Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne
contemporary beliefs and behaviors, and to vivify the important rites of passage in the life of individual Aborigines, and for this endeavor fire was ubiquitous, both a means and an end of inquiry. In this way fire established new, symbolic relationships, its behavior following the fuels of metaphor, the litter of the subconscious. Old Australia and its fires entered a symbolic world whose ecology was vastly different from that which it knew in the bush, but one that also placed fire at its core.
ORIGINS
The ancestral Dreamtime was at least partially conceived and animated by fire. As a context, fire invited contemplation, and as an object, it demanded explanation. The reverie induced by fire helped transport narrators back to the Dreamtime; staring into flame brought magicians to a trance from which they could communicate with the spirit world; the vital stories of creation and existence were almost always retold or reenacted around a fire. It is too much to argue, as Bachelard has for humans in general, that fire was the originating phenomenon of mental activity, “the first phenomenon, on which the human mind reflected.” But one could agree with him that the “mind in its primitive state, together with its poetry and its knowledge, had been developed in meditation before a fire.” The Dreaming was likely illuminated, if not inspired, by fire.2
The pervasiveness of fire in Aboriginal Dreaming reflects the pervasiveness of fire in Aboriginal life. Fire practices created a repertoire of actions and effects that could be transfigured into stories and symbols. But once in this cognitive realm humans could reassemble the pieces according to other kinds of logic. They could establish new patterns that relied on emotional or symbolic associations, without analogues in actual life; like a collage, they could alter the individual parts to make a larger truth, a new register of meanings. From this register came a cognitive universe that told the Aborigine who he was, and a moral universe that informed him how he should behave. Through its metamorphosis into a parallel mental universe, the significance of fire in Aboriginal Australia expanded far beyond its presence in the landscape. “Fire, and its benefits,” Ainslie Roberts concluded, “was possibly the richest Dreamtime heritage of all.”3
Common fire practices become common features of Dreamtime stories. Hunting fires, for example, appear frequently. In the tale of Wirroowaa, a mob of giant kangaroos (perhaps an echo of remembered monsters that populated the Pleistocene bestiary) attacks humans until fire drives them off. Thereafter humans keep fire in the hollowed base of old gums. Lungkata the blue-tongue lizard puts his firestick to spinifex to drive out his defiant sons. After Wyungare, the hunter, keeps the two wives of Nepele, Nepele avenges himself by igniting a magic fire outside their shelter, a fire that subsequently pursues them to the waters of Lake Alexandrina. Bullabogabun fires an enormous tree in which Karambil has taken refuge. The carpet-snake people, angered at the selfishness of Lunkana, the sleepy lizard man, set fire to his shelter and he dies in flames. Women, in particular, use fires to burn out anthills and to flush out bandicoots and other creatures from cover. Often they attempt to hide their fire, even from their husbands, and are killed for their selfishness. When Wildu, the eagle, seeks revenge, he causes a rainstorm to drive the offending creatures into a cave, then blocks the entrance with grass and branches and sets the pyre alight. Though most animals escape, the crows and magpies emerge with black plumage. Two women destroy Thardid Jimbo, the “enemy of man,” by luring him into a cave, then plastering the entrance with fire. When Thardid Jimbo tries to flee, he is consumed in the flames.4
The most interesting motif among the fire myths—one again associated with hunting—is the identification of fire with birds. In some cases, fire is invoked to explain unusual plumage such as the ebony feathers of crows, magpies, and black swans, or the red tail-feathers of the finch and red crest of the cockatoo. But the major raptors, the eagles and kites (and sometimes the crow), are envisioned themselves as fire preservers and fire users. As often as not it is a bird that first knows how to make fire or that captures fire for humans or saves fire from some sinister creature determined to extinguish it. The image clearly originates from the frequent appearance of such raptors at savanna fires, where they scavenge for meals. Often the fire-clutching eagle or hawk of myth drops his firestick into grass, which carries fire everywhere.5
Such escaped fires are common, and their practical moral obvious. They testify, first, to the danger of fire. In one of the most fully developed fire myths, Goorda the fire spirit abandons the heavens and descends to earth like a meteor or lightning flash. But as soon as Goorda touches the grass, it flames, and the fires sweep the horizon and kill a group of boys, waiting to be circumcised, who have crowded into a bark hut. Both Goorda and his human friends have to work out a protocol so that fire may be used, not feared. Once the secret is transmitted, Goorda returns to the stars.6
Escaped fires explain also how fire became so prevalent in the landscape and among people. In this case a stolen fire or a hastily dropped firestick engulfs the countryside, and what had been jealously hoarded now becomes widely available to everyone. Fire enters the trees, which absorb its spirit and rerelease it when properly rubbed. If a firestick fails, a new fire can be extracted from nature. Another variant is to insinuate fire into the basal cavities of large trees, where it is sheltered from the rains. Similarly, digging sticks and spears—capable of spouting fire from their broken ends—act as surrogate firesticks. It is as though, having once been hardened by fire, they have assimilated a fire spirit and can regurgitate it later. The story of Kondole tells how this selfish man hid his firestick rather than share it at a corroboree. After he was changed into a whale, the fire escaped and entered into the grass tree, whose glow advertised its presence. The firedrill made from the grass tree recovers that hidden fire.7
But not all creatures know how to get fire or how to keep it. In most origin myths, the possession of fire is the guarded secret of a creature who does not deserve it—a reptile like a lizard or a crocodile or, if a mammal, an aquatic dweller such as a water rat—a character hopelessly, recklessly selfish who refuses to share his fire and who lives in a nonflammable environment. Through the cunning and daring of his rivals, or his own carelessness, the fire hoarder loses his fire—but not before a final defiance in which he attempts to extinguish fire once and for all by tossing it into water. Thus Kanaula tries to end a corroboree by leaping into the sea with the fire, until Unwala impales his hand temporarily with a spear and Mulara flies to the scene and retrieves the firestick. Mulara then drops the firestick into pandamus, which flares and saves fire from extinction. An analogous version has Kunmanggur, the Rainbow Serpent, attempt to punish humans for their wickedness by retiring to the waters with the final firestick. At the last second Kartpur seizes the subsiding firestick and sets the grass alight, and fire is broadcast throughout creation. When the fire of Goodah, an evil magician, is pirated away, he attempts a retaliation by causing rain, and only the storage of fire in the basal cavities of large gums prevents a total loss. Birikbirik, the plover, acts quickly to rescue fire from Gumangan, the crocodile, who in a temper tantrum seeks to extinguish his firesticks in a river. The stories not only reestablish the proper relationship between human and nonhuman, but that between fire and water.8
The ritual uses of fire in caves, at night, and around gloomy waterholes—not every waterhole, only a select group—originate in the value of fire for illumination. Fear of ambush, alarm over poisonous snakes that might be trod upon accidentally, difficult footing in unburned vegetation all made a torch an act of prudence. But these fears attached to others, to a generic apprehension of darkness as a place of evil spirits who could be held at bay only by torches or fire. While Eyre noted that “all tribes of natives appear to dread evil spirits … [that] fly about at nights,” fire “appears to have a considerable effect in keeping these monsters away, and a native will rarely stir a yard at night … without carrying a firestick.” Grey reported that “if they are obliged to move away from the fire after dark,” they will “carry a light with them and set fire to dry bushes as they go along.” Angas observed that “their belief in spirits is universal; hence their dread of moving at night, unless provided with a firestick or torch.” More recently Gould observed the matter-of-fact way in which “women going out for firewood or water at dusk usually set fire to the vegetation along the way to illuminate their way to and from camp.” By such means cognitive and behavioral fire practices converged.9
Other legends identify the