Australia: Aboriginal culture thriving in Kakadu

By GREG ANSLEY

The punishment spear makes everyone wince. The front barbs, Max tells us, are sloped forward for easy entry, the rear angled backwards for maximum resistance during extraction.

Where the offender is speared depends on the crime - an arm for theft, the thigh for rape, the heart for murder.

This is Aboriginal law, still practised in Australia's Northern Territory and accepted by courts which sometimes send criminals back for tribal justice, with an official to observe the punishment.

If someone doesn't return to accept tribal punishment he will be an outcast, Max says. For a culture whose being is bound tightly to family, clan and land, the spear is often regarded as the lesser pain.

On the Alligator River, below the ancient paintings on the sandstone of Ubirr that was formed half the lifetime of the Earth ago, concepts of life and society change.

Max's European family name is Murphy, taken from his Irish mother. His tribal name is none of our business, made clear with a smile and a brief joke.

But Max's people have lived in this part of what is now Kakadu National Park, butting against the escarpment of Arnhem Land south-east of Darwin, since human life arrived in Australia.

Western anthropologists speak of a vanished land bridge, or of ancient seafaring skills forgotten in pre-history.

Standing on a bluff above the Alligator River, Max talks only of the Rainbow Dreaming and the spirits his people believe inhabit the land.

Their marks can be seen in the rock art of Ubirr, and at Nourlangie Rock to the south, where spirit ancestors called Mimi are said to have painted artwork on the inaccessible ceilings of towering rock overhangs.

At Kakadu, three hours' drive from Darwin, the West has stained the fringes of traditional life, adding some boons - rifles for hunting, for example - while eroding parts of the complex Bininj culture and introducing evils like alcohol.

But the core remains, despite the number of Aboriginal languages shrinking from 200 to about 100, with only 50 having a significant number of speakers.

At Kakadu the number has fallen from 12 to three - the highland languages of Gun-djeihmi, Kun-winjku and Jawoyn, all spoken near the Arnhem Land escarpment.

The tongues of the lowlands vanished with the decimation of the population after the foundation of Darwin in 1869, when disease and bloodshed hewed it to one-fifth of of its pre-European levels.

Today, ranger Greg Miles says there are 20 different clans in Kakadu, living by ancient rules that place family and land above all else.

They live incredibly busy lives, looking after the family, hunting and fishing, going to funerals, getting their grandmother to a clinic, Miles says. Domestic life always comes first, which is one of the problems they have in holding down a job.

Hunting and fishing, and tending the land, have deep religious significance through the belief (waning somewhat among the young) in the spirits that live there: they need to keep in touch, otherwise they will lose control of the land.

Europeans can learn only the most basic levels of Aboriginal belief, encapsulated in the Dreaming that tells of the creation of the world and all life in it, and also sets down the rules to be followed.

Other knowledge is given only to Aborigines, imparted by stages through a series of initiations.

The Bowali visitors' centre summarises what outsiders are permitted to learn.

There are six seasons in the Gun-djeihmi language, for example, based on monsoonal patterns, each linked to changes in plant and animal cycles and to the spirits associated with them.

According to the Dreaming of the Murumburr clan, who live in the Yellow Water area of the lower Alligator River, the Mimi were the first of the first people, the Nayuhyunggi, who appeared as Rainbow Snakes and other creation beings, creating humans, plants and animals and the rules and laws that they should live by.

At the end of their journeys they put themselves on rocks as paintings and became djang, or dreaming, remembered as, for example, Warramurrungundi the earth mother, or Ngalmoban, who taught people the use of yams before becoming Yamidi, the green grasshopper, to escape a dangerous spirit.

They are remembered in the rock art of Ubirr, where tracks wind past ancient red ochre representations of stick-like Mimi figures and a Tasmanian tiger and more recent paintings depicting fish in x-ray vision (showing internal bone structures) and the first Europeans, hands in pockets.

At Nourlangie Rock the key figure is Namarrgin, the lightning man, wrapped in bands of electric power with stone axes at knees and elbows to make thunder.

On a hill above the paintings you can look across to the three pillars in the Arnhem Land escarpment where Namarrgin lives, never to be disturbed for fear of disaster.

Other art depicts rules, moral codes, and warnings. To Max, they are part of life, like the plants, animals and river around him.

The old ways live on, the work divided rigidly according to gender. "We don't do women's stuff and women don't do men's stuff," Max says.

The women are responsible for about 80 per cent of the gathering of food, for bush medicines, and arts such as weaving. They use pandanas palm, sewn together using kangaroo or barramundi bones as needles and dyed with tree roots, ash and berries, to make the same mats and baskets as their ancestors traded with Indonesian trepang-hunters in the 16th century.

Using beeswax for glue and bark as a cover, the baskets become drinking vessels; larger ones are used as baby carriers.

The men paint, pass on the stories and hunt fish and big game. They use spears but take rifles as well.

A .303 spear goes pretty fast, Max says. When we go out we must bring food back for our families, so that's why we take rifles.

But the spears are still used, and lethal: tipped with ironwood on long shafts of kurrajong designed to wobble in flight to increase speed, distance and killing power, flat tips for lean animals like kangaroo, long and thin to penetrate the fat of pigs and buffalo.

For didgeridoos, the men tap melaluka trees to find trunks hollowed by termites, flush out the insects and tune and paint the wood.

The sound, like Kakadu and its people, is timeless.

* Greg Ansley visited Kakadu courtesy of the Northern Territory Tourist Commission and Keetleys Tours.