The relevance of this analysis of an Australian Aboriginal myth to Celtic Studies is two-fold. Firstly, the Wandjinna people and the story content are of vital interest to Celtologists, and I hope, to Aborigines. Secondly, it displays to perfection some of the mechanisms that make myth out of history, including some that are major features of Celtic myth making.

It’s a brief story of only four paragraphs.

THE FIRST KANGAROO

From THE DREAMTIME: Aboriginal myths in paintings, by Ainslie Roberts with text by Charles P. Montford.

Montford retells an Aborigine ‘dreamtime’ tale telling that the first kangaroos were blown to the mainland in a cyclone. Though exhausted they were unable to land, their efforts to touch ground lengthening their legs.

A hunting party was caught in this cyclone and driven to shelter among the rocks, from which they saw the kangaroos being carried along by the storm along with branches and clods of earth and gravel.

They were astounded at the oddity of the animals’ body shape, small heads, little arms, big bodies and long legs and their tails. They watched them trying in vain to touch the ground, while the gusts of wind kept them airborne. But as the storm abated they saw one crash into the branches of a tree, fall to the earth and recovering, get up and hop away.

Satisfied that this place was rich in game, fruit trees and running water, the whole tribe relocated to the area and after a long while, they learnt to hunt the kangaroo.

My interpretation, based on a belief that the story was originally a simple direct narration of real events, made weird by the misinterpretation of it by the white translator who first collected it, is as follows:

A shipload of sailors was blown off course in a cyclone and reached the northwest coast of Australia in a state of exhaustion, their ship beyond repair. They had for some time been unsuccessful in their efforts to land, but at last found a beach where they could. Finding the land inhospitable (William Dampier’s land of sand, flies and sore eyes) they sent scouting parties out in all directions to look for fresh water and decent land.

One such party found rich grazing lands, clear running streams, abundant tree fruits, and kangaroos, whose oddness amazed them, a few days journey to the north, but was caught in a cyclone. Sheltering among rocks they saw trees uprooted, grass torn up and the kangaroos borne aloft by the powerful gusts of the cyclone.

After the storm they sent back word to the rest of the crew to move into the area, where they soon learnt to use the abundant resources of the land.

My comments:

The European collector of this story was not listening for a straightforward account of past events of historical significance but was predisposed to hear a fascinating mixture of naive credulity interwoven with primordial wisdom too cryptic to penetrate, in support of his/her fixed idea that these profoundly primitive people would have a profoundly primitive mentality. The earliest European anthropologists to look at the Aborigines classified all Aboriginal oral history as Dreamtime stories, (which is like classifying Winnie the Pooh or some schoolgirl’s blog on netball as Sacred Gospel) and all their science, ethics,

sociology, political theory and performing arts as magico-religion. (Most still do).

The misinterpreted Aborigines did not understand enough English or what anthropologists wanted well enough to correct them, so later generations not recognising these stories as their own are not able to make anything of them at all, so they can say nothing in their own defence.

We’re not far from a situation in which urbanised Aborigine parents, estranged from their own culture, are offering their children mangled stories like this one believing them to be echt, instead of the powerful, magical, life-shaping glimpses of the proto-creational rainbow of sequences of morphic resonance accessible through the stark symbolism of their precisely structured, ritual-enshrined Alcheringa tales.

It seems to me to be extremely unlikely that European myths have not mutated from simple history in similar ways.

We know that Celto-Egypto-Phoenician sailors lived in Australia in ancient times, because their coins, artefacts and other archaeological remains have been found there. Broome is rich in such finds. Although evidence is in favour of purposeful settlement for the exploitation of resources (Australian eucalyptus oil, for example, was used in ancient Egyptian embalming and there’s evidence of mining for precious metals) shipwrecks of this kind were probably common.

This story seems to have come from Wandjinna country in the Kimberleys in which case, they were Celts (Wan-djinna = bhán duine, which is Irish for white person). The Wandjinna people of the Kimberleys despite generations of intermarrying with local populations still have paler skins than other Aborigines, and many Western, desert and inland aborigines are fair or red-haired. There are many culturally

focal words in Aboriginal languages that have resounding links to words in Celtic and related ancient languages.

Accustomed to ovids, bovids and equines, etc, the Northern Hemisphere Wandjinna would have been amazed at the strangeness of the kangaroo, whereas Dreamtime Aborigines who had never seen a large mammal before would not be amazed that its proportions were nearer to those of a human being, as a kangaroo’s are, than those of many other mammals.

The idea that the Kangaroos’ efforts to land had lengthened their legs doesn’t ring true to my ear. Origin stories of the aborigines aren’t like that. Simplistic tales of ‘how-the-who’s-it-got-its-what’s-it’ tales are more typically western.

A ‘whole tribe’ of native Aborigines would not have needed a storm to guide them to the grassy area of abundant food. A shipwrecked crew would.

When did this happen? How long is it since Irish-speaking people plied the seven seas? Not since Rome proclaimed the world flat and tortured anyone who said it wasn’t. Of course, we now know that their pre-Christian era maps of the Southern Hemisphere are real. In the near future I’ll be looking at some of their strange ‘magical journeys’ to see how much they may have been subjected to the same sort of distortive treatment as we’re seeing here.