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.