Julunggul

Also Known As: also written Yulunggul, Yulunggur, Yurlunggur, Julunggur and Jurlungur; the python of the Wagilag Sisters story, named Wititj, the olive python, in Yolngu Matha
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Aboriginal Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He swallows and brings up again, and the swallowing makes law, weather and ceremony where there was none.
Role in Mythos: He is the great python of north-central Arnhem Land whose encounter with the Wagilag Sisters founded the songs, dances and marriage rules of the clans who own the story.
Relation to Humans: The people who hold his story hold it as law rather than legend, and the rites that came out of it govern kinship, authority and country. Much of what he means is restricted, spoken only inside ceremony, so what circulates publicly is deliberately the outer shell of a much larger thing.

The water at Mirarrmina turned the colours of a rainbow, and the two men who came upon it that day did not have to be told what lay underneath. They already knew. In north-central Arnhem Land a waterhole that shines like that has a snake in it, and the snake in that one was Julunggul.

Nearly every great ancestral being of that country came from somewhere else, walked in, made the land as they went and left their name on the places they passed. Julunggul did not. He had always been at his waterhole, in Liyagalawumirr country, in the deep still water where the light does not reach. He belonged to the Dhuwa moiety, and he was a good guardian of his own site, which sounds like faint praise until you learn what happened when he stopped being one.

He is an olive python, and the bark painters of Ramingining and Milingimbi show him the same way over and over: a single vast coil filling the whole sheet, wound around his own eggs at the bottom of the well. Warner, working at Milingimbi in the late 1920s, was told that snakes and goannas and even the little snails were his sons, living in the water with him. When he chooses to rise he can suck a whole lagoon into himself and stand erect against the clouds, and when he falls he leaves the shape of his body pressed into the ground.

The Wagilag Sisters came up from the south-east, from the Roper River country, the older one carrying a child and the younger one pregnant. They travelled north towards the sea, and as they went they named the animals and the plants and the ground itself, which is another way of saying they brought them into being. At the stone quarries at Ngilipidji they took the name they are known by. Eventually they stopped at Mirarrmina, built a bark hut, and the younger sister gave birth there. They had no idea whose water they were camped beside.

Every animal they caught and laid on the coals got up off the fire and went into the waterhole. Not once. Every time. The goanna, the possum, the fish, all of them sliding off the embers and away down the bank into the dark, because everything at that place belonged to the thing at the bottom of it.

Then the blood of the birth reached the water, and Julunggul smelled it. He drew the lagoon up into his body and stood into the sky and spat it out again, and that spray became the clouds of the first monsoon. The rain came down on the bark hut in sheets. The sisters sang and danced to turn the storm back, hour after hour, until their legs gave out and they fell. He came down and took them, the women and the children, the dog and everything they owned, in one movement.

Afterwards he lifted himself above the drowned country and the other great snakes of the surrounding clan estates rose too, and they talked. They spoke different dialects and said so, and agreed that they held the same law regardless. Julunggul faced east while he said it, with his back turned on western Arnhem Land, whose people did not circumcise and whose marriage rules were not his. When the others asked what he had been eating he lied to them, because he had worked out what he had done. The sisters were Dhuwa. So was he. He had swallowed his own moiety.

The pain came on him then. He crashed out of the sky into the mud, and brought the sisters back up, and the tellings part company over what happened next. In the Ramingining account he keeps the children, who are Yirritja and therefore not his kin, and the sisters are stung back to life by biting caterpillars, whereupon he beats them with clapsticks and swallows them again. In a Milingimbi version that only Warner recorded, a great drone pipe came up out of the waterhole by itself and revived them with the help of green ants, which enraged him, so he killed them and ate them a second time. That drone pipe is Julunggul. The sound of it is his voice. He was, in effect, brought down by himself, and nobody in the story appears to find this odd.

The men who had followed the sisters dreamed the songs and the dances the women had performed against the rain, and were told to carry them home and teach them, so that the seasons would keep turning. That is the point of the whole thing. Out of one bad meal at one waterhole came the ceremonies, the ordering of clans and countries, and the rules about who may marry whom, which the owners of the story still hold. A great deal of it is secret and stays inside ceremony, and the version that reaches print is the shell.

His powers are weather and reach. He is the spirit of the monsoon, of the baara, the fast dark storms that come in off the west and north-west with the wet season in them; he has both freshwater and saltwater affiliations; and though he is anchored to one hole in the ground he can travel in spirit, flying over the country in some accounts with the sisters still inside him, calling out place names and handing each district its dialect as he passes. Whether he is a Rainbow Serpent at all is argued. On the eastern side of Arnhem Land people decline the identification altogether, and the answer they give is one of the better ones in world mythology: Julunggul is separate, he is himself.

His limits are the other half of the same nature. He cannot leave Mirarrmina in the body, only in spirit. What he eats can sicken him, and the law he helped establish binds him first, which is why a snake big enough to swallow the rain was undone by a rule about kinship. Even his name is unsettled. Most accounts make him male; one north-eastern telling makes the snake female, and popular English writing has run a long way with that. Warner called him great father, Yindi Bapa, though Catherine Berndt suspected he had simply misheard the ordinary phrase for great snake, Yindi Baapi, and had been building on it ever since.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Julunggul?

Julunggul is the great ancestral python of north-central Arnhem Land in Aboriginal Australia, a Dhuwa moiety being who lives in the waterhole at Mirarrmina in Liyagalawumirr country. He is the snake who swallowed the Wagilag Sisters, and the ceremonies, songs and marriage laws that came out of that encounter are still held by the clans who own the story. His name is also written Yulunggul, Yurlunggur and Jurlungur, and in Yolngu Matha the python of this story is called Wititj.

What happened to the Wagilag Sisters?

The two Sisters travelled north from the Roper River country and camped at Mirarrmina without knowing that Julunggul lived in the waterhole there. When the younger sister gave birth and the blood reached the water, Julunggul rose, spat the lagoon into the sky as the first monsoon clouds, and swallowed the women, their children, their dog and their possessions. He later brought them up again, and in most tellings swallowed them a second time.

Is Julunggul the same as the Rainbow Serpent?

Not everyone accepts that he is. In the Milingimbi accounts the water above him shone like a rainbow, which is how the men knew a snake was there, and that identification is widely made. On the eastern side of Arnhem Land the Rainbow Serpent label is often refused outright, with the explanation that Julunggul is separate and is himself. The Rainbow Serpent is a broad Australia-wide figure with many regional names; Julunggul is one specific python belonging to one specific waterhole.

Is Julunggul male or female?

Most recorded versions make Julunggul male. One north-eastern Arnhem Land version identifies the snake as female while keeping phallic symbolism, and that reading has been picked up heavily in popular English-language writing about Aboriginal goddesses. Warner recorded him under the phrase Yindi Bapa, great father, though Catherine Berndt later suggested he may have misheard the more ordinary Yindi Baapi, great snake.

What did the Wagilag Sisters story create?

The songs and dances the Sisters performed against the storm were revealed in dreams to the men who had followed them, who were instructed to take them home and teach them so the cycles of the seasons would continue. Out of the encounter came major ceremonial cycles of Arnhem Land and the rules governing kinship, authority, territory and marriage. Much of the material remains restricted and is only handled inside ceremony.