Eagle & Crow

Interpretations | Ownership |  Authenticity | Composition | Woonta-marr

EXTRACT

‘Eagle and Crow were two leading men among the ancestors. Living between them were the three Koorokeheear sisters, unmarried Black Cockatoo girls, who were in the care of Eagle. To him they were “mother”. Crow came to see Eagle to ask him for a wife in exchange for the sister he had given him. Eagle said he didn’t have a sister to swap. Crow threatened to take the girls in Eagle’s charge, who were his mothers-in-law. Eagle told Crow that his sister’s son, Eagle’s little boy, was in camp and shouldn’t listen to such forbidden things. The next time Crow came to Eagle’s camp the little boy was sent to play out of earshot. This time Crow warned that unless Eagle gave him a wife, he would do a clever-man’s trick on him and take his fat. Eagle said he could see no way of finding Crow a wife but would look out for one and tell Crow as soon as he could.

From the mountain tops Crow watched the three sisters travelling and stopping to drink and catch food, eels and possum. Crow found it easy to follow them because he was a clever man; if he lost them he could always fly in a moment to another mountain and find them or their tracks.

‘The three sisters came to the camp of Pelican, who asked them what they were. They were Black Cockatoo women. He was a White Cockatoo man so he was right for them. They took him as their husband.

‘When Crow came by he covered his face with beard and hair and put on a limp so the sisters wouldn’t know him. Pelican invited him to stay in his camp and gave him food, as you always should.

‘Waking late in the morning, Crow thought that Pelican had placed a magic hair-rope around his shelter (to bring Crow some harm). After eating, he tracked Pelican to a lagoon where he was fishing. Then he heard the sound of crying. He looked around and couldn’t see them. Finally he looked up and saw the baby pelicans placed between the forks of the branches of a big gum tree. Their mothers, the sisters, had placed the babies in this tree because its trunk was smooth, making it hard to climb.

‘Crow, thinking he might get one of the sisters alone, touched a baby to make it cry but all the mothers came to the rescue. After they quietened the baby and went back to fishing Crow tried the same trick again, expecting the real mother to know her baby and come back alone. They all came again and went back again.

‘So Crow sang the gum tree to make it grow quickly. Carpet snake came by looking for young pelicans to eat. When he saw what Crow had done he was most annoyed. Crow tried to lower the tree again but was unable to do so.

‘By and by the mothers began to feel something had happened to their babies so they hurried back from the fishing ground to the tree. It was so big that they could not see their babies even though they could hear them crying. The women set up a loud wailing, bringing in Pelican and his friends Goanna, Emu, Kangaroo, Possum and Magpie. They all sat around the huge tree and cried because nobody could climb the smooth trunk of the tree to save the babies; just below the fork there was a large growth like a bracket. This had grown too big for anyone to climb past.

‘Then little Blue Wren went to fetch his cousin, Woodpecker, for nobody could climb as he could. He agreed to help.
‘Arriving at the tree, where all the people were gathered together, Woodpecker told Kangaroo that everyone must stand away from the foot of the tree and that nobody was to whisper or look up, so that he couldn’t be seen going up or returning.
‘Woodpecker climbed over the obstacle and tied one baby on his back with a rope of ti-tree fibre, brought it to the ground, and went up for the second one, and so on, until all the babies had been rescued

‘After losing track of the sisters and not being able to have them, Crow decided to take revenge and came back to his country. The sisters had hidden in a tea-tree swamp and then passed over to a river, avoiding Crow by travelling along the stream under the trees.

‘On arriving at Eagle’s camp Crow said his foot was sore from so much walking; he offered to stay in camp and mind his nephew while Eagle went off to hunt. They would cook the wallaby that was there, leaving Eagle a share.

‘Boy: “Uncle, my belly is aching, it is full”.
‘Crow: “Don’t stop eating yet, let me cut you off another piece”.
‘Boy: “No, I am full. I’m thirsty, I’m going for water to drink”.
‘Crow: “Run down, have your drink and come back again”.
‘When Eagle’s son came back Crow told him to go round the other way and the boy got confused about where to go, asking Crow to help. Crow threw a spear and said: “That will finish you”.
‘Having killed his sister’s son Crow made many tracks on the ground.
‘Feeling something was wrong, Eagle came back to camp. Crow told him he had been attacked by many men and the boy had been killed in the fight.

‘Eagle wasn’t tricked and told Crow to dig a hole to bury the boy. He asked Crow to lie in it “just as your sister’s son will lie” to test it. As Crow lay in the grave Eagle threw in the body of his son and quickly filled the grave with earth.
‘Eagle went back to his camp and left Crow buried. But Crow dug himself out and got away without Eagle knowing.

‘Crow heard that the Koorokeheear, the White Cockatoo sisters, Eagle’s wife and her friends, were going in search of white grubs, of which they were very fond. He at once had the idea of changing himself into a grub; and in this form bored himself into the stem of a tree where he was certain to be found by the women. He was not long in his hiding place before he was discovered by one of them, who thrust into the hole a small wooden hook, which women use for extracting grubs. He broke the point of the hook. He did the same with the other hooks belonging to the friends. He knew Eagle’s wife had a bone hook and allowed himself to be drawn out by it. Crow turned himself into a huge man and ran off with her.

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BACKGROUND

Interpretations

In the book the discussion amongst the characters about the meaning of each part of the narrative is included to help the reader to appreciate the density of meaning in just one myth.

But there’s a lot more to it that cannot be put in the mouths of characters in a novel. Eagle & Crow still takes some explaining and this is some of it.

The story is a sacred narrative of events set in the unknowable past involving supernatural beings doing things only possible in the realm of myth. One way of appreciating the special role of myth is to understand what it is not. The sacred element of myth means that it is neither legend nor epic nor folk-story; the supernatural and the impossible elements mean that it can’t be history.
But an historical point of view is one way of trying to interpret myth. For example, Eagle & Crow could be about two tribes, forever fighting and capturing each other’s women and trapped in a feud of deadly revenge. Eventually they got sick of it and made up into a single society; or it might be that one conquered the other and built another type of society to include both (such conquest is noted in the final scene of the novel).

But the historical interpretation is only one of many. Myths were made up in the first place to do much more than tell people their past; far more important is their foundation. This interpretation takes the view that myth’s role is to provide answers to those leading questions posed by the world, questions like where did it come from and what is it? Or, how did we get stuck in it?
Foundation is not creation. No Australian myths mention creation; the Australians mostly thought that things were always here and the ancestors came to shape it all properly, as it should be, and to impose order, leaving behind spirits as the authorities to maintain that order. Calling them ancestors at once ennobled them and put them far in the past. It also fashioned the supernatural in the image of the faithful, those who were certain of their belief that spirits had been placed on their country for them by the ancestors. Signs of the ancestors were everywhere: in life and death where the spirit enters at birth and then outlasts death; in the regular regrowth of every living thing; in the order that prevails despite unpredictable and destructive natural events.

Eagle and Crow are these ancestors with supernatural powers. In the myth they are adversaries who, despite their destructive conflict and the dreadful deeds involved, during their journey on the earth together brought order to the world. That order was contained in the division of nature into pairs of opposites which continually clashed and energised the world without destroying it. These opposites are represented by Eagle and Crow; the events that take place in the narrative arise out of their antagonism.
Some opposites are not so noticeable. A murderous conflict takes place between an old man and a young one, but at the same time the old man reveals compassion for his son when he sends him away so he doesn’t hear forbidden words. At the beginning the men have a friendship strong enough to embrace sister exchange for marriage, but by the end this has changed into an opposite, complete hostility.

Some other opposites are clear-cut, such as life/death. The ancestors brought life to the world, that was the purpose of their journey, but while they left life-centres wherever they travelled they also brought death along, too. From another point of view these opposites are portrayed in the myth as the creative and destructive energies in the world which the ancestors have set in balance.

In another pair of opposites, male/female, men have an ancestor-given right to women but not to all women, not mothers or mothers-in-law or sisters. This pair can also be viewed as a triumph for the ancestors, who arranged a life-giving union of opposites to offset the antagonism between the sexes, yet another way they put the world in order.
Amidst all this conflicting turmoil of the opposing forces out there the Eagle & Crow faithful were assured of a leading role in it by their myth, which connected them back to a worthy beginning and reminded them that someone from that time was still in charge.

Another interpretation of myth is myth as charter providing answers to many other questions posed by the world. These posers can, perhaps, be distilled into one – what the hell can we do about it?

As a charter, Eagle & Crow not only endows a moral code but also fixes justification for human feelings and for how the whole of society is organised.

In the terrible deeds of Crow can be seen many – in the words of another moral charter – ‘thou shalt not’s: the murder of Eagle’s son, having his mother-in-law, ravishing his own mother. It’s no clear-cut moral code, however. Crow gets away with all of it; there is no punishment except his burial, which he beats and even takes revenge for. Here it must be presumed that associated ritual and story-telling made it alright. The charter definitely prescribes revenge as the way for righting wrongs and again it must be presumed that other measures tempered its employment, not because it was morally wrong but because it could become a feud which could persist until everyone was killed.

Eagle & Crow also prescribes that it’s proper to feel sexual desire, to have a sense of right and wrong, to want revenge.
The myth also contains a prescription for society, that is division into two sections, each represented by its own ancestor, who must intermarry, sister exchange being the best way to do it.

The prescription contained in the change of scene with Pelican is for subsections which can also intermarry. In the magical deeds of Crow – singing the tree, his resurrection, becoming a grub – the myth prescribes that some men, those closer to the ancestors, will perform sorcery.

Ordeals for boys during their rites of passage are prescribed in the death of Eagle’s son and in the continual victories of Crow, the son over his father.

These victories also prescribe the descent rule of society: the line of descent was on the mother’s side, which means that if she was of the Eagle section then so were all her children. This placed Crow in the opposite section to his father to represent the rivalry between them and the opposing differences in the world, but also it placed Crow not in rivalry with his father for the possession of his mother so that the terrible mythical deeds of Crow wouldn’t happen in real life.

The myth would most definitely have been a charter for any number of rituals of which very little is known.

Knowledge of myth and trained observation of the associated rituals in other parts of Australia have afforded further interpretations of the role of myth such as myth as dream, myth as psychological conflict, myth as philosophical outlook. This last one might apply to Eagle & Crow. It could be viewed as a narrative underwritten by a philosophical nod to the ancestor-given destiny of man, a destiny of, perhaps, good-with-suffering or order-with-tragedy.

Anthropology world-wide has given a lot of time and scholarship to Australian myths. What I have written here is by way of introduction; I hope it hasn’t pointed you the wrong way.

As you might expect, the dual deities outdo the single deity in providing answers needed to give people calm, consolation and conviction in the face of the questions posed by the world. If you settle on a single all-good deity then you need to find another fount of answers to explain away all the evil in the world; the only other fount is yourself.

The outstanding example of this is the Jews in antiquity where, amongst multiple tribes with multiple deities, they adopted a single deity, not just any one but the supreme one, of course. All was well until the Babylonians came and rounded up the Jews to take them home to be their slaves. Now enslavement posed questions to which a supreme deity could not provide answers; the Jews had to find them elsewhere. They came up with another old nugget – their own fault; they had not been good enough so their punishment was slavery. By taking the rap for their own enslavement they saved themselves and, more importantly, saved their supreme deity for better times.

Both these notions were borrowed by Christianity, which tweaked the single deity with the trinity and the mea culpa with the original sin. The rest you know; I’ll leave you to consider the consequences for the whole of humanity of these notions stitched up by a few.

The Eagle & Crow people didn’t need to find many further answers, not least because of their extended isolation. About the consequences alluded to above they didn’t have to worry until single-deity people, silent about their necessary claim to be the embodiment of evil, came with armed convicts to wipe out the Eagle & Crow tribal confederation living along the coast of Bass Strait in a few years (1839–43), the most godless period in the history of the British Empire.

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Ownership

Now I wish to establish that BrownJudy’s people, Dawson’s informants, knew about this Eagle & Crow myth. The Eagle & Crow mythical narrative as presented in the book is basically the myth called M1 in Blows ‘EAGLE and CROW’ with some adaptations reliant on information in Dawson.

BrownJudy’s people told Dawson this (p100):

Pleiades are called ‘kuurokeheear’, ‘flock of cockatoos’ by the Kuurn kopan noot tribe, and are feminine. The Pirt kopan noot tribe have no general name for the Pleiades; but there is a tradition that the stars in it were a queen called Gneeanggar, and her six attendants; and, that, a long time ago, the star Canopus – ‘Waa’, ‘crow’ – fell in love with the queen, but was so unsuccessful in gaining her affections that he determined to get possession of her by stratagem. Shortly after her refusal to become his wife, he discovered by some means that the queen and her six attendants were going in search of white grubs, of which they were very fond. On hearing of this, ‘Waa’ at once conceived the idea of transforming himself into a grub; and in this form he bored into the stem of a tree where he was certain to be observed by the queen and her servants. He was not long in his hiding-place before he was discovered by one of them, who thrust into the hole a small wooden hook, which women generally use for extracting grubs. He broke the point of the hook. He did the same with those of the other five attendants. The queen then approached, and introduced a beautiful bone hook into the hole. He knew that this hook was hers; he therefore allowed himself to be drawn out, and immediately assumed the form of a giant and ran off with her from her attendants. Ever since the loss of the queen there have been only six stars in the Pleiades, representing her six servants.

Now the words ‘queen’ and ‘servants’ are out of place; it makes you think Australians couldn’t have told Dawson this; they’d have known about Queen Victoria but their society didn’t have a structure to accommodate a queen. It’s an example of Dawson’s exaggerated advocacy of his informants who may also have been putting on a bit of side. It’s very hard to believe Dawson made this up, in particular the remarkable trickery of Crow.

The piece raises many questions because of another sentence in Dawson (p99)  “Sirius or the dog star, ‘Gneeangar’, ‘eagle’ – masculine.”

This is saying gneeangar is Eagle’s wife (see ‘gneeanggar’ above).

So why is Crow ravishing Eagle’s wife? Is it revenge for something Eagle did to Crow? What did Eagle do to Crow that needed violent avenging? What happened before that to induce action from Eagle?

This piece, by the final nature of its ending, suggests it has no sequel, it seems a culmination of a series of events. But we don’t know, Dawson’s informants didn’t tell him.

This is the only piece of mythology in Dawson and it contains a significant presence of both Eagle and Crow; this strongly suggests that BrownJudy’s people were familiar with the Eagle & Crow myth.

Another means of establishing that these people knew Eagle & Crow is geographical.

M1 is associated with people living around the Murray-Darling junction. They were Black Cockatoo – White Cockatoo people (see Black Cockatoo & White Cockatoo) and they had a matrilineal society because they believed in Eagle & Crow (see Authenticity of Eagle & Crow).

This means they had the same social structure as BrownJudy’s people had.

All the people living due south of the lower Darling all the way to Bass Strait had the same social structure. Mathews says ‘…it is possible for us to apply a philological test by which we find a great affinity of speech among all the people from the district around Swan Hill, on the Murray river, southerly to the seacoast and westerly to the other side of the South Australian boundary. I have found that where there is a similarity of speech among adjacent tribes their social organisations are also more or less in accord.’ Again Mathews ‘…there was but little difference in the dialects of the tribes up the course of the Murray from Lake Alexandrina to the darling. Again, in examining such fragments of the initiation ceremonies as have been preserved, it is found they also resemble each other.’ (The Victorian Aborigines in American Anthropologist Vol. XI 1898 p334-7)

Taking Mathews and Dawson together this means that the region between the Murray river (south flowing) and, say, the line of the Avoca river and from Pooncarie to Bass Strait  contained many tribes who shared much the same language, social organisation and customs. All of them likely shared the Eagle & Crow myth, too and adapted it with local variations based on local geographical features and local fauna.

Further evidence comes from Howitt ‘The Native Tribes of South-East Australia’ (p124) which reveals that Eaglehawk is a Black Cockatoo creature among BrownJudy’s people.  (Refer to Black Cockatoo in Anthropological Background.)

This is confirmed by Dawson (p100) ‘The three stars in the belt of Orion are called ‘Kuppiheear’ [Black Cockatoo] and are the sisters of Sirius, who always follows them.’

This also confirms that the queen, a Koorokeheear – White Cockatoo, could legally have been Eagle’s wife.

The above makes two points about Crow: he must be a White Cockatoo creature and his pursuit of the queen is unlawful, never could he have married the queen as suggested in the quoted piece from Dawson above, a fact which renders that episode far more fertile for acting as a social charter for its believers.

The three kuppiheear can be seen as a local adaptation of the two sisters in Eagle’s charge in M1. Crow, in M1, is in pursuit of Black Cockatoo sisters to which he is legally entitled.

More evidence can be found in the stars as recorded by Dawson. Eagle is between Crow and the Black Cockatoo sisters (see Astronomy). As they move across the night sky Eagle is always in protection of the sisters. But another star near the sisters, Rigel, is Crow in disguise as a grub, much closer to them than Eagle.

Eagle is the brightest star and Crow the second brightest, the alignment of the three sisters is very noticeable in the night sky. By giving these names to the most prominent stars BrownJudy’s people devised a permanent set of strong reminders of the most important elements of their society, I say.

For all the above reasons it is most likely that James Dawson’s informants were very familiar with the Eagle & Crow myth recorded on the lower Darling.

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Composition

Now to the detailed composition of the narrative in the book, and the adaptations to the basic M1 myth which could have been made by BrownJudy’s people.

The narrative is told in four parts. The first part is the first part of M1 introducing the ancestors as protagonists, establishing how they are related and setting out their objectives to be pursued in the rest of the narrative.

The second part is not the second part of M1 but an episode from M11 very similar to that in M1. A different source is required because the second part of M1 introduces Kingfisher as another ancestor to rival Crow. In a foundation narrative for BrownJudy’s people this other ancestor must be Pelican and he must be in the same section as Crow so he can marry the sisters whom Crow is pursuing (see Dawson p26 and Howitt p125who independently confirm that Pelican was a White Cockatoo creature among BrownJudy’s people).

Fortunately such a case can be found in a myth belonging to people who lived around the mouth of the Murray and the Coorong, who, as explained above, enjoyed much the same language, social organisation and customs as BrownJudy’s people. These people also lived at the coast, as did BrownJudy’s people, where pelicans are predominant. It is highly likely that the latter knew this same mythical episode involving Pelican.

This second part contains ‘The single most frequently recurring motif in the entire set of Eagle-Crow stories…that of a tree made to grow very tall by means of magic…always performed by Crow, who intends in this way to isolate a victim or victims, often children, who can’t get themselves down.’ Blows p 69 (Blows book quotes 67 separate Eagle-Crow stories).

In many cases Crow does it to counter a new rival, another ancestor with supernatural powers to perform his own magic. The new rival takes Eagle’s place as the senior player – senior because he’s married – in the conflict which is always won by the junior unmarried player, Crow, the trickster.

The third part is the third part of M1, the killing of Eagle’s son by Crow. ‘An entire episode in which Crow kills Eagle’s son, helps to dig his grave, and is himself buried alive in it by Eagle is shared by…five stories, all from Southeast Australia. Other myths share it in part. M8 departs little from the complete pattern…M10 and M11…share part of the episode…’ Blows p 105.
It is quite feasible that BrownJudy’s people shared this episode, too, particularly when it is also contained in M11, the story associated with their near neighbours.

The fourth part is the quote from Dawson above.

That’s all the background information on the Eagle & Crow narrative told by BrownJudy in the book. In light of this information it seems the narrative is a plausible replica of what her people knew.

Download p26 from Chapter XI “Laws of Marriage” in “Australian Aborigines” by James Dawson, George Robertson, 1881

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Authenticity

Now to discuss the seminal question of the authenticity of Eagle & Crow.

Is it a genuine traditional Australian creed or was it contaminated by contact with Western society?

Firstly, here is a straightforward answer: The authenticity of Eagle & Crow should not be in doubt because it was recorded by people who could not possibly have made it up – people born and bred in western, Christian society. Furthermore, it was recorded at a period when people had very little grasp of any alternative societies; which is to say the recorder would not have known how to make it more plausible

The first question that arises is, ‘How do we know about Eagle & Crow in the first place?’

One answer goes like this: it was recorded post-contact from the memory of its indigenous narrators, but its authenticity relies on its being pre-contact. In the period between first contact and its recording, it could have lost its authenticity by the narrators’ attempts to make it more appealing to the people who recorded it.

The case against authenticity rests with ‘A Place for Strangers’ by T. Swain, in particular, chapter three. This offers much evidence of the Australians adapting their belief-systems to accommodate invaders within their world in order to prevent the collapse of their society.

Swain argues ‘…that an invasion which totally changed a way of life, and which in the south-east took ninety-six per cent of the people’s lives, might have influenced Aboriginal notions of existence.’

These notions of existence were, briefly:
one, the world is divided up between balanced pairs whose continual and equal conflicts produce the energy of the world,
two, the repository of all of life’s essences is the land where the spirits reside and man’s role in life is to form various enduring bonds with that land.

You can see that the loss of their land must have had unimaginable consequences for the Australians. Yet those remaining still had to live and to make sense of living within an alien dominant culture.
Swain says their whole world-view had to change and the Australians actually did it. The prime example of their adaptation was the notion known as ‘All-Father’, which, at first sight, looks like another missionary trump card dealt from the same deck as ‘our sable brothers’.

‘All-Father’ often appears in the anthropological record in association with Australians living in the south-east of the continent. For Swain the notion was borrowed from Christianity as a response to the destruction of a whole way of life by a brutal, intense colonisation. In line with this ‘All-Father’ notion, the Australians adjusted their creed about the repository of life’s essences and moved it from the land to the sky, at the same time handing over responsibility for its care to a higher being, with whom they could keep in touch.

If this response did happen, then the whitefella recordings are not of authentic Australian creeds.

The case for authenticity rests on ‘Arguments about Aborigines’ by L. Hiatt, chapter 6 which claims that Australian ‘High Gods’ were indigenous because the evidence is not based on recordings but on ceremonies witnessed by trained observers. These observations were made at some remove from European colonisation.

In the notes to Chapter 6, Hiatt is strongly critical of Swain’s book:
“…book makes no attempt to explain why concepts allegedly acquired from the public religion of Europeans … would become central elements in the secret religion of Aboriginal men.”

Hiatt asserts that “Australian High Gods” are distributed all over the continent, especially in areas with no outside contact:

‘In some parts, notably south-eastern Australia, a Father-God is conceived to be the creator and ruler of culture’ and later

‘Thus we have Father-Gods eminent in the south of the continent and Mother-Goddesses conspicuous in the north.’

From Hiatt we can claim that the recordings of a single higher being would have been of authentic Australian creeds

We can also claim that Eagle & Crow should lie untouched by any of this dispute because it is clearly not about one higher being, it involves two equal higher beings. But it is not entirely shielded from the force of Swain’s arguments because all examples of the myth belong to people who suffered European colonisation.

The question becomes more complicated when further evidence is considered.

As noted elsewhere (Interpretation), every Australian society was divided into two sections, called moieties. This division was a reflection of the fundamental creed mentioned above; that is, that the world is divided up into two balanced pairs which conflict in everlasting and non-destructive rivalry. This division prescribed the first law of society; that a spouse must belong to the opposite moiety.

Along with this division was another one: there were also two types of Australian society, patrilineal and matrilineal. In the former society, a newborn belonged to the moiety of the father and in the latter, the line of descent came from the mother.

By way of more explanation, let’s call the moieties A and B. A man living in a patrilineal society and belonging to moiety A would have wives belonging to B and their children would belong to A. The same man in a matrilineal society would have children who belonged to B, taken from their mother.

Nearly all Eagle & Crow narratives recorded were linked to matrilineal societies. In the narratives Crow is the son and he is a rival to his father. Crow could only become a plausible rival to his father if he belonged to the moiety opposite his father, which is the case in a matrilineal society. Crow could then represent one of the equal, conflicting parts of the world as understood in the creeds. Therefore he could be accepted as the foundation ancestor for one half of society alongside the father as the other foundation ancestor.

In a matrilineal society the two are definitely equal, there is not one higher than the other. The notion of an ‘All-Father’ would not have occurred to a matrilineal society. Such a society would have found it very difficult to adapt their world-view to one deity.

But in a patrilineal society the son is in the same moiety as the father and the two are not equal. Such a society could not have an Eagle & Crow narrative depicting a rivalry between equal ancestors.
Then the Eagle & Crow myth could not be a foundation myth but rather just another story explaining, for themselves and their youth, some other feature of their society. This society had to believe in a foundation narrative differing from Eagle & Crow in that the conflicting rivalry did not involve the son. And, such a society could readily adopt an ‘All-Father’ as claimed by Swain.

Such a society could still have an intense rivalry occurring between Eagle and Crow in some mythical narrative because they would be in the same moiety and all the women in the other moiety would be the focus of that rivalry. Some of it would be oedipal which would not be unlawful according to one set of rules (i.e. when your descent is from the father then your mother is in the opposite moiety, the only one from which you are permitted to find your spouse). However, such oedipal behaviour would be very wrong in the face of other laws, offering fertile ground for the narrative to fulfil its role as social charter (see Interpretation).

The point here is that an Eagle & Crow narrative does not necessarily authenticate itself just because it does not deal with a single deity but with a pair of equal higher beings. Its authenticity also requires an association with a matrilineal society.

BrownJudy’s people were such a society and even if they’d been able to adjust their creeds to invasion they didn’t have the time to do so. What they were able to do was remove their repository of life’s essences away from their desecrated country. To preserve, at least, their belief-system while their world disintegrated they moved their spirit home to safety on Lady Julia Percy Island about ten kilometres off their shore. This is not an ideal name for an Australian spirit centre; it is also called Deen Maar. (R.H. Mathews ‘The native tribes of Victoria’ p.70 in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol XLIII No. 175)

Swain claims that many Australian societies did this very thing – removed their spirit repository. So if the owners of the Eagle & Crow narrative did this then they may have also carried out some of the other responses to invasion claimed by Swain and therefore the narrative might not be authentic.

In summary, the case for authenticity set out above looks very strong.

One more point: if the Australians were as adaptable as Swain claims and yet, on the other hand, if Eagle & Crow is still authentic then how old is the myth? With such adaptability and invention at their disposal the owners of the narrative could have devised it quite recently, in which case its role of myth as history (see Interpretation) would be enhanced.

Recent history could have been fashioned into a foundation narrative to legitimise and aggrandise conquest, prior to which, the myth would tell, there was nothing; this narrative then became the foundation and anchor of a new society. Myth and history can be very strong soul mates whenever they wish.

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Woonta Marr

Swain makes the claim that ‘ninety-six per cent of the people’s lives’ were lost during the conquest of South-East Australia.

If this is true, even half-true then it is a grave crime against humanity and it should have its own name like holocaust. Some suggestions are:

Kapoonyoong – word from the Woolloo Woorong dialect meaning ‘end’

Wayeen keerreekan – a Peek Woorong phrase for ‘spill blood’

Wooreekoon koolloine – Woolloo Woorong for ‘blacks gone away’

Woonta marr – Peek woorong for ‘where are the blacks’

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