The Wagilak myth

At the beginning of time the Wagilak Sisters set off on foot towards the sea, naming places, animals and plants as they went. One of them was pregnant and the other had a child.

Before their departure they had both had incestuous relations with men of their own moiety (marriage class). After the birth of the younger sister’s child, they continued their journey and one day stopped near a water hole where the great python Yurlunggor lived… The older sister polluted the water. The outraged python came out, caused a deluge of rain and a general flood and then swallowed the women and their children. When the python raised himself the waters covered the surface of the earth and ite vegetation. When he lay down again the flood receded.

The Dreaming

The concept of the Creation Time, when the ancestral beings made the world in the form in which present-day people encounter it, is widespread in Aboriginal thought. This is commonly called the “Dreamtime” or “the Dreaming” in Australia. The Walbiri call this period djugurba which, strictly speaking, refers to the stories and attendant designs about ancestral actions during this creative time.

It means an act of creation which was an actual even in ancestral times but is still ongoing and still exerting creative power in the human present. Access to the significance of ancestral creation is often gained through the power of dreams, which is why the term is used in this way.

The Walbiri say they dream themselves of the design their ancestors are supposed to have laid down across the country. In other areas of Australia, a woman may, shortly before learning she is pregnant, dreams of a species, or of a certain place. This is interpreted as indicating the totemic affiliation of the child and its spiritual progenitor.

Source: World Mythology by Arthur Cotterell, Paraggon 1999. Chapter 14 - Australia.

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