Djanggawul- Aboriginal Australian GroupCollective

From Bralgu

They began on Bralgu, the island of the dead, far to the east across the sea. Two sisters and their brother. The sisters carried sacred rangga in their wombs alongside the spirits of every human who would ever live in Arnhem Land. They loaded a bark canoe and pushed off into the dark water.

Barnumbirr, the Morning Star, rose ahead of them. In Yolngu tradition, Barnumbirr is the light that moves between the dead and the living, and it hung over the water like a lamp held out from a doorway. The three paddled west, following it, crossing from the realm of spirits into the world where land waited to be given its shape and its names.

The Mawalan

The sisters carried digging sticks called mawalan. These were not tools. When a sister drove her mawalan into the ground, water broke through from below, filling the hole into a spring or a sacred well. When she pulled the stick free, trees forced their way up through the opening, and vegetation spread across the bare earth.

They walked through Arnhem Land doing this at site after site. Each place where a mawalan struck became sacred country, charged with the power of what had happened there. At each stop, the sisters drew spirit children from their bodies and set them down. Each group of children became the first people of a clan, with their own territory, their own songs, their own portion of the journey to maintain. The brother worked alongside them, and together the three filled the Dhuwa moiety landscape with its founding families.

The Djanggawul song cycle, recorded by Berndt from Yolngu men, traces this path in hundreds of verses, naming each place and each act of creation in sequence. Singing these verses at the right site renews what happened there.

The Seizure

The sisters owned everything. The rangga and the sacred dilly bags, the ceremonies and the songs: all of it had crossed the sea inside their bodies. But the work of creation was also the work of childbirth, and while the sisters were occupied bearing and placing children, the men acted. The brother and other men took the rangga from them. They took the ceremonies.

The sisters did not deny what had happened. In the accounts Berndt recorded, they said the men could keep the objects and perform the rites. Their power to create had never been in the rangga. It was in them. The objects were gone, but the wombs that had carried them across the sea from Bralgu still held what mattered.