UNGARINYIN RELIGION

UNGARINYIN RELIGION . Members of the Ngarinyin (Ngarinjin) language group, along with their regional neighbors the Worrorra (Worrora/Worora), Wunambal (Unambal), and Gambre (Gamberre), whose combined, adjacent territories cover the northern Kimberley region of Western Australia, share a religious tradition primarily focused on the figures known as wandjina and wunggurr and an associated set of beliefs and practices. While variants of wunggurr, the Rainbow Serpent motif, are evident in Aboriginal cosmologies across Australia (Radcliffe-Brown, 1926), in the northern Kimberley region the Rainbow Serpent beliefs take on a distinctive cast through their interaction with the wandjina complex (cf. Elkin, 1930, "Rock Paintings of North-West Australia," p. 279).

Wandjina and Wunggurr

Whereas wandjina and wunggurr are in some respects distinguishable from each other, in local beliefs and practice they are not entirely separate entities. Wandjina are named and localized "spirits of place" believed to reside in specific tracts of country associated with a particular patrifilial clan and appear in narratives that describe their travels and adventures in the Larlan (the originary creative epoch). Wunggurr is a more diffuse life force animating and underlying the particular manifestations of its power that find expression in all species of things, including the wandjina. Some local expressions use the terms wandjina and wunggurr interchangeably in contexts where powerful forces emanating from the land are discussed in general. A further set of terms, gulingi (properly translated as "rain," but also a personage or group of personages indistinguishable from wandjina ) and Galaru (a sky-snake personage particularly associated with the more dangerous aspects of cyclonic rain and lightning) are also at times used to refer to both wandjina and wunggurr. One further term, Wanjad, is used to refer to an aspect of wunggurr that becomes incarnate in the Rock Python. Representations of wandjina and wunggurr often occur together, alongside depictions of various natural species, in the painted cave galleries of this region. It is believed that Wandjina came to dwell eternally in the caves, in which they painted themselves. An oneiric mirroring between wandjina and wunggurr was noted by Andreas Lommel, who reported on the neighboring Wunambal's belief that "Ungud [wunggurr ] finds the soul of a Wondschina [wandjina ] in a dream in the water" (Lommel, 1997, p. 16).

D. Mowaljarlai explained the relationship between wandjina and wunggurr in this way:

Every man or girl they come out from each wunggurr water. Wandjina gives us back. Then we know where that child come from. Everybody know. And that is where the land is because all the power connected. We find children from water. That's why we're water people. We spirits hide in the water come out in the open. We all belong water because wandjina belong water. He not a dry wandjina. He belong rain. (Doring, 2000, p. 238)

Wandjina are usually depicted as mouthless, anthropomorphic figures representing the body of an apical clan ancestor (or rarely an ancestress). They occur as polychromatic paintings in sandstone caves and in stone arrangements throughout the region. Wandjina are also identified in other features of the landscape, in various animal and plant (especially aquatic) species, in pools of freshwater and sometimes saltwater, and most importantly in the cumulonimbus rain-bearing clouds (gulingi or angguban ) that move across the Kimberley landscape in the cyclone season, Winjin (December through to April). The actions of moving and then laying down performed by the wandjina in their travels in the creative epoch, Larlan, by the rain clouds (also known as "the travelers") each wet season, and by the flowing rivers gradually contracting to isolated pools are all perceived as processual moments in the continual reanimation of Dreaming forces that works toward everything in the country becoming yayiyurru (also transcribed as yorro yorro ), "standing up together in a bunch" (Redmond, 2001, p. 227; also Mowaljarlai and Malnic, 1993).

Wandjina are most often represented only with head and shoulders, though occasionally an entire anthropomorph (usually with no gender marking) is depicted. In such cases the torso, arms, and legs are often filled in with a series of parallel red ochre lines representing falling rain. The head is generally encircled with radiating lines said to be both feathered head decorations and lightning. The head commonly shows a horseshoe-shaped red-ochre band said to be the encircling body of wunggurr, the Rock Python.

Wandjina cave paintings are regarded by the Ngarinyin people as the imprint or "shadow," anguma, left by the wandjina after their creative travels across the landscape in the Larlan. The word anguma also denotes a person's "spirit" or "soul," linking wandjina closely to beliefs about conception (see below). Wandjina are said to be visible in the present because they pressed their bodies into the rock faces of this landscape during the earth's formative period, while its surface was still soft. The apparent absence of a mouth has been explained by some senior Ngarinyin men as resulting from the fact that the mouth is located on the inner side of the visible image, facing in toward the rock upon which the image appears. Wandjina sometimes left behind other sorts of markings, such as the footprints said to be visible in the rock at Aynggulura. Paddy Neowarra, a senior Ngarinyin man, tells how "wandjina walked through that flat ground, through the opening and made his print behind him for us to see" (Redmond, 1998, p. 24). At the painting site known as Yalgi andi, on the central Kimberley Plateau, the qualities of this primordially soft world are still said to be clearly evident. Here an extensive series of cup-shaped markings appear in both vertical and horizontal rock faces. These small hollows, dagula or bindingarri, are said to have been created by the action of the "sweat of wandjina " falling onto the soft rock in the Larlan (Redmond, 1996, p. 35).

The painted wandjina images, then, are regarded not as the artistic work of the ancestors of present-day people but rather as actual ancestors, autochthonous creations whose images have merely been maintained by human agency: "kept bright" by ritual repainting. This periodic repainting is believed to have profound consequences as far as maintaining the natural and social balances of the cosmos (Mowaljarlai and Malnic, 1993; Rumsey and Mowaljarlai, 1994; Crawford, 1968; Blundell and Layton, 1978). Persons of both genders feel a ritual obligation to countries where they have a strong connection deriving from one of a number of potential links (i.e., patrilocality, mother's country, conception site). It seems that socially mature persons other than patriclan members could be invited to repaint an image in another person's clan country. Such persons would then be given gifts (ngurli ), such as kangaroo meat or wild honey. Paddy Neowarra explained, "In Winjin [Cyclone Season] time when that wilmi [mist] come out from the stone in early morning, jurri we call it, the 'smoke' goes into the paint and renews it and it's just like it paint up again so we can go always go back and renew it" (Redmond, 1995, p. 98).

In this sense even the act of retouching is not seen as being initiated by humans but by the saturated air emanating from the sun-warmed rocks that gives a new life to the painted images. There is indeed a noticeable glow in the paintings at this time of year because the kinds of ochre used in the paintings (the white huntite, particularly) absorb moisture readily, enriching the colors, restoring to them something of the vividness these paints display when wet (cf. Crawford, 1968).

Ngarinyin use the term we awani for the "laying down" of the wandjina as they pressed themselves into the soft jelly-like surface of the earth in the Larlan. They speak of the rock caves (tight niches into which painters often had to squeeze themselves) as actually being cloud formations, stating unequivocally "that stone is a cloud" (cf. Mowaljarlai and Vinnicombe, 1995: 236; see also Crawford, 1968).

The annual wet-season deluge finds its earliest mythic archetype in the focal story of Wanalirri. This story and its associated painting site and songs tell of a primordial flood of cataclysmic proportions that submerged the world and all within it. In this saga a boab tree (Adansonia gregorii ), actually a disguised wandjina, "opened its legs" and swallowed up two juvenile miscreants who had originally provoked the wrath of the wandjina by plucking the feathers from Dumbi the Owl, an animal highly favored by wandjina (Redmond, 1995, p. 89). The boys were then trapped inside the boab body forever despite the efforts of their relatives (who then appeared to be saved from the flood) on the outside of the boab tree. These two boys who were trapped in the boab were said to be the only survivors of the great flood, but having grabbed a kangaroo by the tail to escape the floodwater, they were tricked into a premature burial. As in the various Arnhem Land versions of the swallowing myths and rites given by L. R. Hiatt "as a substitute for the natural model of female generation," the two boys of the Wanalirri story were imprisoned, but the other people of the world were regurgitated after the flood (Hiatt, 1975, p. 157).

This cosmogonic event is replicated in the floods of the wet season and in the radical contraction of the river systems as the dry season moves in. Thus there is an annual recurrence of the "breaking up" of the visible body of wunggurr into distinct pools. The long ribbons of the river courses, which are visible from the elevated rock ledges in which many of the wandjina caves are located, slowly break up into large, relatively isolated rock pools, the ngawan or "living water" that never disappears, no matter how dry the season.

The night sky is also said to be replete with pools of freshwater that are made most visible in the body of the originary wandjina, Walanganda, the Milky Way. This galaxy is said to be the body of Walanganda lying across the heavens, with his head in the north and feet in the south. Within this body of swirling white mists are pools of "dark, sweet water" that are pointed out in one dark hole in particular just to the east of the Southern Cross constellation (Redmond, 1996, p. 18). All freshwater on the earth is said to have come from water that originally "fell down" from these dark pools of freshwater in the body of Walanganda.

The whiteness of the body of Walanganda is said to come from the smoke from the cooking fires of the two moiety heroes: Jun.gun (Owlet Nightjar), who was cooking yali (female kangaroo), and Wodoy (Spotted Nightjar), who was cooking jebarra (emu) in the Larlan. These two totemic figures are central to the foundational myths of Ngarinyin sociality. They are said, for example, to have come to blows over the issue of primordial incestuous desire, leading to the introduction of the all-important law of moiety exogamy through daughter exchange. At the Walanganda wandjina painting in Jibilingarri clan country, the wandjina and a smaller second figure, identified as his son, are represented on the roof of a cave. In the burnished rock floor immediately below them is a dark, well-polished depression said to be the wunggurr pool visible in the Milky Way itself. Here the wandjina and his son are perpetually "mirrored" in the "water" that forms part of Walanganda's own body. Parallel red lines emanating from the wandjina body are said to be the swirling mists making up the galaxy. Importantly, these lines of celestial mist also formed an angga (or coolamon ), traditionally used by women for carrying vegetable foodstuffs, babies, and the bones of the dead (cf. Love, 1936, p. 158). The curved outside surface of angga are usually decorated with the same kind of striated red lines carved into the wood. J. R. B. Love noted that at Kunmunya "the mother will often paint her child with stripes of red ochre" (Love, 1936, p. 118).

Death and Funerary Practices

The relationship of continuity between living persons and the wandjina of their clan was traditionally underscored by the practice of interring the skulls and femur bones of deceased men in the main wandjina cave of their patriclan. Most modern burials take place in township or community graveyards following a Christian service accompanied by country gospel singing interspersed with the intense keening of the women in a maternal kinship relationship to the deceased. These funerals are marked by strict observance of avoidance relationships that prescribe that the widow of a deceased man (but not vice versa) enters a lengthy period of seclusion from other members of the community. The occasional performance of precolonial burial practices, in conjunction with the narratives of senior Ngarinyin people about these practices when they were more widespread, permits considerable insight into Ngarinyin beliefs about death.

Once the bones of the deceased were regarded as sufficiently "clean and dry," after perhaps a year or more exposed to the elements in a stone cairn, they were gathered and given a final scrub in water by people in a maternal kinship category to the deceased (Redmond, 1997, p. 34). The skull and long-limb bones were anointed with a mixture of fat and red ochre before being wrapped in sheets of wulun (paperbark). The paperbark wrapping, particularly associated with femininity, symbolically "restores" to the bones their fleshy envelope. In this regard it is important to note that babies were also usually rubbed with fat by the maternal kin in the early days of their lives (cf. Love, 1936, p. 113).

Grieving relatives thus participate in ceremonies that "return" the individual subject to the ancestral realm, reunifying the deceased person with the enduring wandjina ancestor and ancestral clan country. This wandjina identity endures through various reincarnations of the ancestral being (through the abi relationship). A deceased person's anguma (shadow or spirit) is believed to rejoin with the body of wunggurr when his or her bones are lodged in the cave. The person's spirit travels to Dulugun, an island in the western sea (Numenbu, Champagny Island) and, after some indefinite interval, resurfaces through a water hole and attaches itself to the person it has chosen as its new father, thus enacting the abi identity of a person with his or her father's father's brother or sister. Each of these reciprocal relationship categories are glossed in English simply as "brother" and "sister." Afterward, one part of the anguma is said to remain in the rock cave where the bones are deposited. In Dulugun, spirit children are said to be mired in jalad-gu, a green water grass in the water holes where the anguma reside. It is said that this water grass acts as a kind of sponge that absorbs the anguma in Dulugun until they are ready to be reborn.

The identification of the sandstone caves in which the bones of the dead are placed with an.guban (rain clouds) is a crucial element in the understanding of the cosmography of this region—it is in these "watery" recesses that the wandjina, as the living part of a person's patri-identity, continues to dwell (Mowaljarlai and Vinnicombe, 1995; Mowaljarlai and Malnic, 1993; cf. Lommel, 1997; Crawford, 1968). The symbolic equivalence of cloud and stone highlights the series of transformations that link living persons, their wandjina, and the more universalizing aspect of the creative forces believed to be immanent in the figure of wunggurr.

Conception Beliefs

Wunggurr also embodies yarri, dreaming activity in a general sense. This is most evident in the reciprocity of "dreaming" child spirits between the father-son dyad in the Ngarinyin social world, in which a person is identified as a reincarnation of an abi (father's father's brother or sister, depending on the gender of the child) from whom one's name is taken. Wandjina are thus personified in contemporary living persons, who identify with a particular wandjina by referring to him as "I" or "me," or as the speaker's abi when narrating stories of that personage in the Larlan. The association of wandjina and wunggurr with fertility is clearly apparent in the affectionate calling of newborn babies "wandjina," and in the practice of divining where a fetus's wunggurr (conception place) is by family discussions about where the mother first knew herself to be pregnant, what happened on that day, where the husband was, and what he might have caught hunting or fishing that day, thus conferring the name of that place upon the child.

The senior Wunambal man W. Goonack stated, "We born from water, from wulu " (Redmond, 1995, p. 28). Wulu is a polysemous Ngarinyin term that Paddy Neowarra glosses as the "colour seen in water when a man finds dream for baby" or simply "dreams in the water" (Redmond, 1997, p. 72). This color, the spectral dispersion of light in water, is regarded as having "strong wunggurr " just as the rainbow is regarded as a powerful embodiment of wunggurr. In the latter case the shimmering spectral light is as important to the image of wunggurr as the snakelike shape it forms arching across the sky from one point on the earth to another.

Wunggurr and Barnmarn

Beneath the wunggurr pools it is said that there are entire "worlds—big dry ground" in which wandjina dwell, worlds that are mirrors of the airy world above the rock pools but are contained in world-sized caves complete with kin, game, and vegetation. These worlds, also identified with Dulugun, the realm of the dead (see below), are believed to have something like "trap-doors with lid" or "windows" that allow entry and exit for those with the knowledge to do so, such as the barnmarn, a traditional healer and composer. A human being can enter and exit this realm through these "windows" or "trapdoors" as though in a "lift" (i.e., an elevator). The sensation of vertiginous descent was said to be similar (Redmond, 1996, pp. 56–59). According to D. Mowaljarlai, "A man who had healing powers came to that wunggurr place, snake place, punched a hole there with his heel, with foot, and he made a window … hollow ground, it just went down in a door" (Lommel and Mowaljarlai, 1994, p. 285).

The process of "dreaming" songs requires a composer to travel in a dream on the back of wunggurr through the air or deep beneath the water to Dulugun, the land of the dead. The composer's mortal body meanwhile remains on the ground, where it is cared for by the composer's assistants. The sleeping body remains connected to the wunggurr self by buyu, a long, thin, invisible thread connected to the body, now colloquially known as "radar" or "fishing line."

Miriru (or mururu ) is a name for the wunggurr power possessed by the barnmarn. D. Mowaljarlai has explained that mururu is the "clear vision, no longer blind" imparted from wunggurr. Others have described it as "strong wunggurr dreams" and also as the "blood, juice of kangaroo" (Redmond, 1995, p. 25). There are a number of senses in which the wunggurr power of the composer-healer is comparable to that which comes from a person's dreaming of a spirit child. Both are referred to by the same term in Kimberley Aboriginal English: "finding" a song or "finding" a spirit child, respectively. Both require a penetration of the screen that normally shields humans from the spirit realm. Composers take the journey through the bottom of the water hole to Dulugun, where bundles of green leaves are held in front of their eyes so they will not be too frightened to look at the emerging dancing spirits. In the case of a man finding a child, the anguma itself takes the journey out of the water hole and lands on the body of the prospective father.

Beliefs about wandjina and wunggurr continue to have a powerful salience in contemporary Kimberley Aboriginal communities, despite great changes in economic and social circumstances. The people of this cultural domain continue to place these images and beliefs at the very heart of their social and cultural identity vis à vis other Aboriginal groups of the region and the encompassing non-Aboriginal world. In everyday discourse and the interpretation of events, wandjina and wunggurr figure prominently for all age groups, even though the differences in levels of knowledge and specificity are marked. One of the ways in which all participate in this shared body of beliefs is in the attribution of "uncanny" and troubling events to the actions of wandjina, wunggurr, and the host of other supernatural beings in this cosmology. The practice of depicting wandjina and wunggurr on canvases for sale in the contemporary art world is another means by which the salience of these images is transmitted across generations.

Adolescent Male Initiation

Another continuing aspect of Ngarinyin religious life is the annual performance of ceremonies at which boys who have reached adolescence are circumcised. This may take the form either of the local tradition of walungarri (a circle dance performed over three nights accompanied by a long and intricate song cycle and clapping sticks) or wangga (imported to the Kimberley in the 1930s from the Daly River area of Northern Territory in which the didjeridu is employed as an accompaniment to singing in a Murin-patha language).

The practices of walungarri are said to have come from the ancestral bird personages, Gwion Gwion (Doring, 2000; cf. Lommel, 1997, and Crawford, 1968, where their role is understated). The local origins of circumcision are also given in myths such as the Worrorra story of Ngayanggananyi (Mount Trafalgar) and the Wunbangguwa people, told by Elkin Umbagai as "the Mountain of Initiation" (McKenzie, 1980, p. 76). Here the Ancestral Beings first dug a trench around a mountain so it was cut off from its surrounding stone matrix. To celebrate their achievement they instituted "the first initiation ceremony for young men" (McKenzie, 1980, p. 76). Here the walungarri circle dance is an emulation of digging around the base of the mountain. Flying Fox and several other ancestral animals, including Ring-Tail Possum, Crab, and Shovel-Nose Shark, "change their shapes"—that is, attained their present animal morphology through the process of digging out the trench around the mountain (McKenzie, 1980, p. 76). Flying Foxes, the first initiates (said to show circumcision marks on their penises), play a particularly prominent role in this story. The whirling flight of flocks of flying foxes when roused from sleep is said to be a re-enactment of the walungarri circle dance. The walungarri, says Umbagai, "goes on all night. When the first streak of daylight shows, the lads are taken away from the families—from the women and children" (McKenzie, 1980, p. 76). The women then "wail and sometimes beat their heads with stones" (in the manner of widows at the deaths of their husbands), and the initiate is entrusted to the care of a classificatory brother-in-law (a potential wife's brother), who will nurse him through the circumcision and its aftermath. This relationship remains significant to both parties throughout their lives.

Extensive travels to gather initiation performers are an important part of the ceremonial process and foster close ties of reciprocity between individuals and groups in far-flung settlements across the Kimberley. Other forms of exchange (wurnan ) of both a ceremonial and mundane nature, the arrangements for which which tend to be all-consuming for the participants, are instituted and perpetuated through these visits, which in turn impart vitality and complexity to Kimberley social and religious life.

See Also

Rainbow Snake; Wandjina.

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Anthony Redmond (2005)