The Birth of the Mathapurda Pula

Words Don Rowlands OAM, Illustrations Nick Sidle

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Even in deserts it can rain, in some it is expected although infrequent, and in these it shapes the land and the life where it falls and beyond. When the rains in the most ancient times came to the Northern Desert in Queensland, Australia, all the sand and seeds were taken away South to Kati Thunda (Lake Eyre). There, the little men, the “Warana’s, the caretakers of Lake Eyre, enjoyed the new life the water brought to their home. After a while though, the lake filled up with too much sand from the floods and it had to be taken back. The little men sang up a whirlwind (The Witjikura) to carry it all back to the country it came from, dropping sand and seeds across the Wangkangurru lands to replenish the desert as it moved across the country. This created the giant sand dunes of Munga Thirri. Big Red is the mightiest of these and is the ancient guardian of Wangkangurru Country.

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Back in history, back a long way in time, a small Wangkangurru family were caught in the desert in a time of drought. There were two grandfathers, a daughter and her young child. And so a girl, who was now a young woman and a mother, went out alone from an encampment to find food, to live off the land and its bush tucker, in the way she had learned from her people and to provide for her two grandfathers, who stayed behind, and for herself so she could care for her baby who she left with them in their protection. It would not be easy, times were hard, sustenance was scarce and hunger was real but she kept her faith that the land would provide. There is an order and an expectation in people and societies, which makes life together possible and which is assumed. There are also the dark episodes in history where this is betrayed. The story of that day was to be told and retold in perpetuity since the history was so important. The two grandfathers lost their faith in the land and broke every rule of culture, they took the life of the child. When the history was told and passed on to new generations an awful realisation had to be added to their betrayal, they eased their pain, distress and hunger from the now lifeless infant, it was said in hushed tones that they had defiled even the body of the helpless baby after death. They were not the first, and would not be the last from all cultures, that traded breaking a strongest taboo in the name of survival. However in doing so they had severed the ties, the bonds and the lineage between the land and the people, between the ancestors and the elders, the elders and the young, the young and the children and the sacred bond between a mother and a newborn. They had broken the order of the world and had made themselves outcast from everything they had known and, for an instant, no one, the mother, the tribe, the ancestors and even the land itself, knew how to act. Then the young woman in her grief, in her anger and in her pain sang the wind and the wind and the places and the spirits from which it came did know what to do.

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The wind she called was the same whirlwind that had brought the sand and the seeds back to her country.

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The daughter dug a hole for herself to hide from the whirlwind. The whirlwind ripped into the camp, destroyed everything in its path and swept the two old men into the sky.

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The wind hurled them down and smashed them on the arid country and made deep holes in the hard gibber plains, finally bouncing them back up into the sky. They took the dust with them and created the Mathapurda Pula. The holes they left behind are called gilgais. When it rains, these fill with water and bring the country to life.

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Water hens, ducks and stilts flock to the gilgais to nest and breed and enjoy the beauty of the season. The Wangkangurru people use the Mathapurda Pula to find their way through the desert at night. It also reminds them how the gilgais were made and the terrible thing the grandfathers did way back in the Ularaka (The Dreamtime). So, two grandfathers, who lost their way, became a means for new generations to find theirs and their last marks on the land made in that time of hardship became a focus of new hope and life when droughts again pass over the country and a reminder that relief and water will eventually follow.

Don Rowlands OAM

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The Mathapurda Pula

The Mathapurda Pula is a native Australian name for what are known outside the culture as The Clouds of Magellan, two irregular galaxies, one larger than the other, seen close to the milky way and visible in the night sky in the desert. Recently there have been calls to rename them. Magellan was a European explorer notorious for his treatment of indigenous peoples whose homes he burned, who he murdered and killed and who he enslaved. He was also not an astronomer and the galaxies were already known before Magellan’s time, they were definitely not something he discovered, even from a European perspective. They already bore the names the ‘Clouds of the Cape’ or the ‘Nubecula Major and Minor’. The name Magellan was not widely attached to the galaxies until around the 1850’s, long after his death in a battle with islanders in the Philippines. Yes, eventually Magellan was held to account for his actions by one of the indigenous peoples he abused.

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Don Rowlands OAM, Ranger in Charge Munga-Thirri National Park, Queensland, Australia, and Wangkangurru Elder

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