Gurangatch

At midday the waterhole at Murrawall lay flat and warm, and something under the surface caught the sun and threw it back as a single hard point of light, like a star sunk in the water. The fisherman on the bank had worked these rivers all his life and knew every large fish in them by habit. This was not a fish. It was the eye of Gurangatch, lying in the shallows to warm his long body in the heat of the day, and the moment Mirragan the native cat marked that eye, the whole country was about to be rewritten.

Gurangatch was one of the Burringilling, the ancestral spirits of the Dreaming, and an incarnation of the Rainbow Serpent that runs through so much of Aboriginal belief. His form sat between two orders of animal, partly fish and partly reptile, a great eel-thing heavy enough to shoulder rivers out of dry ground. The Gundungurra people of the Blue Mountains, whose country reaches from the high ridges down toward Goulburn, kept his story as the account of how their land was made. It was written down only once, by the surveyor R. H. Mathews, who sat with Gundungurra people in the Burragorang Valley around 1900 and published what they told him in a German journal in 1908. The land itself had been telling it far longer.

He liked the deep places. His favourite camp was the drowned junction where the Wollondilly meets the Wingecarribee, a hole so deep that when he slid off the bank and made for its centre no spear could follow him down. That habit of lying in the sun near the edge was the one careless thing he did, and it was enough. Mirragan, a hunter who bothered only with the biggest fish, saw the star-bright eye and threw. He missed. Gurangatch went to the bottom, and the contest began.

Unable to reach him, Mirragan tried to poison him out. He cut armfuls of hickory bark, called millewa, and sank it in heaps around the lagoon to foul the water. Some tellings name the bark as wattle instead. Either way the poison made Gurangatch sick but could not kill him, and while Mirragan went back into the bush for more, the serpent understood what was coming and chose flight over patience. He began to tear up the ground along the valley of the Wollondilly, and the lagoon emptied itself after him with a roar, carrying him along on his own flood. Mile after mile of new river channel opened behind him as he went.

What follows is less a fight than a landscape being cut. Gurangatch burrowed under ridges and rose again in springs; he could send water uphill as easily as down, being a magician as much as a monster, and so he opened channels where no water had any business flowing. He drove up Jock’s Creek and tunnelled clean under the range to surface inside the Wombeyan caves. He looped the Wollondilly back on itself where the digging came hard. He cut the Cox River, gouged the deep canyon at Meeoowun, hollowed out the waterholes that still hold his resting places, and climbed at last to Jenolan, the caves the Gundungurra called Binomil. Every bend and gorge and cave in that country is the mark of where he passed, or where Mirragan’s pole prodded after him, or where the two of them fought until the rock came away smooth and slick. The weather-worn pot-holes on top of the Wombeyan caves are said to be the holes Mirragan dug trying to spear him out.

The hunter would not let go. When the divers finally cornered the serpent, the country had already been made. Gurangatch, worn out and sore from a running battle in which he had clubbed Mirragan with his boondee and lashed him with his tail, begged his relatives at Jenolan to hide him, and they led him over the main range into the deep cold pool of Joolundoo, more than a hundred kilometres from where the chase began. Mirragan walled off the escarpment behind him and went west for help, gathering the best divers he could find: Billagoola the shag, Goolagwangwan the diving bird, and two ducks. The ducks failed. The diver went down twice into that black water, and the second time the shag got a grip, and though he could not shift the serpent wedged into the rock he tore a great piece of flesh from his back and brought it up. Mirragan and his divers cooked it and feasted, and called that the end of the hunt.

It was not the end of Gurangatch. A strip of his back was gone, but the serpent lived, and the waterholes along the Wollondilly and the Cox are counted as his to this day, still held to shelter his descendants. His power was never really the club or the tail. It was that he carried water inside the earth and could open a river anywhere he chose, which is a slow and unanswerable kind of strength. His weakness was smaller and very old. He liked to lie in the shallows in the sun, and a sharp-eyed hunter caught the shine of him doing it. Everything that followed came from that one glint of light on the water.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Gurangatch in Aboriginal mythology?

Gurangatch is a giant eel-like ancestral being of the Gundungurra people of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, understood as an incarnation of the Rainbow Serpent. He is one of the Burringilling, the spirits of the Dreaming, and his form is described as partly fish and partly reptile.

What did Gurangatch create?

Gurangatch carved the river systems of Gundungurra country, chiefly the Wollondilly and Cox Rivers, along with their gorges, springs and waterholes. As he fled the hunter Mirragan, he tore channels through the land, tunnelled under ranges, and passed through the Wombeyan and Jenolan caves, leaving the shape of the whole landscape behind him.

What is the story of Gurangatch and Mirragan?

The story tells how Mirragan, a native cat and renowned fisherman, spotted Gurangatch sunning in a waterhole and tried first to spear and then to poison him. Gurangatch escaped by ripping open the earth and flooding after himself, and the running pursuit that followed gouged out the rivers and caves of the Blue Mountains, ending more than a hundred kilometres away at the deep pool of Joolundoo.

Did Gurangatch die?

Gurangatch survived. When Mirragan’s diving birds finally reached him in the pool at Joolundoo, the shag could only tear a large piece of flesh from his back rather than kill him, and Mirragan feasted on that and ended the chase. Gurangatch lived on, and the deep waterholes of the Wollondilly and Cox are still said to be inhabited by his descendants.

Is Gurangatch the same as the Rainbow Serpent?

Gurangatch is understood as a local incarnation of the Rainbow Serpent, the widespread ancestral water-serpent of Aboriginal Australia. He carries the Rainbow Serpent’s core traits, control over water and the power to shape the land, expressed through the specific Gundungurra story of how the Blue Mountains rivers were made.

Related Entries

Rainbow Serpent, Dirawong, Wati-kutjara, Yawkyawk, Muldjewangk, Bunyip, Nargun, Mungoon-Gali, Baiame, Bunjil