Mudungkala- Aboriginal Australian PrimordialPrimordial"The Blind Old Woman"

The Crawling Creator

In the Palaneri, the Tiwi Dreamtime, the world was featureless and dark. Mudungkala, a blind old woman, rose from beneath the earth in the southeast of what would become Melville Island. She carried three infant children, the first Tiwi people, and she began to crawl.

Crawling north on her knees, Mudungkala moved across the flat, empty landscape, and the earth responded. Fresh water bubbled up in the tracks she left behind, rising into tides that flooded the channels between the land and the Australian mainland. The Clarence Strait and the Dundas Strait formed in her wake. As she continued around the landmass, she decided it was too large and created the Apsley Strait, dividing the single island into two: Bathurst and Melville.

Mudungkala covered the bare islands with vegetation and animals so her children would have food. When the islands were ready, she left the three infants on the land she had prepared and vanished. No one knows where she went. The three children became the ancestors of all the Tiwi people.

Mudungkala made a world where living was possible. What followed, the Purukupali cycle, the death of the infant Jinini and Purukupali walking backwards into the sea, made it a world where dying was inevitable. Between them, the Tiwi world took its final shape.