Altjira

At night, above the ranges of Central Australia, a river runs across a country no one on the ground has ever walked. Tall trees stand along its banks and its springs of sweet water never fail. Flocks of birds cross it, kangaroos and wild cats move through the grass, and a red-skinned man with long pale hair and the feet of an emu waits beside the water for game to come down and drink. His campfires burn from one edge of the sky to the other. The river is the Milky Way, the fires are the stars, and the hunter is Altjira.

Nearly everything written about him comes from one book. In 1907 the municipal ethnological museum in Frankfurt published the first part of *Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien*, by Carl Strehlow, a German Lutheran missionary at Hermannsburg in Central Australia, edited by the ethnologist Moritz Freiherr von Leonhardi. Its opening chapter is headed simply “Altjira”. Strehlow presented it as the tradition of the old people of the Arrernte, whom he called the Aranda, and the portrait he set down is precise enough to dress a figure by.

Altjira is a big, strong man with red skin, and his long, light-coloured hair falls down over his shoulders. His feet are the feet of an emu, which earns him the by-name Altjira iliinka, from *ilia*, emu, and *inka*, legs or feet. He wears a white band across his forehead, a necklace, an armband, a belt spun from hair and a small covering at the groin. He has many wives, called *tneera*, “the beautiful ones”, who are red-skinned like him but stand on the legs of dogs. The family keeps the pattern exactly: his sons have emu feet and his daughters have dog legs. Handsome young men and girls keep him company.

His home is the sky, *alkira*, which has existed as long as he has, and which the Arrernte pictured as solid land rather than empty air. While Altjira stalks the animals that come to the springs to quench their thirst, his wives dig *latjia* roots and *jelka*, the onion-like tubers of a sedge that Strehlow calls the staple food of the women, along with other fruits that ripen there in every season. The stars are his cooking fires. A few constellations are excepted: those, Strehlow was told, are totem-beings who climbed into the sky after their work below was done.

He has no origin, and that is the point of him. Strehlow could find no derivation for the word, but his informants told him again and again that Altjira meant one who had no beginning, one who was not brought forth by another. They had a phrase for it: *erina itja arbmanakala*, nobody made him. The earth was eternal too. In the beginning it lay under the sea, and from that water rose mountains on which lived the *altjirangamitjina*, the eternal uncreated ones, beings with the powers that would later shape the land.

The sky and the earth touch in only one story in the chapter. Near the Finke Gorge, where the Finke River breaks through the MacDonnell Ranges, stood a high rock called Eralera, hollowed by a great cave in which duck-men lived. With the earth still drowned there was nothing to eat below, so the duck-men climbed again and again into the sky to hunt in Altjira’s country, and came back down to their cave loaded with game.

That is the whole of his dealings with the world beneath. His rule stops at the edge of the sky. He did not make human beings and he does not care what becomes of them. There are no tjurunga, the sacred boards and stones of Arrernte religion, that belong to him. The Arrernte told Strehlow that they had neither fear of Altjira nor love for him. Their one dread concerned the sky itself: that one day it might fall and kill them all. It rests, they said, on legs of stone.

He was contested almost from the moment he was written down. Francis Gillen, writing in the report of the Horn Expedition in 1896, had heard that the sky was inhabited by a gigantic man with a huge emu-shaped foot, a woman, and a child who never grew beyond childhood. Strehlow thought this was really Tukura, the Loritja sky being, and that Gillen’s teller had been a Loritja man. Baldwin Spencer and Gillen, in their *Native Tribes of Central Australia* (1899), reported no belief in a true divinity among the Arrernte at all, and it was their reading of the Arrernte word for the ancestral age, alcheringa, that later gave English “the Dreamtime”. Strehlow answered in a long footnote. The verb for dreaming, *altjirerama*, did join *altjira* to *rama*, to see, but in that word the altjira seen in sleep was a totem-being, not the god of the sky. Alcheringa, he argued, was a garbled form of the rare word *altjirerinja*, and the Arrernte knew nothing of a “dream time” as a period of history.

Spencer’s reply was blunt: the missionaries had taught the people that Altjira meant God, and Strehlow was hearing his own lesson repeated back. The charge had teeth. According to the anthropologist Anna Kenny’s study of Strehlow’s work, the Hermannsburg missionaries before him, Kempe among them, had already used Altjira to translate the word God. Von Leonhardi defended Strehlow’s findings against the accusation of Christian influence. The emu feet and the dog-legged wives count for something here. Nobody took them from a Lutheran hymnbook.

Émile Durkheim, reading Strehlow in 1912, was puzzled for a different reason. A god who made nothing, explained nothing and served for nothing was hard to account for, and he wondered whether Altjira was an older high god whose standing had faded, or whether Strehlow had misread his informants. The figure has not grown clearer since. Arrernte is now written in a modern orthography, which spells the word Altyerre, and Jennifer Green gave her 2012 study of it a pointed subtitle: “Suffering Badly by Translation”.

Strehlow recorded a neighbour as well. The Loritja called their highest being Tukura: a man of fine red skin with long hair and a great beard. The western Loritja gave him emu feet like Altjira’s, the southern Loritja human ones. Tukura has a single wife and one child who stays a child for ever, and unlike Altjira he keeps busy, calling the young men who live near him to hold ceremonies by day.

Altjira’s power is the power of permanence. He was never made, he will not end, and everything overhead is his, from the river of stars to the game on its banks. His limits are just as plain. He has no reach below the sky, no ceremonies, no sacred objects and no claim on anyone’s loyalty, and the only disaster the Arrernte feared from above was not his anger but the sky giving way on its stone legs. Whether he stood at the centre of Arrernte belief or at its far edge, or was partly shaped by the mission that wrote him down, the record cannot settle. It is one missionary’s chapter, and it is all there is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Altjira?

Altjira is the eternal sky being of the Arrernte (Aranda) people of Central Australia as recorded by the Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow in 1907. Strehlow described him as a highest good being who lives in the sky, which the Arrernte pictured as solid land with the Milky Way as a river running through it.

What does Altjira look like?

Strehlow’s informants described Altjira as a big, strong man with red skin, long light hair and the feet of an emu. His many wives have red skin and dog legs, his sons have emu feet and his daughters have dog legs.

Did Altjira create humans?

No. In Strehlow’s account Altjira rules only the sky, did not make human beings and takes no interest in their fate. The Arrernte told Strehlow they had neither fear of him nor love for him, and no sacred tjurunga objects belonged to him.

Is Altjira the same as the Dreamtime?

Not exactly. Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen took the Arrernte word alcheringa as the name of an ancestral age, which became “the Dreamtime” in English, while Strehlow argued the word was a garbled form of altjirerinja and that Altjira was the name of an eternal sky being. The Arrernte verb for dreaming, altjirerama, contains the word altjira, but Strehlow said the altjira seen in dreams was a totem-being rather than the sky god.

Was Altjira invented by missionaries?

This is disputed. Baldwin Spencer argued that the Hermannsburg missionaries had taught the Arrernte that Altjira meant God, and missionaries before Strehlow had in fact used the word to translate God. Strehlow and his editor Moritz von Leonhardi rejected the charge, and details such as Altjira’s emu feet and dog-legged wives have no Christian source.

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