Windows on Meteorology: Australian Perspective

1. When the Rainbow walks

Debbie Rose

North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, Darwin

For many thousands of years, Aboriginal people have lived successfully in a wide range of climate regimes throughout Australia. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to learn something about an Aboriginal approach to meteorological and other natural events at a location in the tropical north. Broadly, the basic philosophy would be similar, though the details would differ, in the arid inland with its sporadic rainfall; and this would also have been the case in the temperate south-east and south-west when the Aborigines were following their traditional modes of subsistence in these areas.

When I arrived in the small Aboriginal community of Yarralin, Northern Territory, in September 1980 to carry out anthropological research, I was indeed ignorant — myall is the local Aboriginal term. Prior to this I had lived most of my life in cities and towns in the north of the United States of America. I knew nothing of fishing, hunting, collecting, nor yet of tropical ‘wets’ and ‘dries’. I had been advised to regard my ignorance as an asset: I could start from scratch, allowing Aborigines to decide what they thought I needed to know and how they thought I should learn. I explained to people that I was interested in learning about their culture. The Yarralin school employed two Aboriginal teachers as part of the attempt to include Aboriginal topics in the curriculum; as a first step, I joined the girls’ class.

One of my first lessons was a fishing trip at a nearby waterhole. It was a hot day in September, and as we sat on the bank, fishing and chatting, we also killed the marchflies that harrassed us. The teacher, Sally Bijibiji, said that next time we should go to Crocodile Billabong to fish, to look for sugarbag (native honey) and to hunt for crocodile eggs. The flies are telling you that the eggs are ready, she told me. This was my first introduction into a complex and systemic world view in which events, referred to as ‘natural’ in my culture, are understood by Aboriginal people to be essentially cultural.

As a cultural anthropologist, I was particularly interested in how people organised their ideas about the natural world and how these ideas served as organising principles in social and cultural life. I cannot offer a formal and systematic set of statements about Yarralin people’s understanding of meteorology. What I can do is demonstrate the holistic and systemic nature of their understanding, showing how the phenomena which we class as meteorological are, for Aboriginal people, the products of interactions which derive from a whole system. Aboriginal understandings of natural phenomena including meteorological systems have been discussed by Jones (1985), Rose (1987) and Stevenson (1985).

In every culture, people’s knowledge of the world rests on detailed observations through time, and on taken-for-granted assumptions about how knowledge is acquired and how ideas come to be accepted as true. Attempts at intercultural communication founder when people’s assumptions differ, and the results can look bizarre. On one occasion, while we were chatting around the campfire at night, an Aboriginal man asked my husband, Darrell Lewis, What do whitefellows reckon about the sun? Darrell’s explanation that the sun is a great ball of burning gas and hangs in the sky a long, long way away made sense of a sort; people recognised most of the principles involved. But then he was asked, How do whitefellows know that? The answers constituted an account that appeared bizarre to our Aboriginal friends, and their response was instructive to us in demonstrating how much we take for granted about mathematics, technologies, astrophysics, scientific authority and, ultimately, the world we live in. We had not made any of the discoveries about the sun ourselves; we only take them for granted, trusting that the scientists know what they are doing. My account of Yarralin people’s understanding of the world suffers a similar fate in reverse. It may appear bizarre, but it, too, rests on observations, hypothesis construction and testing, social authority, and a taken-for-granted sense of how things work.

Yarralin is located in the north-west corner of the Northern Territory, in a region characterised by the presence of big rivers with permanent water. Yarralin is on the Wickham River, 15 km upstream (west-south-west) from Victoria River Downs, which itself is 10 km from the junction where the Wickham River flows into the Victoria River.

In July, the coldest month, temperatures range from overnight minima averaging about 11°C to daily maxima averaging about 29°C. By the end of the dry season (October–November) desiccation may be extreme; all but the major waters will have dried up (Plate 1.1), ground cover is sparse, and the soil is dusty and cracked. The build-up period (Plate 1.2) is generally from October to December; it is characterised by heat and humidity, convective cloud masses, violent electrical displays and erratic, turbulent winds which often accompany short fierce thunderstorms, some of which bring no rain but only dust. (The months quoted for seasons are representative only, as there is some variation from year to year.)

The wet season proper tends to be from January to April. Excellent rainbows are often seen (Plate 1.3). Turtles represent a valuable food source in this season (Plate 1.4). Rainfall varies dramatically from year to year: true monsoonal rains may occur several times throughout the wet season, or not at all, so that one season may be characterised by major flooding and another may remain comparatively dry. The median annual rainfall figure ranges from about 400 mm at the headwaters of the Victoria River to 800 mm over the lower reaches of the river, about 300 km to the north. At Victoria River Downs and Yarralin, roughly midway, the figure is about 600 mm.

From October to February, high humidity is accompanied by daily temperature maxima ranging up to 41 or 42°C in most months, occasionally a little higher, with overnight minima averaging about 24°C. Yarralin is in an area where, because of the high temperatures and accompanying high humidity, the heat stress for humans is greater than in any other part of Australia (Lee 1969).

Yarralin people make a division of seasons which corresponds broadly with the distinctions Europeans make in this tropical region. In Ngarinman, the language of most Yarralin people, there is a term for the cold time of the year (the ‘dry’ in English): makaru, which simply means cold. There is also a term for the hot time of year (the ‘build up’ in English): ngarap, translated as ‘more hot and hot’. And there is a term for the time of rain (‘the wet’ in English): mayiyul. This term is built from a root denoting the vegetable kingdom, and appears to indicate the relationship between rains and new plant growth.

The changes through time can initially be seen to result from the actions of two major beings: the sun and the rain. In the time of creation, the sun travelled across the world in human form, but then, as now, it was also the source of light and heat for the world. Rain is characterised as the Rainbow Snake — a snake of extraordinary powers who inhabits permanent water holes and the sea. There are many Rainbow Snakes, but they are collectively referred to, in Aboriginal English, as Rainbow.

Yarralin people talk about the sun in ways that indicate that they regard it as predictable. What interests them are the far less predictable events which interrupt the sun. These are the Rainbow and, to a lesser extent, the wind. Yarralin people’s interests are particularly focussed on the action of the rain. There is a generic term for rain (yipu) and a set of terms to refer to all the different types of rains: the cold weather rain, the hot weather rain, the first rain after the really hot time of the year, and the smell of the first rain. There are also different coloured rains which relate to matrilineally defined categories of people. Rain is conceptually related to all water, and different coloured rains are conceptually linked to different coloured river water. River water changes colour in response to the action of the Rainbow Snake, as does the rain itself So there is a complex and interconnected set of ideas about water which are summarised in the existence of the Rainbow Snake.

Normally, rain comes because a series of interlinked messages have been brought to the Rainbow Snake. During the cold time, the flying foxes are said to live in the bush, eating the nectar of various trees (principally Eucalyptus terminalia and E confertiflora). As the flowers dry up, the flying foxes move to the rivers and roost in the pandanus. Their presence ‘tells’ the Rainbow Snake that the earth is getting hot, the trees are getting dry and the land-based foods are becoming scarce. The Rainbow rises up and, towering over the earth, emits lightning, thunder and rain. These first rains alert other species related to the Rainbow. Tadpoles, for instance, start to hatch, and frogs sit up and call out to the Rainbow telling it to send more rain. In addition, the first rains create the moisture which then moves back into the sky, forming more clouds and rain. Yarralin people say that the Rainbow walks the sky during the wet season; it causes rain, thus providing the moisture for the clouds on which it walks.

In an abnormal year, Yarralin people conclude that someone, somewhere, has done something to interfere with the set of messages which bring rain. Because the wet season rains are usually carried by winds which come from the west, Aboriginal people to the west are thought to have particular influence over rain. It is said that they can ‘hold it back’. Once Yarralin people decide that the causes of unusual rain behaviour are social, they can respond by taking their own actions to bring on rain. There are a variety of means for bringing rain, principally ‘rain stones’ (calcite crystals) and songs. However, Yarralin people are generally reluctant to intervene in systems which, they believe, behave according to laws which were determined for the benefit of all living species. Therefore, it is only after considerable deliberation among many of the old people that generalised interference might be attempted.

After a few months of rain (usually about March or April), the rivers are well filled, the earth is well watered and new growth is appearing everywhere. At this point the rain, which had been beneficial to the burning earth, becomes baneful. If it does not stop, major flooding and perhaps disaster will result. Yarralin people say that as the earth becomes wetter, the wind, which has been blowing from the west, realises that there has been enough. It breaks the Rainbow’s back, the Rainbow returns to the waterholes, the wind shifts to the east, and the sun regains its position of eminence. Here again, if people determine that their interference would be advisable, special songs and actions can call on the wind and sun to stop the rain.

This is the broad outline. It identifies the major changes in the weather, and links these changes to animal behaviour, the cycle of plants, and the behaviour of sun, wind and Rainbow. It is based upon the essential premises that all the elements of the earth and atmosphere (including humans) are part of a system, and that any one portion of the system (e.g. the sun) must be balanced by other portions of the system if life is to continue to be generated and regenerated.

However, general outlines are not enough for people whose lives depend on understanding their ecosystem in intimate detail. Yarralin people, like most hunter–gatherers, lived a life which some anthropologists characterise as ‘original affluence’ (Sahlins 1972). Their diet was varied and nourishing, resources for tools were readily available (locally or through trade), and the number of hours each person worked per week was low. Their major adaptive resource was knowledge: of animal behaviour (including habitat, breeding, feeding and watering habits), and of the locations, reproductive systems, edibility and seasonal availability of plants.

Much of this knowledge is communicated from older to younger people in the normal course of hunting, fishing, collecting, tool making, and similar activities. In addition, much of it is coded, in condensed and allusive form, in myth, song and ritual. Through rituals performed at ‘increase’ sites, humans aim to promote the reproduction of the plants and animals with whom they share the earth (Plate 1.5).

The basis of finely detailed knowledge of ecosystems is the identification of patterns through long-term observation and memory. Such knowledge conveys the sense that the whole cosmos is alive and communicating. Knowledgeable human beings are able to perceive ‘messages’ as information. This is the significance of marchflies. Crocodiles vary their behaviour from year to year; using the western calendar it is only predictable that they will usually start to lay eggs between late August and late September. But for Yarralin people the event is completely predictable: the marchflies tell them.

There are many such examples based on the behaviour of animals and plants. When the flowers of the jangarla tree (Sesbania formosa) fall into the water, the barramundi start to bite. When the green flies arrive, a certain species of bush plum is ripe. When the cicadas start singing, the turtles begin to gain fat. When the brolga returns, the dark catfish become active: the river will start to flow soon. Other types of knowledge are based on celestial phenomena: the movements of the Pleiades indicate the coldest time of year and the birth and maturation of dingo pups. Such knowledge is valued; it is the basis of human competence, and marks human worth. Today, Yarralin people are well aware of their position in Australian society as members of an underprivileged minority. In addition to the personal and social value they attach to the achievement of knowledge, they also identify this type of knowledge as an indication of the unique and valuable contribution they could be making to the wider Australian public. Daly Pulkara, the man who told me about the brolga, said: You didn’t know that? That’s really culture, that one.

Yarralin people understand the earth, the atmosphere with its variations of climate and weather, and all forms of life as a living complete system; and undoubtedly the same could be said of all Aboriginal groups living over widespread areas of Australia. Through long-term observation, and a style of management which preserves rather than disrupts the integrity of systems, they have learned to live in symbiosis with their world.

References

Jones, R. 1985. Ordering the landscape. In: Seeing the First Australians, eds I. Donaldson and T. Donaldson (George Allen & Unwin: Sydney), pp. 181–209.

Lee, D.H.K. 1969. Variability in human response to arid environments. In: Arid Lands in Perspective, eds W.G. McGinnies and B.J. Goldman (The American Association for the Advancement of Science: Washington, D.C.; The University of Arizona Press: Tucson, Arizona), pp. 227–245.

Rose, D. 1987. Consciousness and responsibility in an Australian Aboriginal religion. In: Traditional Aboriginal Society: a Reader, ed. W.H. Edwards (Macmillan: Melbourne), pp. 257–269.

Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone Age Economics. (Tavistock Publications: London).

Stevenson, P. 1985. Traditional Aboriginal resource management in the wet-dry tropics: Tiwi case study. Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia, 13, 309–315.

2. Cry of the plover, song of the desert rain

Dick Kimber

Alice Springs

The heat and aridity of inland Australia were graphically described by a Dalhousie Springs correspondent in the Adelaide Observer of 5 May 1883 (p. 34). He wrote as follows:

Providence evidently intended this country to be peopled by the blacks, and these droughts are intended as a judgement on the white race for encroaching on their property. It can rain, but it won’t.

The weather has been very changeable — pleasant, hot and sultry, and cold. You can never tell from one five minutes to another what sort of weather you are going to have. A nice clear morning, very hot, heavy clouds in the afternoon, probably thunder, and then perfecrly clear at sundown with a cool night. One thing you can always be sure of, and that is, if you have a week of very hot weather, it will then come up cloudy, the thermometer will drop from an average of 108°[F] in the shade down to about 90°, when you will have a turn for a week or so of a south wind and cool, so I should advise astronomers to have as little to do with these parts as possible, because if they say it is going to be wet it will be the contrary.

The correspondent noted that in 1880 he had recorded 1.545 inches [39 mm] of rain, in 1881 this had struggled up to 1.725 inches [44 mm], in 1882 it had leapt to 5.657 inches [144 mm], and now in April 1883, with only 0.105 inches [2.7 mm] in the first three months of the year, things were a bit on the dry side again.

The explorer David Lindsay found conditions similar in 1885, as noted in Lindsay (1885):

But the rain did not come, even though he had observed some of the signs — the active pissants and the vast numbers of flock pigeons — that were those awaited by the Aboriginal rainmakers of this Southern Arrernte area. (‘Pissants’ are small black ants which become very active in humid weather and can be very irritating to people who sleep or rest on the ground.)

One month later (as described by Dittrich 1886) the Aborigines had gathered at Dalhousie Springs, one of the great ‘Rain Dreaming centres’ or simply ‘rain centres’ — places, generally with hilly terrain, which are believed to be important for the development of rain and hail through the influence of mythical rain-storm ancestors. They began their songs: the first was to cause the flies to depart, then there was the ‘cold-water’ rain song, and next the song of the meat-food, for the rains would bring grass and insects, so that all animals would thrive. These meanings of the Southern Arrernte songs were explained to me in 1981 by Walter Smith, who was born in 1893 at Arltunga goldfield, 90 km north-east of Alice Springs (Kimber 1986; Kimber and Smith 1987, endnotes). He and his ten younger brothers and sisters were of Arabana Aboriginal descent on their mother’s side and of Welsh descent on their father’s side (the Arabana land spreads to the west from Lake Eyre, encompassing Old Peake former telegraph station and Oodnadatta to the north-west; Tindale 1974). He spent much of his life in the company of Arrernte Aborigines and learnt the Rainmaking Law of both the Southern Arrernte and Eastern Arrernte in the 1920s and 1930s.

At Charlotte Waters, and at other great rain centres on the edges of the Simpson Desert, such as the Eastern Arrernte site Aruabara (Kimber and Smith 1987), we can assume that the men were preparing for the ceremonies in their different ways. Over several years I have noted that they observed the water-absorber mineral gypsum, and, on perceiving moisture-induced changes or deliberately moistening the gypsum to promote such changes, crushed the mineral to free the water spirit. At other places they crushed the white shells of desert-dwelling snails so that they glistened like hail, and were thereby considered to enhance the creation of storms and at yet others they pounded calcite until it shattered, then, seated on the ground and singing the rain-song chants, they hurled it in the air so that the crushed and shining-white ‘hail stones’ fell lightly all over them.

And then came the truly sacred ceremonies, those which no women or children could see, nor even the young first-stage initiated men. At Dalhousie Springs these took two days, and at the conclusion of the sacred ceremonies the local group leader announced that the sacred dances were at an end. As noted in 1899 by Spencer and Gillen (1968, p. 193):

[At] once the young men jump to their feet and rush out of [their] wurley, screaming in imitation of the spur-winged plover. The cry is heard in the main camp, and is taken up with weird effect by the men and women who have remained there.

Plovers are birds associated with water. The late Joker Doolan of Finke, in discussions with me in the early 1800s, confirmed the nature of the rain ceremonies as recorded nearly a century earlier by Spencer and Gillen, and imitated the cry of the plover to perfection. (Joker Doolan was one of several brothers who were direct inheritors of the traditions of the Lower Finke River and general Southern Arrernte country of the south-west Simpson Desert fringe.)

On 7 January 1886, the rains came (Lindsay 1886), and they would have filled the rainwater pools in the Goyder Creek. There the plovers would have run again, just as did the Dreamtime plovers according to Aboriginal mythology as recounted to me by Joker Doolan.

These kinds of ceremonies have persisted for the century since they were first recorded in central Australia. No doubt they had been practised for centuries before that, in the country of the Central Arrernte and Eastern Arrernte, in the territory of the Warlpiri some 200 km north-west of Alice Springs and the Ngardi territory 350 km north-west. I have seen ancient rock-engravings that knowledgeable Aborigines have associated with the rain ancestors. Some background on the Aborigines of central Australia is to be found in Gillen (1968), Strehlow (1971) and Tindale (1972).

The focus on rain in the great arid lands of Australia is to be expected, for the rain is the driving force for life in vast areas where there are no permanent rivers. There is also very considerable irregularity or uncertainty about rainfall — a point well made by the 1883 correspondent quoted at the beginning of this article. However, this does not mean that seasons are not recognised, and, as Tindale (1972) has indicated, the Pitjantjatjara recognise the following: kuli, the ‘hot time’; putu kalitja, the ‘rain time’; njenga, the ‘cold time’; and piria, the ‘dry time’.

An important strategy of the Aborigines, related to the seasons, is the movement of groups between different water resource locations. To quote Tindale (1972), putu kalitja is a green time when the claypans have water, and this is when groups can disperse to lesser temporary waters, which they will typically do immediately after significant rainfall; piria is the time of retreat from the lesser waters; and kulu is a time of refuge at main waters, this generally meaning permanent waters, where groups will also concentrate during drought conditions and any hot, dry summer (i.e. an anomalous ‘wet season’ in which little or no rain falls except perhaps late in the season). This strategy of group movements related to water resources, movements which were finely calculated to optimise use of any group territory, has been recorded for all arid areas (see e.g. Peterson 1978; Kimber 1984).

Associated with these movements was the use of fire. The burning of country was not at all random — there was greater attention to areas favoured by certain nutritious or otherwise useful plants and to areas favoured by certain animals (Latz and Griffin 1978; Kimber 1983; Kimber and Smith 1987; Latz 1995). A patchy mosaic of vegetation in different stages of regeneration was created. Along with the various advantages, a major benefit was, in the words of Latz and Griffin, that this almost completely eliminated the risk of large scale wildfires which would have been disastrous for any group attempting to survive in a completely burnt-out area.

Thus, the fired lower slopes of the George Gill Range promoted the flourishing growth of highly prized native or ‘bush’ tobacco, while in the Tanami and Great Sandy Deserts burning promoted the growth of two kinds of sweet-tasting solanum (Plate 2.1; for more extensive information see Peterson 1979; Latz 1995). Although men, women and children all gathered such fruits in times of plenty, the women were the principal gatherers, and sometimes pulped the fruits to make cakes which could be stored for later use. In all areas near the foot of ranges and hills, careful patch burning, when followed by rains, created grassy areas favoured by euros (hill-kangaroos) and wallabies, while similar patch-burning in light mulga country created ideal conditions for red kangaroos. Knowledge of the locality of previously burnt areas clearly aided men in their hunting — and also resulted in greater focussing of animals than if lightning-induced fires spread fiercely, wildly and unpredictably.

Conversely, in the case of Mala hare-wallabies it was important to ensure that patches of mature spinifex tussocks remained in which safe ‘hide’ homes could be made, and safe breeding occur. A series of adjoining mature spinifex ‘islands’ was the ideal for this animal.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that at least some burning took place immediately prior to rain, so that fire and rain were viewed as associated. Certainly the sight of a cloud formed through convection from an Aboriginal-lit fire caused W. Tjampitjinpa, a Warlpiri man, to comment about this to me and sing the Warlpiri song of association in appreciation.

The performance of ceremonies at appropriate times, and likewise the firing of the country in a directed and often more controlled way than might generally be thought, indicate another important aspect about Aboriginal beliefs. This is that certain people, particularly those conceived at major Rain Dreaming centres, have powers inherited from the eternal mythological ancestors. These powers are perceived as such that they can not only enhance the prospects of rain, but also direct its course or, if needs be, cause it to stop.

In the mid-1970s I was privileged to witness senior Rain Dreaming men exercising their powers. My notes record the events as follows:

The men were gathered for the ceremonies when the sudden storm rolled in from the west, from the direction of the great rain centre, Kalipinypa (see Amadio and Kimber 1988). As the first big drops fell, scuffing the dust, the men ran for shelter. All men, that is, except for three very senior men. Two of these were ritual leaders for the Warlpiri rain centres, the other a man called Tjungurrayi who was, in Aboriginal terms, a kutungulu — a kind of ‘policeman’ director — for the site Kalipinypa.

The rain came, an almost solid mass out of seething black clouds. Thunder cracked and rolled and the lightning flashed and crackled in constant stabs of ‘Storm Boss’ marching. In all of this chaos the three old men sat, unmoving and unafraid. They had been drenched on the instant, and now the water streamed from their hat-brims. Eventually the ritual leader of Mikantji stood, and walked unconcernedly towards the men who had sought shelter. Then, with the cloud mass still swirling overhead in a rush to the east, and with the rain still pouring down and the lightning jagging, Tjangala of the northern Warlpiri rain centre Puyuru, stood. He held a boomerang in each hand and he shook them at the storm mass, directing the clouds to part and pass overhead. Still the rain came, as heavily as ever before, it seemed, and still Tjungurrayi sat, like a dark and streaming statue.

Finally Tjungurrayi stood. He raised his hands and addressed the Lightning Boss. He called to the storm-clouds and directed them to part and pass. He shouted at the rain. And as he stood, dramatically directing, the dark cloud mass passed to the east, led by the Lightning Boss. The trailing cloud mass broke and scattered. The rain eased, then ceased. Tjungutrayi stood, solid, magnificent, still dripping rain, as the men emerged from tree and shrub shelters, laughing and excitedly talking and calling to one another. Now the ceremonies could continue. Now the claypans would be full, the rock-holes overflowing. Soon the land would be singing with the growth of new grass, with bright wild-flowers, and with flights of birds and with breeding kangaroos and other animals.

Thus it was that the record rains for central Australia over the period 1972–1978 fell and passed by.

Since that time, I have experienced wide variations of climate while travelling with groups of Aborigines over extensive desert areas. On the long trips, including motorised ones such as these — we used 4-wheel-drive vehicles — Aboriginal men and women usually travel in separate groups to visit the respective mythological sites which have particular gender relevance. We always carried some basic food supplies, but mainly we relied on the highly developed capabilities of the Aborigines in providing abundant food from natural sources. Illustrative of drought-time experiences were those in 1970–1971 in Warlpiri country, when both men and women located yala bush potatoes by probing along cracks in the soil well out from the yala plants (in good seasons these large yams can be harvested from directly beneath the plant), and when men hunted emus at known emu-favoured waters.

Two food sources that are valuable, particularly in drought conditions, are witchetty grubs, referred to as cossid grubs by Tindale (1974), and honey ants (Devitt 1986; Conway 1990). Extensive discussions of plant food sources are given by Tindale (1974) and Latz (1995).

In flood conditions, kangaroos, their only hope of survival being the crests of sandhills, have fallen easy prey to Warlpiri hunters. The following are a few final brief accounts.

On a trip in April–May 1983 over the Great Sandy Desert, about 600 km north-west of Alice Springs, our party comprised five Pintupi men, one teenage Pintupi boy, a historian from the University of Sydney, and my young son. After further record rains which fell in March–April 1983, one of our two vehicles was bogged. It took three days to dig our way out, during which we lived largely on Childrens pythons — reptiles which seek shelter on high rocky ground during such rare desert deluges. (Interestingly, the explorer W.H. Tietkens in 1889 (see. Kimber 1983) noticed that, after heavy rains, the remains of snakes were prevalent at one camp west of Alice Springs in Pintupi country.) The senior Pintupi men were expert at knowing the likeliest locations for these snakes, and were equally expert at finding spiny-tailed lizards; a bandicoot was the only other item of food captured along with the reptiles.

There was a striking contrast in January 1990 when, accompanied by a young Pintupi man as guide and assistant, I travelled over the same desert in 50°C shade temperature — but without any shade available! (I had previously travelled with him and his family members in 1974, the year of record rains. During a break in the weather we went on a hunting trip and made camp on the soft: sand of a creek flood-out. A light shower in the evening caused hundreds of desert-dwelling frogs to emerge; if we invaded their territory, they certainly also invaded our swags!)

But what seemed perhaps strangest of all, keeping in mind the 50°C heat in the Great Sandy Desert, was that only a month earlier I had travelled alone south of Oodnadatta, and on leaving William Creek in 50°C shade temperature, I had very shortly been able to indulge in a shallow swim in Lake Eyre, in water Prom rains that had fallen hundreds of kilometres to the north-east several months earlier. It was foolish to travel in such temperatures. I would have done better to have done as myoid mate Walter Smith of the Lake Eyre country, or my old Pintupi friends the late Jimmy Tjungurrayi and Arthur Panna Tjapananga of the Great Sandy Desert, had told me — Find a thickly shaded bush or tree, dig down beneath a big old root if it is a coolibah, and lie down in the shade and cover yourself with the moist soil. You don’t perish then. And if you get hungry, just tighten your belt.

As I reflect back on my travelling with Aborigines in their ancestral lands, the words of the 1880s correspondent quoted at the start of this article still seem remarkably apt — the weather in the great arid lands is indeed very changeable. Through my privileged travelling, however, I believe I have learnt a little better how to go with the weather, go with the country, and accept very changeable as entirely natural.

References

Amadio, N. and Kimber, R.C. 1988. Wildbird Dreaming: Aboriginal Art from the Central Deserts of Australia (Greenhouse Publications: Melbourne).

Conway, J.R. 1990. Copping it sweet: the honey ant in Aboriginal culture. Geo, 12(3), 54–61.

Devill, J. 1986. A taste for honey: Aborigines and the collection of ants associated with mulga in central Australia. In: The Mulga Lands, ed. P.S. Sattler (Royal Society of Queensland: Brisbane), pp. 40–44.

Dittrich, H. (1886, unpublished). Vocabulary, recorded November 1885 to January 1886. (Held in the library of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Adelaide).

Gillen, F.J. 1968. Gillen’s Diary. The Camp Jottings of F.J. Gillen on the Spencer and Gillen Fxpedition across Australia 1901–1902 (Libraries Board of South Australia: Adelaide).

Kimber, R.G. 1983. Black lightning: Aborigines and fire in Central Australia and the Western Desert. Archaeology in Oceania, 18, 38–45.

Kimber, R.G. 1984. Resource use and management in Central Australia. Australian Aboriginal Studies (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies), 1984/number 2, 12–23.

Kimber, R.G. 1986. Man from Arltunga (Hesperian Press: Carlisle, WA).

Kimber, R.G. and Smith, M.A. 1987. An Aranda ceremony. In: Australians to 1788, eds D.J. Mulvaney and J.P. White (Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates: Broadway, NSW), pp. 221–237, with endnotes on p. 457.

Latz, P.K. 1995. Bushfires and Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia (Institute for Aboriginal Development Press: Alice Springs, NT).

Latz, P.K. and Griffin, G.F. 1978. Changes in Aboriginal land management in relation to fire and to food plants in central Australia. In: The Nutrition of Aborigines in Relation to the Ecosystem of Central Australia, eds B.S. Hetzel and H.J. Frith (CSIRO: Melbourne), pp. 77–85.

Lindsay, D. (1885, unpublished). Journal for 1885; Oodnadatta to Dalhousie Springs Country (Held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney).

Lindsay, D. (1886, unpublished). Great Central Exploration Expedition, Book No. 2, 1886 (Held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney).

Peterson, N. 1978. The traditional pattern of subsistence to 1975. In: The Nutrition of Aborigines in Relation to the Ecosystem of Central Australia, eds B.S.Hetzel and H.J. Frith (CSIRO: Melbourne), pp. 25–35.

Peterson, N. 1979. Aboriginal uses of Australian Solanaceae. In: The Biology and Taxonomy of the Solanaceae, eds J.G. Hawkes, R.N. Lester and A.D. Skelding. Linnean Society Symposium Series, No. 7 (Academic Press: London), pp. 171–189.

Spencer, B. and Gillen, F.J. 1968. The Native Tribes of Central Australia (Dover Publications: New York; reproduced from earlier publication 1899).

Strehlow, T.G.H. 1971. Songs of Central Australia (Angus & Robertson: Sydney).

Tindale, N.B. 1972. The Pitjandjara. In: Hunters and Gatherers Today, ed. M.G. Bicchieri (Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York), pp. 217–268.

Tindale, N.B. 1974. Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names (Australian National University Press: Canberra).

3. Balmarrk wana: big winds of Arnhem Land

Rhys JonesA and Betty MeehanB

ADivision of Archaeology and Natural History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra

BBungendore, NSW

The initial human occupation of Australia must have involved travel over several stretches of ocean, as the Australian continent has never been connected by land-bridge to south-east Asia. This initial colonisation is believed to have occurred at least 40000 years ago, on the basis of radiocarbon dating of stone artefacts and fossil sand-dune deposits from several sites across Australia (Jones 1989). A technical problem is that for an age this large we are close to the practical limits of radiocarbon dating. However, with the advantage of recent developments in the thermo-luminescence dating method, ages of between 50000 and 60000 years have been obtained for stone artefacts from within the sand deposits of two caves in the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory (Roberts et al. 1990, 1994). These results need confirmation from sites elsewhere in Australia, but the indications are that human occupation of the continent was probably initiated more than 50000 years ago.

There is no question that by 30000 years ago people, presumably the distant ancestors of the Aborigines, had successfully colonised every major ecological zone of the continent, which, during the low sea level phases of the Last Glacial, also included New Guinea and Tasmania. These zones ranged from the tropical lowlands, off-shore islands and the highlands of New Guinea, through the savannas of northern Australia and the deserts of the Centre, southwards to the mountain valleys of south-west Tasmania. These people experienced the full range of climatic change associated with the last Ice Age. In Tasmania, these changes were perhaps dominated by temperature changes. Throughout most of the interior of the continent, however, the major ecological parameters were glacial aridity associated with a marked strengthening of the wind regime, which reactivated the great anticlockwise swirl of desert dunes such as those of the Simpson. Whether people survived such conditions in desert oases, or whether the arid zone was totally abandoned, only to be reoccupied in mid Holocene times is a subject of contemporary research and debate (Smith 1989). Suffice it to say that Aboriginal economic systems not only had to be flexible enough to be able to accommodate the great ecological range encompassed by the continent, but also over a vast time scale, the great climatic fluctuations associated with the last Ice Age and the post glacial warming. Such survival depended upon a profound knowledge of the environment and its seasonal and wider time cycles. Such knowledge was empirical, based upon minute observations gained from the experiences of the chase, day by day, but encoded into a shared experience of the community. To gain some insight as to