Minka Bird

After dark on the Lower Murray, when the water stops throwing back the last of the light and the reed beds go still, a call sometimes moves through the camps that people have learned to dread. It is low and rough and hard to place, coming from the dark edges where the firelight gives out. Along the lakes and the Coorong the Ngarrindjeri know that call. It belongs to the mingka, and to hear it close at night is to be told, plainly and without appeal, that someone is going to die.

The bird is a messenger, and it deals mostly in arrivals. It knows who is coming before the people do. A traveller on the track, a relative making their way from another stretch of country, the mingka names them ahead of time. But the arrival it is most feared for announcing is death. In the old accounts it does not merely hint at the loss of a loved one; it declares it, so that a family who heard the bird in the night and then received word of a death the next day counted the two together as cause and confirmation rather than as chance.

There are gentler versions of its visits. The call comes at dusk and an old woman lifts her head, because the mingka has announced someone on the track, and by the time the fire has burned low a cousin walks in from downriver, exactly as the bird foretold. Not every arrival it names is a death. But the one everyone remembers is the death.

What the mingka actually is remains oddly unsettled. Some describe it as a small bird, barely more than a sparrow. Others call it an owl, and later observers have tied it to the tawny frogmouth, the flat, wide-mouthed night bird whose grey plumage lets it sit against a branch by day as still and grey as dead wood, then hunt once the sun is down. The descriptions do not fully agree, and part of the reason is that the mingka was never only a bird. It was a spirit that could wear a bird’s body, and a spirit is harder to hold in the eye than a wing or a beak.

That is the heart of it in the accounts Ronald and Catherine Berndt gathered from Ngarrindjeri people along the river and the lakes. The mingka is bound up with the spirits of the living and the dead. A person’s spirit, in some tellings a woman’s, could go out from them in the shape of the little bird and travel the night on its errands, arriving at a camp to say that visitors were near or that a death was at hand. The bird and the spirit are the same traffic seen from two sides. This is why it keeps to dark, closed places, the deep shade under the bank, the hollow log, the recess in the reeds, the same ground the dead are held to be near.

A night like any other. A family sits close to a low fire on the edge of the reeds, talking themselves toward sleep, when the call comes out of the dark behind them, near and unmistakable. The talk stops. No one has to say what it means. In the morning someone will walk in with news from another camp, and the news will be a death, and the people around that fire will already have known.

The mingka has a near neighbour in the tradition, the mulduwanke, another night bird of the Ngarrindjeri that also kept to dark recesses. The mulduwanke did not foretell death. It stole children. That is a different kind of dread, and it served a different purpose in the telling, the sort of warning that kept a child close to the fires after sundown. Between the two of them the dark held both a thief and a herald.

Its power is knowledge, and knowledge that arrives too early to be of any use. The mingka sees the shape of what is coming and says it aloud, and being a spirit as much as a bird it can go where a bird goes and where a bird cannot, out into the night and back with a name. There is nothing to be done with the warning. The bird does not cause the death. It only knows, and it tells, and the telling changes nothing except that the grief begins a day sooner.

Its limits are the limits of an omen. It carries no violence, no hunt, no bargain to strike. You cannot pay it off or send it away or prove it wrong, because by the time it has spoken the thing is already true. It holds to the night and to enclosed, shadowed ground, and it does its work in sound, a single call that carries the whole weight of the message. For a people whose law and living were threaded tightly to the river, the lakes and the long lagoon behind the dunes, the mingka was the point where the ordinary world of birds calling in the dark touched the other world that was always close, and let a little of its knowledge across.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Minka Bird?

The Minka Bird, also spelled mingka, is a night bird from the folklore of the Ngarrindjeri people of the Lower Murray River in South Australia. It is regarded as a spirit messenger whose call or appearance foretells death and announces the approach of visitors.

What does it mean to hear the Minka Bird?

Hearing the mingka call near a camp at night was understood by the Ngarrindjeri as a sign that a loved one was about to die. The warning was treated as certain rather than merely possible, and news of a death often followed the next day.

What kind of bird is the mingka?

Accounts of the mingka disagree on its exact form. It is described variously as a small bird, as an owl, and by later observers as the tawny frogmouth, a grey nocturnal bird of Australia, and it was also understood to be a spirit that could take a bird’s shape rather than an ordinary animal.

What is the difference between the mingka and the mulduwanke?

The mingka and the mulduwanke are two Ngarrindjeri night birds that both lived in dark, hidden places. The mingka foretold death, while the mulduwanke stole children instead, making it a warning to keep the young close to camp after dark.

Which Aboriginal people believed in the Minka Bird?

The Minka Bird belongs to the traditions of the Ngarrindjeri nation, whose country lies along the Lower Murray River, the Lakes, and the Coorong in South Australia. Their beliefs about the bird were recorded in twentieth-century ethnographies of the region.

Related Entries

Muldjewangk, Bunyip, Nargun, Yara-ma-yha-who, Mimi, Quinkin, Mokoi, Wondjina, Rainbow Serpent, Baiame, Bunjil, Yowie, Aboriginal Mythology