Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne
fire. Thus the sun and moon are the firesticks of Wuriupranill, the sun-woman, and Japara, the moon-man, each cycling the world in their own time. The first man, Purukupali, discovers fire accidentally and gives it to others with the instructions that they never allow it to expire. An emu egg hurled against a pyre built by Gnawdenoorte, the Great Man’s Son, kindles the light of day. The firestick of Koolulla, before he drowns, scatters embers skyward to make the stars. In most myths, this celestial fire is returned to an Earth—or at least to humans—that lacks it. Spears, boomerangs, and throwing sticks capture fire, a symbolic variant on fire hunting. From the Murrumbidgee region, an origin myth, closely following real conditions, relates how the magician Goodah captures lightning as it strikes a dead tree, then uses the captive lightning as a kind of personal firestick. When his selfishness becomes intolerable, a whirlwind sweeps Goodah’s fire and scatters it around the countryside where it quickly becomes common property.10
More important than joining the lights of heaven and earth, fire myths and fire rituals joined the spiritual and the physical; they married the great moieties of Aboriginal existence. Much as it made the world habitable, so fire made it understandable. Fire helped explain the colors of animals, the heat and light of celestial objects, the distribution of species, the warmth of the human body, the wondrous process by which fire may be extracted from wood. Fire’s power made it useful as a dramatic plot device. Even more, fire helped explain motives; it exposed character. By their relationship to fire, creatures are revealed as brave or pusillanimous, generous or selfish, obedient or defiant. By their use of fire, humans reveal themselves as either responsible or evil.
A reciprocity existed between the two worlds. What was abstracted into myth returns, rereified in practice. But in this fire cycle, the end is different from the beginning. When humans took fire out of the landscape, they passed it through a mental—a spiritual—world before returning it to the land. Anthropogenic fire had to reconcile both universes. Those myths and rites helped guide the proper use of fire by shaping fire practices around waterholes, campsites, hunting grounds, and along the corridors of the Dreamtime. As nomadic Aborigines traced and retraced the ancestral pathways of their Dreamtime totems, the legendary paths etched on their stone churingas took on a material existence in the Australian landscape by trails of fire and smoke. As they told and retold the saga of creation, each tribe holding a fragment of the master myth cycle in the form of a bushfire song, the rhythms of Australian fire took on a new cadence. If fire transported Aborigines into the Dreamtime, it also superimposed elements of the Dreamtime onto Australia. Fire ecology acquired symbolic dimensions; fire history, new depth of metaphor; fire practices, new codes of behavior. A fiery land became a burning bush.
MYTHIC FIRE
In the early Dreamtime the creatures of the world did not look as they do today. These disordered animals eventually gathered in the country of the Rembarrngas, where Nagorgo, the Father, examined them and proclaimed, “You are not proper people and not proper animals. We must change this.” With his firestick he lit a ceremonial fire that spread and spread until it encompassed the world. It swept over all the creatures. It burned the earth and the stones. After the fire passed, the creatures and the humans assumed their present forms and characters.11
In Aboriginal myths fire, once freed, spreads widely and impregnates woody flora and other phenomena. The fire spirit is not an exclusive possession of humans, but only humans have the capacity to invoke it and the necessary knowledge to preserve it, and only humans need to explain fire and to incorporate it into ritual. This special attribute, however, is enough to cause the natural world and the human world to diverge. Humans cannot renounce fire and still remain human, yet they must reconcile fire practices with both realms of existence. Because the possession of fire fundamentally changed the world, the behavior of humans toward fire becomes a moral paradigm for the behavior of humans toward one another and toward the rest of the natural world.
The crocodile possessed firesticks. The rainbow bird would ask for fire, but was knocked back every time. The rainbow bird was without fire: he had no light, slept without a camp fire, ate his food (fish, goanna lizards, mussels) raw.
The rainbow bird could not get fire because the crocodile was “boss” for fire and would knock him back.
“You can’t take fire!”
“What am I to do for men? Are they to eat raw?”
“They can eat raw. I won’t give you firesticks!”
The crocodile had fire. No man made it. The crocodile had had fire from a long time ago. Then the rainbow bird put fire everywhere. Every tree has fire inside now. It was the rainbow bird who put the fire inside.
The rainbow bird spoke. “Wirid, wirid, wirid!” He climbed into a tree, a dry place, a dry tree. Down he came, like a jet plane, to snatch the firesticks, but the crocodile had them clutched to his breast. Again and again the rainbow bird tried.
“You eat raw,” the crocodile told him. “I’m not giving you fire.”
“I want fire. You are too mean. If I had had fire I would have given it to you.
“Wirid, wirid, wirid, wirid!” Down he came. He missed. He flew up.
“Wirid, wirid, wirid!” They argued again.
“I’m not giving you fire. You are only a little man. Me, I’m a big man. You eat raw!” That is the way we had been going to eat.
The rainbow bird was angry. “Why do you knock me back all the time?”
The crocodile turned about. Snatch! The rainbow bird had the firesticks! Wirid, wirid, wirid! Away he flew. The crocodile could do nothing. He has no wings. The rainbow bird was above. “You can go down into the water,” he called. “I’m going to give fire to men!”
The rainbow bird put fire everywhere—in every country, in every kind of tree (except the pandamus). He made light, he burned, he cooked fish, crocodile, tortoise.
The crocodile had gone down into the water. The two had spread out.
“I’ll be a bird. I’ll go into dry places,” the rainbow bird called out. “You can go down into the water. If you go in dry places you might die. I’ll stay on top.”
The rainbow bird put the firesticks in his behind. They stick out from there now.
That was a long time ago.12
In attempting to reconstruct an ancestral supermyth from recorded fragments, Kenneth Maddock uses the above story as a myth of reference. With its allusion to jet planes, the story has obviously acquired recent embellishments, and with its reliance on crocodiles and a division of the world into wet and dry, it clearly identifies itself with the Australian tropics. But its themes and story line are ancient, with strong parallels in myths told throughout the region, and with fainter, metastructural echoes in fire origin myths told elsewhere in Australia and throughout the globe.
The fundamental concern of such stories is what the possession of fire means to humans. Fire differentiates humans from other creatures, and it demands that a moral code be prescribed to guide its usage among humans. Fire brings power. If misused, if not shared, fire must be removed from its possessors and given to others. Once shorn of fire, a creature descends to a lower scale of existence. It occupies earth or water, while the fire possessor climbs to the sky; it lives a more debased life, while that of the fire keeper aspires to a nobler code. For humans, the first necessity is to acquire fire, and then to distribute it among themselves.
For these stories, too, there is a practical basis. The extinction of fire is such a catastrophic, dehumanizing loss that people must be willing to share their fire with those who need it. In wet times, a fire once extinguished may be difficult to rekindle. Robinson, for example, described how he carefully put out the native fires he found so that dispirited Tasmanians would have to approach his band for new fire and, one presumes, a lesson in Christian theology.13
Two women were cutting a tree for the purpose of getting ants’ eggs, when they were attacked by several snakes. The women fought stoutly, but could not kill the snakes.