Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore of Settled Australia

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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



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.



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




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




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




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).




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




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




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).




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




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




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




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




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.




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.



Documents

Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore of Settled Australia