Aboriginal History and Lore
Daisy Bates recorded a totemic ceremony called Woolberr, which was practised by the "last of the black swan group" of the Nyungar people of south-western Australia in the 1920s. The website of the Premier of Western Australia refers to Nyungar lore of how the ancestors of the Nyungar people were once Black Swans who became men.
The Dreamtime story of the black swans tells how two brothers were turned into white swans so they could help an attack party during a raid for weapons. It is said that Wurrunna used a large gubbera, or crystal stone, to transform the men. After the raid, eaglehawks attacked the white swans and tore feathers from the birds. Crows who were enemies of the eaglehawks came to the aid of the brothers and gave the black swans their own black feathers. The Black Swan's red beak is said to be the blood of the attacked brothers, which stayed there forever.
The moral code embedded in Aboriginal lore is evident in a story from an unspecified locality in eastern Australia (probably in New South Wales) published in 1943. An Aboriginal man, fishing in a lagoon, caught a baby bunyip. Instead of returning the baby to the water, he wanted to take the bunyip back to the camp to boast of his fishing prowess, against the urging of his friends. Before he could do anything, the mother bunyip rose from the water, flooding swirling water around them, and took back her baby. As the water receded, the men found that they had been changed into Black Swans. As punishment for the fisherman's vanity, they never regained their human form, but could be heard at night talking in human voices as a reminder to their human relatives of the perils of pride and arrogance.
Read more about this topic: Black Swan Emblems And Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words aboriginal, history and/or lore:
“John Eliot came to preach to the Podunks in 1657, translated the Bible into their language, but made little progress in aboriginal soul-saving. The Indians answered his pleas with: ‘No, you have taken away our lands, and now you wish to make us a race of slaves.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program. Connecticut: A Guide to Its Roads, Lore, and People (The WPA Guide to Connecticut)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)