Wurrunnah- Aboriginal Australian HeroHero

Wurrunnah and the Meamei

The Meamei were seven sisters remarkable for their beauty, with long hair falling to their waists and bodies that sparkled with icicles. They lived together, skilled in gathering food, and it was while they were digging for flying ants with their yam sticks that Wurrunnah saw his chance. He had been watching from hiding, and when the sisters sat down to feast, he crept forward and stole two of the yam sticks, then slipped back into concealment. When the sisters finished eating, five found their sticks and moved on, but two were left behind searching the ground. Wurrunnah stuck the missing sticks upright near the ant nests, and when the two sisters bent to pull them free, he sprang from hiding and seized them both around the waist.

The captured sisters went with him, but they were miserable. Their bodies still sparkled with ice, and when Wurrunnah tried to warm the icicles from them, he only succeeded in putting out his own fire. Eventually he sent the two sisters to chop bark from a pine tree, and as they worked, the tree began to telescope upward, rising higher and higher until it reached the sky where their five sisters waited. The two captives climbed free and joined them, and all seven Meamei became the Pleiades, the star cluster that shines cold and bright in the winter sky. A relation of the sisters who had watched from above laughed so hard at Wurrunnah's discomfiture that she has been laughing ever since. She is Daendee Ghindamaylannahh, the laughing star. We call her Venus.