Notes from Red Kangaroo Dreaming
Central Australia
Aranda
(David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson.
In Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature. 1992
Bone dry river beds and grassy plains fan out from the northern flanks of
the rugged Macdonnell mountain ranges. Here the red kangaroo, Macropus
rufus, is no ordinary marsupial to members of the Krantji Kangaroo clan,
they trace their spiritual lineage to this totemic figure.
Traditional homelands encompass the parched region.
Powerful fleet-footed red kangaroo is also a beloved ancestor, shaper of
the landscape, and immortal being of that timeless, instructive, and never
ending epoch of creation known as the dreamtime, dreaming, or creation
time.
During the dreaming great herds of red kangaroos sometimes assembled
on a grassy mountain-fringed plan.
Surrounded by bees, bandicoots, birds and other kindred animals and
plants they talked to the mulga parrots, their paternal aunts and trusted
allies.
In the daylight hours, the watchful parrots cried out to arouse sleeping
kangaroos if hunters were coming too near.
In the night, all animals return to a deep subterranean realm, where
metamorphosed back into human form, they gather together until dawn.
Multa parrots transform into women and bring the humanoid red kangaroo
skin bags filled with cool weather.
At dawn the dreamtime congregation ascends to the earth’s surface and
resume their animal forms and habits.
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Today there is no place more sacred to the red kangaroo clan than a
single, small natural spring known as Krantji. It is the everlasting home of
their original ancestor the leader of their red kangaroo clan.
Out of the cool depths of the spring’s perennial waters the leader
Krantijirinja sprang – who was a true kangaroo.
He was clearly no ordinary kangaroo. He grazed in the day on lush green
herbs and grasses around the sacred spring. When the sun set he took on
his human form. He decorated his body with bold white geometric
patterns. He danced until dawn.
The spring is sacred because it is the aperture through which the red
kangaroo chief made his first appearance on earth after the awakening of
the ancestors from their eternal sleep underneath the sheltering crust.
It is also sacred because Krantjirinja’s presence continues to animate this
place, pulsate from it, in ways that challenge the human imagination and
permeate the natural world. Creative life rejuvenating powers.
Beneath the spring waters are the ancient sunken shield and several sacred
stone slabs. It is the duty of each generation of red kangaroo clan to honor
and care for these stones. They are remnants of the living tissue of
Krantjirinja, their common ancestor.
These stones are visible embodiments of some part of the fertility of the
great ancestor. Reservoirs of reproductive energy from which all kangaroo
ancestors arise in batches. Emerging first as kangaroos and then assuming
human bodies.
The red kangaroo chief is the living essence of the dreamtime unity of the
two species.
This ancestor is the ancestor of all living human beings in his totem clan
and of all living animals of his kind. Human and animal are bound together
by common descent, mutual concern, and shared destiny.
During the course of a particular ancestor’s heroic land sculpting journey
on under or above the earth’s virginal creation time surface, the ancestor
left in its wake a sacred, eternal, living spoor. Rock formations, trees,
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water holes, and other features that dot the local terrain maker ancestral
dreamtime passages, record their dramas, and entomb many of its
principal characters, as if in slumber.
These sacred places are centers of nature’s reproductive powers.
The vitality of the red kangaroo ancestor inhabiting krantji spring is at once
spiritual and ecological.
- his story is a reflection of the Aranda peoples’ dreamtime origins and
religious duties
- his story is a reflection of the primal, cyclic, life perpetuating process
of the natural world
- he embodies the essence of nature’s life force and fertility and
primordial, pervasive, and perplexing life stuff that animates all living
things
their knowledge that the local terrain is a sacred map of their animal
ancestor’s journeys gives members of the red kangaroo clan a sense of
participation in the workings of local ecosystems.
- if local big game populations dwindle, Aranda hunters can
communicate through ritual and prayer with the forces of nature that
have placed their existence in peril
- along the dreamtime trails of the clan animal ancestor are indelible
geographic points where human beings can communicate with the
sum total of living human and animal fertility
This understanding of the creation time connects between the topography
of the land and nature’s regenerative powers which allow the hunter to
work in harmony with the forces of fertility.
The ancestors left a trail of words and musical notes and physical
footprints, permanently etching their stories in the earth.
By singing the appropriate sacred songs, a totemic clansman could reliably
navigate for days along these dreamtime tracks.
In the process the land would be rejuvenated, memories of totemic
ancestors would be ritually rekindled, and reunions with faraway kinsmen
would take place along the ancient dreamtime spoor of stone, story and
song.
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In theory the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score.
The song lines are episodes that are readable in terms of geology.
In Dec. 1980 A.E. Newsome, a wildlife biologist and authority on natural
history and ecology of the red kangaroo, published an article that
suggested that Aranda Red Kangaroo stories harbor considerably more
scientific meaning than skeptics had imagined.
“The ecological mythology of the red kangaroo in central Australia”
published in Mankind.
He reported a congruence of myth and reality.
The stories about Red Kangaroo Dreaming and the sacred spring at Krintji
have an underlying ecological rationale.
Newsome pieced together segments of the meandering dreaming trails
evoked in certain red kangaroo stories. He matched sacred aranda sites
mentioned in accounts of the mythological journeys of the ancestors with
actual physical locations.
The site of the spring, for example was a place that the aranda approached
in silence and reverence, eyes closed, fingers feeling their way among the
rock. They had already laid down their weapons some ways off to show
peaceful intent.
They offered a friendly signal to ancestors and kangaroos.
There was no hunting near ceremonial sites. Kangaroos were sacred and
protected at these sites.
They red kangaroo clan performed their primary task of striking sacred
rocks and trees knowing that every grain dislodged arose as a kangaroo
when next it rained. They sang to Krantji.
Red kangaroos are herbivores and nomadic, moving with seasons.
Kangaroos depend on the green plants that flourish along the moist shady
drainages of rivers and creeks. They rely on a grass called never fail
because of its hardiness in drought.
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The kangaroo’s range follows the patterns of high soil moisture created as
waters drain the lower slopes and plains.
In dry spells the animals congregate near river beds and plains where the
grasses still thrive.
In the aboriginal tales of the dreamtime travels of kangaroo ancestors
during creation time, Newsome discovered a sophisticated grasp of red
kangaroo ecology.
A map of the ancestors’ overland trek near Krantji, breathing life and form
into the landscape as they went, corresponded with uncanny precision to
maps of the preferred habitats of red kangaroo which Newsome had
painstakingly assembled by scientific study.
A map of the subterranean portions of the ancestors’ dreamtime journeys
during which their radiant powers are diminished, corresponded with
expanses of desert lands inhospitable to red kangaroo populations.
“The ancient Aborigines who created these legends must have been well
acquainted with the ecology of the red kangaroo, and appear to have
passed that knowledge into the mythology to be hidden by allegory.”
At the same time, these stories and beliefs about the sacred site called
Krantji encode genuine ecological truths about population dynamics and
dietary preferences of local red kangaroos. They also contain a moral code
mandating irrevocable human responsibility to honor and nurture those
precious life sustaining animal populations in perpetuity.
A taboo against hunting red kangaroo in areas surrounding sacred clan
totemic sites is a conservation tool.
- these sacred sites are often located along the overland Dreaming trails of
the ancestors, corresponding to prime red kangaroo habitat.
A powerful environmental ethic that ensured that the red kangaroo were
protected near their best habitat.
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By paying homage to the original ancestor of the red kangaroo, Aranda
hunters established spiritual and ecological reserves for this species. Over
generations their sustained reverence was probably rewarded.
Sacred songs, dances, and prayers performed in such sanctuaries
sustained and even seemed to renew local kangaroo populations, just as if
precious particles of dust from beloved sacred kangaroo sites like Krantji
became a kangaroo when next it rained.
This poignant marriage of spirit and ecology is inconceivable without a
profound, enduring sensitivity to the real workings of the natural world
over great expanses of time.
Aranda thought and memory seem to have given birth to a land ethic in
the truest, most holistic, sense of that term.
Equipped humans with a profound emotional and ecological connection
with the rest of creation and a responsibility to conserve forever the
capacity of the land for self renewal. (David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson.
In Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature. 1992
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