CREATION MYTH -MYSTIQ IN AUSTRALIAN ABORGINAL STORIES (original) (raw)

Australian Aboriginals, who at one time were regarded as so primitive in their outlook and culture as the earliest tales of stoneage. The large number of books describing the life, customs, arts, and skills of the Aboriginals is ample proof of this renewal of interest. The white Australians appreciate the wealth of imagination displayed in Aboriginal legend. It is part of the literature of Australia. As Eleanor Dark puts: "The Australian Aboriginal had great virutes; in a fairly extensive reading I have been able to discover no vices save those which they learned from the white invaders of their land."(9) Aboriginals are primitive, clever and imaginative people who had to fight to gain their nourishment from the mother earth. It is remarkable that in an environment of desert wastes and infertile soil, as well as in wellwatered country, the imagination of the Aboriginals produce tales that are both beautiful and amusing , and that they find human characteristics and poetry in bird and beast, in the sky above them, in sun, moon, and stars, and even in reptiles and insects. They lived close to the soil, and children of nature. They were dependent on her for sustenance, and in the teeming animal life and in the barren places alike they found evidence of the work of a Creator Spirit, and promise of Bullima, the afterlife. The legends have been gathered from many different sources. It is natural that there should be inconsistencies and contradictory elements. This is particularly in the case of Creation Myths. The animals and insects were brought to life at the touch of Yhi, the Sun Goddess, and that man, the final creation, was made in the bodily and mental from of Baiame, the Great Siprit. Other widespread legends say that all living things first took the form of men, and gradually achieved individual characteristics as animals. This is a reasonable explanation of the origin of totemism, which exercised a considerable influence on Aboriginal life. The presentation of myths and legends in a form which is acceptable to the present day must necessarily depart from the spirit of the Eternal Dreamtime in many respects. As professor A.P.Elkin remarked. Mythology is not just a matter of words and records, but of action and life, for the cult societies, the totemic lodges, do not spend their time at meeting reciting and chanting only: they also reenact myths, and do so because the heroes and ancestors were, in their belief, actual persons and totemic beings; what they did in the course of their labours, must now be done in ritual and the