Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies by Bruno David Ian McNiven Bryce Barker

Author:Bruno David, Ian McNiven, Bryce Barker [Bruno David, Ian McNiven, Bryce Barker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Archaeology, Anthropology
ISBN: 9780855757366
Publisher: Aboriginal Studies Press
Published: 2006-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Memories of emotion and warmth

The relationship of people to kundawira reflects an emotional engagement with the world and a way of being that embodies Yanyuwa Law, and the experiences of Yanyuwa people and their spirit ancestors. This relationship is articulated in the following account, given by one of the last senior men associated with the placement of kundawira stones on country:

The old men they would speak in the following manner. Let that stone be standing in the country of the deceased one. Let his nephew obtain that stone and place it there. The nephew of the deceased one will place designs on the stone and he will take it and stand in the home of the deceased one, he will talk to the stone saying, ‘Remain here for ever, stay here and be warm in your country, let the country warm you’. It was in this way now that these stone of importance were taken and stood up in country (Old Tim Rakawurlma 1986, in Bradley 1980-98)

What is of interest in Rakawurlma’s comments is his reference to the stones being warm and the country warming the individual. Warmth in this context is part of the act of nurturing the individual and the land of that person. Placing the stone in country warms and maintains the health of the spirit of the deceased kin and other spirit entities who inhabit that place. The country is kept warm (i.e. healthy), and in a state that allows it to respond to both the living and deceased kin who move across the land. Yanyuwa country is an animated landscape that contains living people and the sprits of the dead. These living people must find ways to relate to the spirits so that humans and deceased kin can co-exist within one countryscape. The stones positioned the metaphoric body and memory of the deceased person on the land. The physicality that the stone presented, coupled with the ideological anchor that the object created, provided Yanyuwa people with a means to negotiate and understand the spirits of the dead and the spiritual world they came to occupy. Each stone that was placed in country represented a named individual and the stone itself took on the name of the individual that it stood to represent. This is expressed beautifully in the following statement made by a senior jungkayi when he visited an area where a number of stone markers stand:

Oh I am too sorry for this place, here they are still standing. My mother’s kin they stand here, here [indicating to stone] this is Mangayi, that old man who was a rainmaker, and close by this tall stone this is Mamudibarrku a big man, a ceremony man who knew the song cycles. This smaller one there in the north is Narnuwungkuwungku and that smaller one I don’t know. He is old, he has stood there from before me, he belongs to the old people. There is another here and it is broken, who broke this one? I don’t

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