example, or of moiety.

To speak of Murngin religion as comprising a number of ceremonies may leave the impression that it lacks overall system. In fact, Warner sees unity as coming especially from myths, which provide a symbolic underpinning for the ceremonies. Thus the first four of the six ceremonies listed above belong to the myth cycle of the Wawilak sisters and the last two to that of the Djunkgao sisters.

The Wawilak myth, for example, tells of two sisters who set off from the interior on a northwards journey to the sea after committing incest. As they travelled they named the plants they gathered and the animals they killed; they also named places and countries and, from time to time, changed language to that now associated with the area through which they were passing. When the younger sister felt a child within her (the fruit of incest) she told the elder, and they hurried on to a water-hole associated with the rock python. There they made a fire and began to cook the plants and animals collected on their journey, but each sprang from the fire and ran like a man to the water, into which it dived. Next the elder sister gathered bark for a bed for the younger, but in doing so she menstruated into the water. The pollution aroused the python. He rose to the surface, the water level also rose to flood the surrounding country and soon rain began to pour down. Hastily the sisters built a house. They fell asleep within it, but were soon awoken by the rain, which was becoming heavier and heavier.

In a vain effort to stop the rain the sisters sang the songs of the Gunabibi, Djungguan, Mamdiella and Ulmark. Then in desper­ation they sang of rock python and menstrual blood. At this the python made them fall asleep by magic, after which he swallowed them. He regurgitated them, swallowed them again and finally regurgitated them a second time. Later the spirits of the sisters appeared in a dream to two men, to whom they taught the four ceremonies.

The Wawilak myth is more than an original tale. It enables symbolic sense to be made of what is done in the ceremonies associ­ated with it. In the Gunabibi, for example, the bullroarer (one of the ‘holy objects’ of Worms) is identified with the python, the various animals referred to in songs or mimed in dances are among those the sisters saw and named on their journey and a structure of forked sticks, erected at a late stage and serving as a focus of action for both men and women, is the house in which the sisters took shelter. We can also see the myth as rationalising the religious division of labour and responsibility between the sexes—a theme elaborated in a different way by the myth of the Djunkgao sisters.

It would be a mistake to explain the ceremonies as having been derived from the myths. Rather the ceremonies, as large-scale collective actions of stereotyped form, could more plausibly be invoked to explain the myths, for the latter are not learned in word-perfect fashion and can vary a good deal in the telling. But, when Murngin religion is looked upon as a more or less functioning whole, myth and ceremony are best seen as complementary variables.

Many of the cults described in the literature are not confined to one locality. Those of the Murngin, for example, are performed by other Arnhem Land peoples. The Gunabibi, in particular, enjoys a wide distribution, being known over many tens of thousands of square miles of northern Australia. But, as is to be expected from the lack of an overarching ‘church’, considerable variations can occur in details of performance from one locality to another, and the associated myths can be quite different. Thus, to the south-west of the Murngin, the Gunabibi is explained by a myth about a father and son, both properly married, who set off on ajourney inland from the sea after a water-dwelling monster swallowed ceremonial performers and regurgitated them as bone.

In addition, there can be important differences in the purposes fulfilled by ceremonial performances. Emphasis may be laid espe­cially on the passage of youths into manhood and on the separation of masculine from feminine elements in society—certainly that is how Warner depicted Murngin religion. But ceremonies may also be understood as a means to transform spirits of the dead from a wandering state to a state in which they may enter ancestral waters—and from which, in the belief of some areas, they may undergo reincarnation. Ceremonies may be centred on the disposal of the bodily remains of the dead, or they may aim to ensure the perpetuation of plant and animal species. Invariably they incorporate a divi­sion of labour and responsibility, for which reason it is by no means fanciful to see them as occasions on which Aborigines colourfully and dramatically map out their social structure. And, because the associated myths and songs are located at known places, or lines of places, in the landscape, the cere­monies are also a kind of geographical mapping. Some of these functions— the social and geographical mapping, for example—probably pertain to all ceremonies, but others are contingent and can change from one area to the next even as regards the ‘same’ ceremony. Thus assisting in the transforma­tion of spirits of the dead provides some of the purposive core of the Gunabibi south-west of the Murngin, but it is no part of the Gunabibi among the Murngin themselves. They secure that end through other ritual observances.

These considerations suggest that the future development of the study of Aboriginal religions will do well to follow two complementary paths. On the one hand, we need to elucidate the system of ceremonies (understood as complex wholes) of particular peoples. On the other hand, we must aim to trace the chains of connection between the systems of different peoples. In ascertaining the relations of transformation between different ceremonies in the same locality or between the ‘same’ ceremony in different localities, we may hope to reach more or less plausible conclusions about processes of religious growth, change and decay on the continent. Given the shared ancestry of the Aborigines and their long isola­tion from the rest of the world, it might well turn out that these processes could best be understood on the analogy of the incessant dealing and re­dealing of a pack of cards.

But have Aboriginal religions (as distinct from the study of them) a future? They have vanished from parts of Australia, and where they survive the context of performance—and therefore the significance of performance—is by no means what it would have been in pre-colonial times. Formerly, for example, most Aborigines spent much of the year on the move in small groups in a quest for food. Performances of major ceremonies were occasions of heightened social life, when perhaps a few hundred people would come together for a few weeks. Disputes might be settled and marriages arranged, as well as ceremonies performed. The switch to a largely sedentary existence and to assured food supplies has changed all that. The social order in which Aborigines live can no longer be wholly explained by the deeds of the spirit beings of the creative period. Greatly improved communications have exposed Aborigines not only to profound differences in attitude and belief among Europeans but to consider­able variations in Aboriginal practice according to location or region. Not all influences are corrosive. Thus the definition of Aboriginal land rights in South Australia and the Northern Territory has incorporated the mythic and ceremonial aspects of traditional relations to land. Accordingly it would be premature to foretell the demise of Aboriginal religions. The likelier out­come, at least in the near future, is the emergence of very widespread religious movements based on a selection of themes and elements from the more detailed but spatially more restricted cults of the immediate past.

Further Reading

Charlesworth, M., Morphy, H., Bell, D. and Maddock, K. (eds.) Religion in Aborigi­nal Australia: An Anthology (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1984)

Howitt, A.W. The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (Macmillan, London, 1904) Spencer, B. and Gillen, F.J. The Native Tribes of Central Australia (Macmillan, Lon­don, 1899)

Stanner, W.E.H. On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monographs, Sydney, 1964) ‘Religion, Totemism and Symbolism’, in R.M. and C.H. Berndt (eds.) Aborigi­nal Man in Australia (Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1965)

Warner, W.L. A Black Civilization (Harper, New York, 1937)

Worms, E.A. ‘Religion’, in H. Shiels (ed.) Australian Aboriginal Studies (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1963)