Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chunks of ocher lay everywhere on the Australian landscape that was
arrivals drew with them are preserved in nearby Kakadu National Park. The
pictures include drawings of the striped catlike thylacine marsupial known
as the Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf. As we saw in Chapter 3, this predator was
fi nally driven to extinction in the 1930s in its last refuge, the isolated south-
ern island of Tasmania. But it went extinct on the Australian mainland about
3,000 years earlier. It is unclear whether it was the arrival of the wild dingo
dog that triggered the extinction of the thylacines and other large marsupi-
als around that time, or whether the extinction was due to improvements
in Aboriginal hunting technology that have been dated to about the same
time. But the marsupial tigers must have been plentiful when the fi rst human
migrants arrived in Australia.
The fi rst humans did not arrive empty-handed. They brought fi re, weap-
ons for hunting and war, and possibly tales and legends from their earlier
travels. Once they began to spread in Australia their languages diversifi ed
and so did the legends that they told. Present-day northern Australian leg-
ends and beliefs provide some clues to the legends imported by their ances-
tors, though much has changed in 45,000 years.
One powerful deity is the Rainbow Serpent, a god of water. He used his
sinuous form to push up mountains and ridges, and as he writhed he carved
out the winding courses of rivers. Some of the pictorial representations of
the Rainbow Serpent are as much as 6,000 years old, and he continues to
fi gure in present-day Aboriginal ceremonies. The worship of the Rainbow
Serpent must be the oldest surviving religion on the planet.
The Rainbow Serpent deals with water in its various manifestations, so
it is not surprising that he plays a more important role among the northern
tribes than among those in the dryer south and west. Did some ancestral
form of the Rainbow Serpent legends accompany the early migrants across
the land bridge from the even wetter north, more than 40,000 years ago? If
so, then this religion would be ten times older than any other religion that
we know of.
Australia and Tasmania were the furthest destinations that these human
migrants could reach. They were fi nally stopped in their great trek by the
