{"collection":"aus","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/aus/peck/peck09.htm","path":"aus/peck/peck09.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/aus/peck/peck09.htm","text":"Out on the Murrumbidgee there is a tale about the setting sun. The country there is very different from what it is where the aborigines had a story of the Escapees.\nIt is flat.\nIt seems to be below, far below, the level of the sea.\nAnd the sun can be seen setting.\nThe land which contains the great, dreary salt lakes-Frome, Eyre, Gardiner, Amadeus, Torrens, and a lot of others named and unnamed, is really below the sea's level, and if ever a canal is cut from the head of Spencer Gulf to the bed of those lakes a vast extent of territory will become an ultra-salt inland sea.\nBut though the country through which the greater part of the Murrumbidgee and the Lachlan and the Darling flow seems very low, it is still above the level of the great oceans.\nIt seems to be a disc, like a huge plate.\nTurn which way one will, the horizon is sharp and level and lies all around. In the summer (and summer sets in in October and lasts until the end of March) the sun rises a huge fiery red ball. Before he appears he sends his torrid shafts, and the earth is dried and heated. With his horrible advance agents of wilting beams the flies are a wracking buzz and a stinging poison as they wing their nauseous way about, and all the other insect life starts into pestering being.\nThe smell of baked earth rises, and the dried grasses stand stiffly and starkly.\nThe level east lightens; and slowly, surely, and relentlessly the great red disc ascends and throws long shadows across the ground.\nThe dwarfed and gnarled gums seem to beg for some respite. The sombre Murray Pines cluster in masses as if seeking the solace and protection of one another's company.\nBy the advent of the first month of summer the few orchids that bloomed in the short spring have gone, and the glowing grasses have seeded and died.\nIt is now a bare and browned and sere world.\nThe sun changes from red to grey, and as he wends his solemn way up to the zenith he pours out molten light.\nLazy clouds of dust rise up from. the new-formed roads, stirred by waggoned teams, and flatten and float out over the trees.\nShadows grow less and less until they are only patches directly below the bushes.\nLife is a dreary and painful process.\nHorses stand mutely, head to tail, close to any tree stumps that may be there; sheep huddle, panting, out in the glaring sun; birds sit on the boughs with wings opened and mouths agape; nothing lives in the wilting day-everything crouches in whatever of shade can be found.\nOver and above passes the molten ball, and as he slowly descends towards the horizon of the west, and the east begins to blacken, life stirs again, and all beings long for the cool of night.\nMany nights are but little cooler than the day.\nThe gay, glowing flowers of the sandstone elevations are not here. No epacrids, no boronias, no waratahs!\nThe deep restful greens of the laurels, and the glowing browns of the turpentines and woollybutts and ironbarks and lilly-pillies do not show. The banksias are stunted. Only the hardiest trees grow, and the most transient of the grasses, and they are poor and bare-all except the annual grasses. They are the saving of the land.\nIt was not always so.\nThe aborigines have a legend-born of their stricken condition, and of that wonderful and unexplainable knowledge of their past history as is revealed to us by our geologists and scientists-which tells of a time when the earth was not parched by such a sun; when it was ever day, but the daylight was the radiance of a human ancestor, and when the trees and shrubs and flowers were as bright and plentiful as they are now in the regions that are not wilted by our sun.\nThe sun, they say, is an ancestor-a human that was not understood, and he retired in sorrow and became a god and thus came light-so came the setting sun.\nA family which claimed the sleeping lizard as its totem was camped in a scrub of Murray Pine (a callitris); and, with wurleys built against a number of seared logs, lived, not far away, a family of which the brown-banded snake was the totem.\nDuring the winter months good rains had fallen, and the ground was clothed with many beautiful grasses and much wild parsley, and rearing its pretty pink three-leaved and fringed flowers amongst the grasses was the Thysanotus tuberosus, or Fringed Violet.\nThe Kennedya and the Hardenbergia clambered over the old time-worn stumps, and the acacias poisoned the air with their pollen.\nDown on the ground were the purple and white wild violets. The sleeping lizards fraternised good-naturedly with the snake-people, and all \"was merry as a marriage bell.\"\nThere was a plethora of foods-birds, animals, roots, and berries.\nAmongst the snake people two young men strove for the one maiden, and there had been many quarrels because no one seemed to know to which she had been promised.\nMeeting after meeting had been called, and the clamour at every one was great.\nAt last it was decided that he who made the finest stone spear-head for presentation to the father of the girl should have her.\nShe often spent many hours running from one to the other and she was not innocent of jeering and jibing at both the anxious workmen.\nWhen the proofs of their handicraft were brought to the wurley of the father he pretended to fly into a great rage. He denounced the young men and scoffed at the spearheads-all of them. He rushed to the King and implored him to condemn the lot. He spat on them and flung them amongst the women, who picked them up and flew into as big a pretence of anger as the man.\nThe contest was renewed and it continued until the pleasant weather had gone, and the light that came from whatever member of the priesthood held the power to so propitiate the light-giver as to vouchsafe day to the world, began to wane, and it was nearly time for another magician to be appointed to carry on.\nTo the surprise of everyone, one of the contestants proclaimed himself to be the proper magician.\nNow the duties pertaining to such an office were many and arduous.\nThe priest had to spend long periods in prayer and meditation out on the plain by himself. He had to submit to much indignity-even flagellation, and he had to ostracise himself in other ways.\nThere were not many natives who cared to be considered the special emissary to the ancestor of the light.\nAnd in this young man's case it meant giving up the girl.\nBut the dispute was not to be settled.\nWithdrawing from the contest did not give the other man the right to his claim.\nIf winning in the set competition could not happen, then some other way must be chosen by the priest.\nAnd he was not in any hurry to give a pronouncement.\nIn the meantime the girl did not cease her teasing.\nShe still jeered at both the newly-announced magician and the other contestant.\nThis became distasteful to the old women, whose charge she was, and they set her to perform many tasks that otherwise would not have fallen to her lot.\nPerhaps never before did so young a girl have to grind the grass seeds. She had to find out for herself how to hold the stone between the calves of her legs and how to use the grinder.\nShe became a wife without being married, for it was a wife's duty to make most of the cakes.\nOne day she found her suitor to be busy making a shield.\nHe was drawing the circles and the radiating lines that represented the light of day.\nBut in it he drew the sleeping lizard.\nIt was meant as sarcasm, and it was hoped that this piece of portrayed scorn would bring some evil to his rival. He would much have preferred to go on with the competition until one or the other had won. He was becoming anxious to secure the wife, and this delay was beginning to annoy him.\nThe newly recognised magician was out somewhere in communion with the saints or the spirits or whatever it is that such people have found when they come back with tales of supernatural visitations while they are either figuratively or really eating locusts and wild honey.\nNow the artistry of the young man was good.\nThe girl was really interested.\nShe sat beside him watching intently every mark.\nAnd as they sat thus the old lightmaker died, and the new one emerged from his solitude and commenced the ceremony of light making so that it would continue.\nAs he was so young the light nearly went out. The semi-darkness that ensued was bewildering and it struck terror into everyone.\nThe tribe implored the young magician to put forth every endeavour, and his answer was that without the girl he could not make more light than there was then.\nThe people looked all around, but they could not see the wanted girl. No one knew where she had gone.\nThen they saw that the young lover was missing also.\nThe light maker grew very angry.\nAll the gesticulations, all the genuflexions, all the grotesque dancing that were resorted to in anger, he indulged in.\nHis anger grew very real and it communicated itself to his people. Even the King himself became as the rest.\nThat feeling gave way to despair. Women sat in groups and beat themselves and one another and inflicted severe wounds. Priests hurriedly drew sacred totemic marks on the ground and drew similar designs on the bodies of those whose right it was to bear them. Mitres were fashioned and put on the heads of the higher clergy. Fires were lit to augment the lessened light of the day.\nAfter a while a hunting party was organised to hunt up the missing people, and upon being blessed they seized their spears and shields and bounded off.\nThe light maker forgot his mission. He yearned for the girl, and without saying a word he betook himself off to search.\nAfter a very long time he found her.\nShe was living in a slight depression--a crabhole--that is pointed out to-day by all who know this story.\nThe man with whom she was living was away at the time, and the light maker appealed to her to come to him.\nSo together they ran, and all the light of day went with them. The further they went the less the light grew until they were right on the edge of the world.\nThere a son was born to them, and because of the wrong, the father and mother died.\nNever since the beginning of the trouble had the daylight been so clear or so strong as before it, and now it was leaving the earth for ever. No one else could ever receive the instructions that would make him a light maker. The great ancestor needed a mediator between himself and the world, and it had to be a lizard man, and now no lizard man knew what to do.\nThe daylight faded right away.\nIn its going it was much more beautiful than ever before. Long streaks of gold spread over the sky, and as that faded everything became awestricken, and the world was hushed.\nEven now there is that period \"while the air 'twixt dark and daylight's standing still.\"\nBut the baby that was born away over there grew and became at once a light man. He held direct communion with the great ancestor and he gathered great quantities of light in his hands.\nSo he set out to find his way back to where he knew his people dwelt. There was one thing he did not do.\nHe was born with his back to his people, and he did not turn round. He just walked on and on.\nHe had great waters to travel over, and great beds of sand to travel through, and great forests to find his way in, and great mires to wade across, but he kept going.\nHe was determined to find his people and to bring them light. So a time came when the tribe saw light breaking away over in the east. It had disappeared on the one hand and it reappeared on the other.\nThey were overjoyed.\nBut the priests counselled great caution.\nNo one knew what to say or do.\nThe priests and the King said that if they made the wrong ceremony they would lose the light.\nSo they waited mutely and watched it. There was no welcoming shout. The birds sang to it. The trees nodded to it. Flowers bowed to it. Dewdrops left the earth and flew to it. But men and women were mute because they were afraid that they may do the wrong thing and it would leave them for ever and all their days would be dark and they could not live.\nTherefore the light maker sailed over their heads. He went on to the edge of the world where he was born.\nThe priests said that when they had found out how to worship him he would come down out of the sky and remain with them for ever, but while in ignorance in that respect he would continue to go over their heads and disappear.\nThey are still in ignorance. That is why there is no sun worship.\nThe new sun man became more beloved than any had been before, and so the ancestor made him a god like himself, even if the father and mother did do wrong.\nAnd the ancestor sometimes gives him huge quantities of light, and as it is thrown down to the earth it burns and sears and scorches.\nSo we have summer. If we could only find out how to carry out the proper ceremony of sun worship then there would be no more great heat waves.\nThis is the tale of the aborigines who live in those parts where the summer is scorching. It accounts for more things than will be seen at first reading.\nWhen the light is not being thrown in large quantities the days are not scorching and the grass is green and the trees are not so dry and the great cracks in the ground are closed up and the little flowers are blooming and all is gay.","title":"Australian Legends: Why The Sun Sets","type":"page"}