Chapter 12

"This box came to us from the Museum," Winnie said, reading a label. "It's from north of the Baiame Cave in Milbrodale" [Excavations on that large Aboriginal site were carried out by staff from the Australian Museum]. It was nearly two weeks after the dinner. Winnie had settled Rachel with papers to be filled out and led me to a work room. "I'm hoping you can tell me what these things are."

She opened the carton and I looked inside. There were a number of items, each one carefully swaddled in soft paper. I picked one up and began unwrapping it. It was a smallish oval stone with scratches on one side; otherwise it was smooth. I immediately knew what it was. "This is a stone of the Wanaruah. I should not be touching it. You should not look at it. There may be other Wanaruah tjuringa stones in this box or in the others. I'm not sure what we should do. It is centuries since this was used by the clan. It was buried and lost and dug up and despoiled. Like the clan. Let me rewrap this and place it in the box. I will go home. Perhaps I will dream of it. Baiame may inform me. But do not touch this yourself. It is forbidden to women."

The spirit ancestor regarded his tjurunga as portions of his own being; and was always fearful that strangers might come and rob him of the essence of life. Legends abound with stories of theft and robbery, and of the very fierce vengeance exacted. Tjuringa were considered to have magical properties. They would be rubbed on the body to confer sacredness onto the subject and to heal wounds. While the tjuringa were useful to the individual, the clan's collective fate was also considered to be tied up with the items: it was the totemic image that provided representation for the group on the tjuringa. Stone tjurunga were thought to have been made by the ancestors themselves.

"Are you serious?"

"Quite. In general, men under 25 were not permitted to look upon the stones; nor women at all. I will think about what is best. Reburial might be possible. But I doubt it. Let us restore the box to its place. We can consider this later."

"Would you be willing to look at other things?"

"Perhaps. If I've committed a mortal sacrilege, how much further transgression is possible?"

Winnie pulled out an enormous, flat box and wrestled it onto the table. She lifted back the lid and I realized it was a gigantic art portfolio. Two metres by three metres by about six centimetres. "Voila!"

"Ah! Tree bark paintings. Well, this top one is easy. It's Yirrkala from before commercialization."

"How can you tell?"

"No border. Only clan paintings had borders until the buyers came from here and Melbourne. Now nearly everything does."

"Do you know what it means?"

"Not really. Here's a group of women. There are some birds. Ducks? There's a croc. And some hunters approaching. One has a throwing stick. It may be a story I don't know."

"That's far more than I got out of it. Willing to look at another?"

"Sure." She lifted it away, revealing a smaller bark picture."

I laughed.

"That funny?"

"That one's fairly recent. Say, under 60 years. It's a story from one of the children's books about Abo myths. It's Purupriki being carried off by the flying foxes. See, these are all large black bats. The story's in The Dreamtime. Published in the '60s. It's far too representational to be old."

"Wow! You make it seem easy!"

"Winnie, I've been around the tales and the symbols all my life. What did you study when you were at UNSW?"

"Art and Women's Studies. Not much prep for Aboriginal anthropology."

"Do you know HMS Pinafore?"

"Of course. I introduced your father to Gilbert and Sullivan."

"Well, remember what Buttercup and Captain Corcoran sing."

"'Things are seldom what they seem, / Skim milk masquerades as cream'."

"Exactly. So the contemporary bark paintings invariably give themselves away."

"I'll remember that. Let's go rescue Rachel."

I was still troubled about the tjuringa. After dinner I explained the problem to Rachel.

"I don't know what to tell you. Probably, if you located the elders of the Wanaruah, they might have a purification ritual. But I don't know whether there are any elders of the Wanaruah any more. In fact, there may not be any Wanaruah at all."

"We can look that up online," I said. Though it didn't help, we learned about the Burning Mountain origin tale.

[The scientific estimate is that the fire has burned for approximately 6,000 years and is the oldest known coal fire. Original explorers and settlers believed that the smoke coming from the ground was volcanic in origin. The fire is moving in a generally southerly direction at a rate of about one metre per year.]

One day the Gumaroi people in the north sent a raiding party to steal Wanaruah women for wives. Having heard of the plan, the Wanaruah people sent their warriors to do battle with the raiding party. A Wanaruah warrior's wife sat at the top of the southern rock face to wait for her husband's return. When he did not come back from the battle, the woman was so sad that she asked the great sky god, Biaimie, to kill her. Biaimie felt so sorry for her that he turned her into stone, and as she turned to stone she cried tears of fire that set the mountain alight.

If you look closely from the New England Highway at the southern rock face of Wingen Maid Nature Reserve, you can still see the seated shape of the warrior's wife, waiting for her husband to come home.