Riawarrawapah/SPIRIT OF PLACE
“The mountain is more than rock.
The Mountain is tribal land made in sacred country.
kunanyi brings forth life.
For two thousand generations past. And forever more.”
The mountain was created.
It was created by a tremendously powerful ancestor who, Worreddy told George Robinson in a celebrated passage, is named Laller.
“Laller made the Mountains”.
Large landmarks elsewhere in Australia often have symbolic significance to Aboriginal Peoples.
“There is no reason not to believe that Tasmanian indigenous peoples held that Mount Wellington contained the association, the memory, the feeling the concept of ‘Genius loci’ – spirit of place.
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“The story of the ancestors creating palawa above the silhouette of kunanyi relies on the mountain shape being a base line or a symbol of our country. This baseline helps to highlight the connection of the dark spaces and the white glow of the star systems that are our spirits in the sky. The very pinnacle is touched every time the story of palawa is told.”
In palawa cosmology the entire landscape is created, is alive with its creators—who are eternal; and the cultural landscape is constructed in a 'sacred geography' where ‘distinctions between the living and non-living are less real than in the West. The powers of animals, plants, rivers, mountains, spirits and ancestors blend into one another,’ according to Professor Greg Lehman, the grand descendant of Manalganna—which Aunty Ruth Langford underlined by saying that the wrong development on the mountain would be a scar not only across the place, but a deep wound across the hearts of Aboriginal people.
“I have always been taught that the mountain system that you connect with the most is the place where your spirit will go when it’s time to leave and to enter to the spirit world. For that reason, I don’t often walk on the mountain, knowing that that’s where I’ll go when I need to.”
Evidence for the worship (for lack of a better word) of mountains in Tasmania has been found in the Blue Tier where carvings into the lower slopes, and the presence of a ceremonial cave, strongly suggest this conclusion. That such ideas were widespread is difficult to refute.
“Kunanyi is a dominant feature within the cultural landscape. It has incredible significance to Aboriginal people in regards to the stories it holds within,” said Sharnie Read from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.
“The shape of the mountain, its sounds and silence, its connection to the dark spaces beyond and the valleys and folds that hinge the mountain system together are what we experience and what we look at, but what we see and feel is a description of the creation of palawa, of the journey of our people traveling through our country, from one nation to another. These valleys and folds of the mountain are permanent pathways, they are our illustration of ancient native tracks.”
Image from NITV website 28/7/21
When interviewed, local Tasmanian Aboriginal people have expressed a personal apprehension at going all the way to the top of the Mountain. This is a place they will go to only once, on their journey beyond this world to another place.
WARRA-NE/A HIGHER PLACE
“Our creation myths weld us to a sacred landscape of Palawa knowledge and identity that is profoundly home. This is why we say that ‘the land owns us’.”
Janice Ross described a painting she made on the Mountain in 2018: “This is a significant place where our Tasmanian Aboriginal Spirits travel to for our next journeys ahead.”
LAYATINAH NGUNE/MOUNTAIN FIRE
Two creation spirits were seen standing at the top of a mountain. They threw down fire. It fell among the people. At first, they all ran away in fright, but then some returned and made a fire with the flaming wood. The spirits are now the stars Castor and Pollux.
Quoting this story and noting that ‘Mountains are, around the world, revered as places where the Sky meets the Earth’, Masters student Angus Barnes in Mount Wellington and the Sense of Place speculated that the Muwinina people may well have looked to The Pinnacle as the place where the two fire-makers stood, particularly when those two stars set behind The Mountain. It is not outlandish. It is a worldwide belief. Epic events, far beyond the powers, far from the reach of mere mortals, on mountains unfold, revealing themselves to all below. Mountains are often stairways to the heavenly realms.
Culla~Minna MOTHER OF ALL LIFE
“In the daylight the very shape of the dominant feature of kunanyi is described as one of the mothers of our land. Her face stares up at our spirit ancestors, her grand, nurturing figure is etched into our stories.”
In the 1970s a woman approached the Tasmanian Writers Centre with a manuscript. It was all she could remember from the original records she had read as a child. It was what became known as The Cotton Papers (after William Jackson Cotton who lived between 1909 and 1981) but it was not published until the 2013.
The National Library entry for the book states:
‘The Cotton Papers were an archive of documents and drawings on the society and culture of the Tasmanian Aborigines compiled by early members of the Cotton family, Quakers and early settlers on Tasmania's east coast, and their friend Dr George Story. According to family tradition the material was gathered from 'elderly Aborigines who wanted their traditions recorded before they died'. The archive was destroyed in a fire in 1959 but was re-created, from memory, by William Jackson Cotton. Some of the stories and drawings he produced were published as 'Touch the Morning' in 1979. This compilation has been annotated by historian Nick Clements and includes a special essay by historian Henry Reynolds. Despite the absence of the original documents, this 'fascinating and often startling material' is an important addition to a field of study in which contemporary sources are extremely limited.’
Here is a story documented in the Papers relating to the Mountain:
‘Moinee, a great god, and his wife Vena, slept with their faces turned to the heavens and beside them lay the figure of Culla~Minna, Mother of all Life: Lying slightly north-west of Mt Wellington and seen plainly from the Eastern Shore are the faces of Moinee and Vena and north of them again is the figure of the Mother of all Life.’
According to the art space DETATCHED:
The central claim of “The Cotton Papers” is that a pre-19th century European shipwreck, possibly Portuguese or Spanish, was located at Niblin Point on Point Hibbs, Tasmania. “The Cotton Papers” further claimed that there had been a significant number of survivors of this shipwreck and that they had mixed with the Aboriginal population of the area for some time, producing offspring, before eventually being murdered. The implications of this claim, combined with the other material in the book, if proven to be true, would have profound effects on the existing understanding of Tasmanian Aboriginal history.
The Cotton Papers are an extraordinary read that posits a religious creed and a powerful group of religious leaders who secretly controlled the other Aborigines. Critics have compared in to the literature of Middle Ages Romances and Quests and Knights with their ritual power. And dismissed the work.
In 2014, Detached supported an expedition, led by Greg Jeffreys, to test the claim of a shipwreck, with survivors, at Niblin Point, which would then go some way to supporting the other, somewhat controversial, material in the book.
The search around Niblin Point and the associated headland revealed zero non-Aboriginal artefacts. The search of the beaches between Niblin Point and the mouth of the Spero River found only Aboriginal artefacts and 20th century European artefacts, which contrasts with the north side of Point Hibbs where numerous artefacts from the 19th century or earlier were found. These results indicate that the claim in “The Cotton Papers”, that the shipwreck occurred on Niblin Point, is not correct. The results exclude the area from Niblin Point to the Spero River as a location for survivors of the shipwreck. They also cast doubt on the accuracy of the other narrative claims in “The Cotton Papers”.
The search was documented and the film Point Hibbs was produced in 2014.
The importance of staying sacred
Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania Chairman Rodney Dillon said kunanyi/Mount Wellington is a bearing point for the state's Aboriginal people. "It’s got a significance in the change of its shape, whether it’s snowing or blowing, or whether it’s raining or really hot. The shape of it, the face of it, the way that the clouds hang around it, when the mountain changes colour, you can tell what the weather is doing by the colour of the mountain. I think it is important for the mountain to stay sacred.”
Greg Lehman has written and spoken about the mountain for decades. He wrote the words to kunanyi.
SOURCE
Mountain Fire: Michael Roe’s book The Flow of Culture: Tasmanian Studies (1987) J. Clark.
Mother of All Life
Recorded by J.W. Cotton ca.1830, cited by 'Peregrine' 1972