A dry dusty day in a land that rarely felt rain. It was 1957 and anthropologist Donald Thomson was spending his last day in the company of the Pintupi (Bindibu) people of the central desert of Australia. The elderly Tjappanoŋgo gave Thomson one of his people’s prized spear-throwers (llanguro) which enabled them to hunt kangaroos and emus with deadly effect. Like the others, this spear-thrower (illustrated below) was intricately decorated and Tjappanoŋgo made sure that Thomson understood what was represented on it. For to Thomson’s astonishment, the decoration was a map showing the landscape roamed by the Pintupi and, critically for their survival, the locations of forty-nine water sources.
Many literate people assume that those of us who once could not read or write are somehow disadvantaged when it comes to understanding the world. While this may be true in most metropolitan contexts today, it was not always thus. Many non-literate societies existed for tens of thousands of years, flourishing and growing without the need to write things down. Discovering how long particular events might be “remembered” in non-literate societies is one of the goals of The Edge of Memory. And it seems indisputable that recollections of especially memorable events – like volcanic eruptions, giant waves, even the abrupt disappearance of land – could survive in intelligible form for seven millennia or more.
Consider the example of the formation of Crater Lake (Oregon, USA), pictured below. The first literate people to arrive in this area in the second half of the 19th century encountered its indigenous people who had some extraordinary stories about this spectacular lake. And how it formed.
The Klamath told a story about how once there was no Crater Lake here, only a massive volcano, towering high into the sky, within which dwelt the God of the Underworld. One day, he developed a passion for a beautiful human living in a nearby village but since she spurned his advances he began to rain fire and rocks on the land. The people appealed to their protector, the God of the Above-World, who battled his plutonic counterpart, eventually defeating him and pulling his volcano down around him, creating a crater that became filled with water.
We can take the Klamath story as a memory of the time when indeed there was no Crater Lake, only a huge volcano (today called Mount Mazama) that one day erupted with such force that it emptied out its subterranean magma chamber, causing its remnants to collapse and form a caldera – which is what Crater Lake actually is. That the Klamath should remember such a dramatic event is less surprising than the fact that we now know it occurred 7600 years ago. We have to understand that the story has been kept alive by the Klamath and their ancestors for this long, carefully told and retold over perhaps more than three hundred generations.
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Indigenous Australian cultures are among the world’s oldest and most enduring. For this reason, their stories represent a huge store of potential information about Australia’s past. For example, some Aboriginal Australian stories recall volcanic eruptions at places like Mount Schank (SA), pictured below, perhaps six thousand years ago (more details here).
But perhaps older, and certainly more widespread within Australia, are Aboriginal stories that recall the drowning of the land’s fringes, likely to be a recollection of the time after the last great ice age (around 20,000 years ago) when the ocean surface was lower. The subsequent rise in the ocean ended here about seven thousand years ago – so all these stories must have endured for at least this long!
Some of these ‘drowning stories’ come from the east coast of Australia, especially in northern Queensland, where distinguished Aboriginal linguist Bob Dixon found that
“many tribes … have stories recounting how the shore-line was once some miles further out; that it was – on the north-east coast – where the barrier reef now stands”.
In one of those stories, at the time the barrier reef was dry land, a man named Gunya was out fishing one day when he caught a forbidden (taboo) fish, for which the ocean punished him by rising across the reef, drowning it and forcing all its inhabitants inland. Stories tell that Gunya and his people, alarmed at the ocean’s rise, climbed a high mountain where they made a huge bonfire in which they heated large rocks. Throwing these downslope into the rising waves is said to stopped their rise.
Another great example comes from the islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria (northeast Australia), places like the Wellesley Islands which, as shown on the map below, today lie a few kilometres off the coast of mainland Australia.
The Lardil people who live in the area today have stories about the time when these islands were joined to the mainland. Stories like this one told by Dick Roughsey –
“in the beginning, our home islands, now called the North Wellesleys were not islands at all, but part of a peninsula running out from the mainland. Geologists … thought that the peninsula might have been divided into islands by a big flood which took place about 12,000 years ago. But our people say that the channels were caused by Garnguur, a sea-gull woman who dragged a big walpa or raft, back and forth across the peninsula”.
The last time in history that these islands were joined to the mainland was at least 7450 years ago, perhaps more, requiring that these stories have been passed down across hundreds of generations of Lardil and others without their essence being lost.
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Another story that features in The Edge of Memory is that about the legendary lost land of Lyonesse, reputed to have once existed off the tip of Cornwall in southwest England. Bound up with Arthurian lore, I suspect the Lyonesse stories originated far earlier but were kept alive – as is customary with ancient stories – by becoming attached to each new set of culture heroes. Some of the evidence for this is the recent nature of the stories, such as that noting that Lyonesse was a land containing 140 churches before it became submerged, and that the sole survivor, one Trevillian, escaped on a white horse which has featured ever since in this family’s coat of arms.
Forty-five kilometres off the southwest tip of Cornwall lie the Isles of Scilly, a map shown below, and I favour the idea that the original Lyonesse stories derived from the submergence of these.
Consider the facts. People lived in the Scilly Isles 5500 years ago at a time when the three main islands – St Martin’s, St Mary’s and Tresco – were a single land mass. Sea level rose subsequently creating the distribution of land that we see here today. We know from other places that ancient stories can endure for thousands of years, so why not here? Case closed?
Writing The Edge of Memory piqued my interest in ancient stories about lost lands so over the last eighteen months I have worked on a new book about submerged lands. Provisionally entitled Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth, I hope it will eventually also be published by Bloomsbury.