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 and was published in one volume as Land of the Sleeping Giants.
It is an extraordinary read, and 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.
Here is an example: 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.
Recorded by J.W. Cotton ca.1830, cited by 'Peregrine' 1972
