Stories of the Tanganekald
Jacob Stengle
2021
Reviewed by SAMUEL COX
Emu and Brolga © Jacob Stengle 2021
“From time immemorial” – David Unaipon
For the first time, Stories of the Tanganekald: a collection of ancient stories from the Coorong, South Australia shares the narratives of the Tanganekald, a language of the Ngarrindjeri Nation, as told and sung by the late Ngarrindjeri elder Milerum. Across eleven narratives – accompanied by artwork from Milerum’s celebrated descendent, Jacob Stengle – this book culturally re-enlivens a stretch of coast, lake and lagoon system of national and international importance.
Located at the mouth of the continent’s largest river basin, the Coorong is a convergent and keystone ecosystem of continental significance, yet it has also been a notable wellspring for literary production. From the Coorong’s fertile estuarine seedbeds have emerged not only Colin Thiele’s well-loved Stormboy (1964), but also brilliant polymath and Ngarrindjeri man, David Unaipon, whose trailblazing writing on Indigenous culture and story in the 1920s positions him as the “first Indigenous Australian writer”. In an expansive imaginative act, Unaipon compared his culture’s stories with the originary tales of the Western tradition – Roman, Greek, Norse, and Arthurian legends – even as he noted their greater antiquity: “Aboriginal myths, legends, and stories were told to laughing and open-eyed children centuries before our present-day European cultural began”. Experiencing the uncredited publication of his work in his own era, Unaipon nonetheless began the task of Indigenous literary reclamation and translation – a kind of counter assimilation – which today proceeds across the country. By publishing these epic stories for the first time – in a language nearly lost to the world – Stories of the Tanganekald represents a vital cultural (re)emergence from the Coorong’s ecologies of confluence.
The narratives of a people, rather than an individual, Stories of the Tangekald’s telling and transcription is owed to the last speaker of the language, Milerum. In the 1930s he collaborated with Anthropologist Norman Tindale, recording his knowledge of “songs, language, and stories and made objects that [now] form part of the South Australian Museum’s collections” (p.4). Stories of the Tanganekald draws from this material to present a collation of stories which have been translated and edited for clarity. The book also connects readers directly to its archival progenitor, Milerum, including access to his recordings via QR codes (hosted by Aboriginal Living Languages: https://aboriginallivinglanguages.com.au/riverine/tanganekald/ ). Stories of the Tanganekald acknowledges the oral nature of Milerum’s telling and openly declares the shared nature of the stories with neighbouring Indigenous groups. The book is also a learning and teaching tool, providing the letters, sounds, vowels and consonants, and selectively inserting words of the Tanganekald language into each story. What emerges across Stories of the Tanganekald – brilliantly combined with the modern yet almost atemporal artwork of Jacob Stengle – are a series of stories which reenliven the fluvial, riparian and littoral terrain of southern South Australia with stories of cunning, interconnection and transformation.
The collection begins with a triad of stories centred on Ngurunderi – the “most powerful of Tanganekald Ancestral beings” (p.8) – “Ngurunderi and Pondi”, “Ngurunderi and Paramperi” and “Ngurunderi and his Wives”. The first narrative recounts Ngurunderi’s cross-continental pursuit of Pondi (Murray Cod), whose writhing turns “this way and that created the bends in the Murray” (p.8). Finally caught by Ngurunderi and his wives at Lake Alexandrina, Pondi’s death brings the vital riverine ecosystems to life. An epic creation story of Australia’s largest river system, these ancestral acts parallel the scale of the famed northern hemisphere creation story in which Hercules carves the straits of Gibraltar. Yet taken together with the “Origins of Tanganekald”, which tells of a journey of passage as vast as the Biblical Israelites, from the lerami (scrub country) to the north to the “great yuluwar [Southern Ocean] waves beating on the yurli [ocean beach]” (p.17), they represent the origin stories of an entire people. Both narratives support Unaipon’s contention that the Indigenous groups of South Australia all shared stories of arrival from the northwest followed by descent down the Murray-Darling. If this is the case, then it suggests “Ngurundi and Pondi” might represents a polycosmic creation story for Indigenous South Australians.
Ngurunderi’s next journey moves into the southern reaches of the Kurangk (Coorong) and is centred on an encounter with Paramperi, a “nasty old man” (p.10), near Kingston in the South East. Ngurunderi must free himself from the malignant old man’s magic through fire, to return to his ruwi (country). The Ngurunderi triptych concludes with the retelling of the ancestral hero’s epic pursuit of his wives from Goolwa to Cape Jarvis and Kangaroo Island. The story intimately shapes the coastal geography of this well-known region – from plucked hair becoming kelp at Chiton Rocks, to a club becoming Rosetta Head at Victor Harbour – until Ngurunderi finally catches his wives attempting to flee to Kangaroo Island on rafts. Churning up the sea to drown them, they become the islands known as the Pages – a narrative feature that Patrick Nunn’s Edge of Memory (2018) has argued is retained cultural memory of sea level rise following the last ice age. In his final creationary act, Ngurunderi strides across to Karta (Kangaroo Island) and pulls up two islands, before ascending – like Orion the celestial hunter – to take his place in the skies. The narrative’s final line imparts the enduring significance of Ngurunderi’s journey: “As you walk along the coast you may hear the spirits chattering and talking as they wind their way along Ngurunderi’s invisible road” (p. 13).
Following the originary trevails of Ngurunderi and the Tanganekald, the collection features seven more varied ancestral tales. “Madawuli” reads like a Tanganekald mediation on the duality of human experience, contrasting a promethean-like ancestral being who teaches the people how to live in their new ruwi (country) with another who brings death and disease (p.19). “Prupe and Koromarange” recalls aspects of a Grimms’ Fairy Tale as Koromarange seeks to outwit her heartless and blind old sister Prupe who has turned to eating children (p. 20). Meanwhile, “Crow and the Seagulls” and “Crow’s Revenge” introduces the ancestral corvid as a trickster figure, aided by iarmi (dust) and pangari (shadow), whose transgressions are also important acts of creations (pp.26-33).
Although interpretatively rich, all the collection’s stories remain defined by their connection to the Coorong’s unique ecology and topography. For example, “The Great Hunt” retells the story of a hunt which utilises a thin isthmus – sharing affinities with the Greek story of the Calydonian Boar – to trap wainggamar (kangaroo) and peindjali (emu). Meanwhile, in a tale of trickery and revenge “Emu and Brolga” retells how Emu came to have sixteen eggs yet Brolga only two, in a story linked to the creation of the distinctive Granites rock formation, near Kingston. Finally, “Dog and Seal” suggests the transformative encounters between land and sea which have shaped the Coorong so vividly, via an interchange between Wentwin karakoanyi (Leopard seal) and Panmauri (Dog).
Aside from being cause for celebration, the publication of Stories of the Tanganekald raises two important and interlinked questions: who are these stories for and how are they to be received? Undoubtedly, the first and primary audience for such work is the immediate community – the descendants of the Tanganekald, several of whom have contributed to the creation of this collection. Yet the reclamation of these stories – which were so nearly lost to the world –should have ripple effects which reach far beyond the Coorong. Noel Pearson has argued that such Indigenous stories (in reference to Rachel Perkin’s documentation of Arrernte songlines and culture) are:
…also the heritage of non-Aboriginal Australians. It is this culture that is the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. It is these mythic stories that are Australia’s Book of Genesis. For the … classical culture of this continent to vanish would be a loss … to all Australians, and to the heritage of the world generally.
Reviving one of the world’s lost languages and its narratives, which have been told since “time immemorial”, Stories of the Tanganekald’s importance must be understood in such expansive terms.
Nearly one hundred years ago, David Unaipon established the equivalency between the classical stories of Indigenous culture and the mythic and legendary precursors to the modern Western canon, putting forward the hope that that one day Australian writers might “weave literature from them”. (4). If political conditions in Australia prevented such possibilities from blossoming for much of the twentieth century, then the recent renaissance in Indigenous literature is beginning to fulfill such hopes. Yet, Stories of the Tanganekald reminds us how much of this great wellspring remains – like the contemporary Coorong – barraged and restricted from flow. These stories are not only older than the mythic stories of the north but are deeply rooted and woven into the rich ecologies and geographies of this land. The storied Coorong, in both its modern ecological troubles and rich riparian, fluvial and littoral terrains, epitomises this and suggests a model for recovery and interchange.
Cited
- Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2001, p.4.
- Muecke, Stephen and Adam Shoemaker. Introduction. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, by David Unaipon, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2001, p. xi
- Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2001, p. 4.
- Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2001, p. 6.
- Noel Pearson, “A Rightful Place.” Quarterly Essay 55, 2014, https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2014/09/a-rightful-place/extract.
- Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2001, p. 4.
Dr. SAMUEL J. COX is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen and research fellow at the University of Adelaide. Samuel is a researcher and teacher of Australian and Southern literatures whose work has won ASAL’s A.D. Hope Prize and Australian Literary Studies PhD Essay Prize. He is particularly passionate about Australian writing and publishing in its myriad of forms and his forthcoming monograph Dust Country: Australian literature in the Age of the Anthropocene will be published with Routledge in 2026.