Garkain

Also Known As: recorded by Charles Mountford, who also called him Garkain the Recluse
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Aboriginal Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: He carries great flaps of loose skin on his arms and legs that let him fly, and he kills by dropping onto a person and closing those folds over them.
Role in Mythos: He holds one small patch of jungle near the mouth of the Liverpool River and takes anyone who walks into it.
Relation to Humans: The single account of him says he hunts at night and smothers whoever enters his country, then eats the body raw because he has never learned to make fire. It also records that people of the district did not fear him as much as they feared other spirits nearby.

A heap of dead leaves lies on the floor of a patch of thick jungle near the mouth of the Liverpool River, in Arnhem Land, and something roughly the size of a grown man is asleep beneath it, waiting out the daylight. That is Garkain, and the whole written record of him is about two pages long. Charles Mountford printed it in 1956, in *Art, Myth and Symbolism*, the first of the four volumes of Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, published by Melbourne University Press; the passage sits at pages 199 and 200. He retold the same material fifteen years later, as Garkain the Recluse, in *The First Sunrise*, the book he made with the painter Ainslie Roberts. Everything else in circulation runs back through one of those two.

The place has a name in the account, Magurlipun, and the account gives it no more detail than that it is dense and it is jungle. Coastal Arnhem Land carries pockets of monsoon forest that stay closed and humid while the country around them is open woodland, and walking into one is a change of temperature and sound rather than a change of scenery. Garkain owns one of them.

The detail that makes him himself is the skin. He has great loose flaps of it hanging from his arms and his legs, described in the record as being like wings, and also like fins. They work. He walks when he wants to, and when he wants to he goes up off the ground. He has no speech. He does not make fire and he does not make tools, so he takes what he catches with his hands and he eats it as it is.

The attack is the one scene the record actually stages. A traveller comes into the forest after dark. Garkain lifts, and comes down on top of them, and there is a moment of flailing arms and legs before the folds settle over the face and the smothering starts. Nobody is bitten, nothing is torn open at that stage. The killing is done by weight and by skin.

He is not clever. He is simply very hard to walk past.

Mountford noted that Garkain resembled Warraguk, another being from the same stretch of country, and he also recorded something that a monster is not usually granted: a ranking. People of the district, he wrote, did not hold Garkain in the dread they held for the Namarakain and the Nabudi. He is a real danger in a specific patch of forest, and if you stay out of the forest he is somebody else’s problem.

There is an object as well as a text. A bark painting of Garkain hangs in the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, natural ochres on eucalyptus bark, 78.5 by 30.5 centimetres, accession number 0.1763, a gift from Charles P. Mountford in 1957 and dated to 1948 or 1949. The flaps of skin are the picture’s subject. His feet are shown as footprints rather than as feet, which is how spirit and human beings are commonly drawn in that region. The gallery records the artist as Unknown.

That blank is worth pausing over, because it is not an accident of filing. Mountford led the 1948 expedition, funded by the Commonwealth government, the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian, and came home with roughly five hundred paintings on bark and card. Margo Neale, writing for the National Museum of Australia, describes him as having become notorious for failing to document who made the works, and for descriptions of them that were detailed but at times badly wrong. The painting was collected at Gunbalanya, well west along the coast from the Liverpool River, and Neale notes that Mountford drew on artists from the Liverpool River district while he was camped there because the local Gunbalanya painters were occupied with mission work. Mountford had left school at eleven and held no professional qualifications. Ronald Berndt reviewed the volume in *Mankind* in 1958 and, setting the illustrations aside, judged that it had “little to commend it”.

So what is left is narrow, and worth saying out loud. No source gives Garkain an origin, a parent, or a first appearance. No source gives him a death, a defeat, or a person who outwitted him. No second telling exists to disagree with the first. And the account never names the people whose country Magurlipun is, or who told the story, which is the largest hole in it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Garkain?

Garkain is a man-eating spirit of Aboriginal Arnhem Land, recorded as living alone in a patch of dense jungle near the mouth of the Liverpool River in the Northern Territory. He is about the size of a grown man and has wide flaps of loose skin on his arms and legs that allow him to fly.

How does Garkain kill people?

Garkain kills by smothering. He drops onto anyone who enters his stretch of forest and wraps the loose folds of skin on his arms and legs around them until they suffocate. He then eats the body raw, because the record says he never learned to make fire or tools.

Where does Garkain live?

Garkain lives in a dense patch of jungle called Magurlipun, close to where the Liverpool River meets the sea in Arnhem Land. He hunts at night and spends the daylight hours asleep on the jungle floor under a pile of leaves.

Who recorded the story of Garkain?

The anthropologist and collector Charles P. Mountford recorded Garkain in *Art, Myth and Symbolism* (1956), the first volume of the Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, and retold it in *The First Sunrise* (1971). Those two publications are effectively the entire written record, and both come from the same collector.

Is there any surviving artwork of Garkain?

Yes. A bark painting of Garkain, made in 1948 or 1949 and painted in natural ochres on eucalyptus bark, is held by the Art Gallery of South Australia under accession number 0.1763. It shows his flaps of skin and renders his feet as footprints, and the gallery lists the artist as unknown.