Aboriginal Legends

These legends may be of interest to the student of anthropology, for their detailed word-of-mouth exposition of the habits of Australian aborigines and the structure of their tribal groups; or to the artist, as the crystallisation of an animist view of the universe. Yet they have not been presented with sufficiently scholarly annotation for them to be placed in the category of anthropological studies, and also have plainly been selected for a public audience. No aboriginal equivalent of Leda and the Swan has been here resurrected for an Australian Yeats to use in public myth-making. By one group, however, this book should be received enthusiastically – by parents or schoolteachers who have exhausted their repertoire of nursery stories.

The world of nursery legend is strictly limited. The resourceful hero, good fairy and wicked witch, act according to rules as severe as those of classical drama. One would not have thought any real modification possible in a pattern familiar from Sweden to Japan. But here at our doorstep is another pattern, that which the Australian aborigines have evolved in their struggle for food and survival, in the unique landscape of the Australian continent,page 141 to propitiate and humanise the forces with which they have been obliged to contend. Their totemistic self-identification with various animals – emu, hawk, kangaroo and a hundred others – is the same process as that which brought about the personification of animals in European fairy stories; and these legends are likely to have the same appeal to the young child. I have experimented in reading them to a Standard One class. It seems they have numerous possibilities for dramatisation. Much of their material would come under the convenient syllabus classification of Social Studies. The stories have one essential qualification – they are various, concrete and imaginative in their own right. The illustrations which accompany them, taken from aboriginal drawings, could provide an added field of study.

1954 (82)