Muldjewangk

Also Known As: also Mulyawonk, Mulgewongk, Muldewangk, Moolgewanke, Multyewanki
Region/Culture: Ngarrindjeri people, Lower Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia
Mythos: Aboriginal
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A huge, powerful water being of the Lower Murray that seizes the careless and the greedy and drags them under.
Role in Mythos: It guards the river and lakes, punishing children who stray to the water’s edge and anyone who takes more fish than they need.
Relation to Humans: The Muldjewangk was held up to Ngarrindjeri children as the reason not to play near deep water, especially after dark. It was also the enforcer of restraint, waiting for the person who hauled in more than a family could eat.

A knot of weed drifts on the brown water where the Murray slows and widens into Lake Alexandrina, and a Ngarrindjeri mother calls her child back from the shallows before the light goes out of the sky. There was a reason the children of the Lower Murray were kept from the reeds at dusk, and the reason had two enormous hands. It waited beneath exactly that sort of floating weed, in the still deep channels and the tangled margins of the lakes, and the old people did not offer it up as a tale to fill an evening. They spoke of it the way you speak of deep water itself, as something that keeps its own accounts and settles them without hurry.

The creature went by several names along the river, Mulyawonk and Mulgewongk and Muldjewangk among them, the spelling shifting from clan to clan and from one recorder’s ear to the next. What did not shift was its function. A Ngarrindjeri parent did not need to describe it in detail to make it work; the name alone, spoken at the right moment, was enough to pull a small wanderer back from the edge. It stood guard over the one lesson the river could not afford a child to forget, which was that water does not forgive carelessness, and it stood guard over a second lesson besides.

That second lesson was about greed. The Muldjewangk was the keeper of a hard rule of the Lakes, that a person takes from the water only what they need and no more. Haul in a netful beyond your family’s hunger and you had drawn the attention of the thing under the weed. It is a piece of law dressed as a monster, and it did the work of both, teaching restraint to people whose survival depended on a fishery lasting longer than a single greedy season. The threat and the ethic were the same sentence.

Pinning down its shape is a losing game, because the sources will not agree and never did. In some accounts the Muldjewangk is a kind of grim merfolk, human above and fish below, its hair a mat of river weed and rushes, its face something no one wanted to meet across the shallows. In one older telling its very cry brought on aching joints and rheumatism in whoever heard it. In other accounts it is simply vast, less a figure than a force, known by the great footprints left in the mud and by the size of the hands that could close around a boat. Whether there was one Muldjewangk or a whole submerged people of them was never settled either. The old men of the river disagreed, and left the disagreement standing.

It turns up in the oldest and largest of the Ngarrindjeri stories, the journey of the ancestral hero Ngurunderi down the Murray in pursuit of a giant cod, the chase that carved the river’s bends and shaped the Lakes. When Ngurunderi and his wives made camp on the banks of Lake Alexandrina, it was the Muldjewangk that pestered them, fouling and tearing their fishing nets, a nuisance even to a maker of the world. That detail says a good deal about how the being was ranked. It was old enough and strong enough to trouble the hero who shaped the country, not some late invention to frighten the young.

The story most often told about it is grimmer and closer to living memory, set on the river after the paddle-steamers came. A boat was moving down the Murray when two immense hands rose out of the water and took hold of the hull. The captain reached for his gun. The Aboriginal elders aboard begged him not to shoot, warning that the thing in the water was not to be provoked and that harming it would fall back on him. He did not listen. Not long after, weeping red blisters broke out across his body, and he took six months to die of them. No one raised a weapon against the Muldjewangk in the tellings. It did the raising.

Its strength was the strength of the river in flood, enough to drag a grown man off a bank or hold a moving vessel by the timbers, and it needed no cleverness to use it, only patience and the cover of weed. Against that, its limits were the plain limits of a water spirit. It belonged to the deep places and the reed beds and could not follow onto dry land, so distance from the water was safety, and daylight and open ground were its own kind of protection. There is a quieter limit as well, and the old people of the river name it themselves. Some of them say the Muldjewangks have gone now, that the river system is no longer theirs, that whatever they were, they have withdrawn from a water that has changed too much to hold them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Muldjewangk?

The Muldjewangk is a large and dangerous water being from the mythology of the Ngarrindjeri people of the Lower Murray River and the Lakes in South Australia. It was believed to seize careless children who played near the water and to punish anyone who took more fish than they needed.

What does the Muldjewangk look like?

Descriptions of the Muldjewangk vary widely. Some accounts portray it as a monstrous merfolk figure, half human and half fish, with river weed and rushes for hair, while others describe it as an enormous creature known mainly by its huge footprints and by two great hands large enough to grasp a boat.

What happened to the steamboat captain who shot at the Muldjewangk?

In the best-known story, a Muldjewangk gripped the hull of a paddle-steamer with two huge hands, and the captain reached for his gun despite the elders on board warning him not to shoot. Soon after he ignored them, he broke out in weeping red blisters across his body and took six months to die.

Where does the Muldjewangk live?

The Muldjewangk lives in the deep channels, reed beds, and lakes of the Lower Murray River in South Australia, especially Lake Alexandrina. It is said to hide beneath large clumps of floating weed, which Ngarrindjeri people learned to avoid.

What lesson did the Muldjewangk teach?

The Muldjewangk enforced two central rules of life on the Lakes: that children must keep away from deep water, and that people should take only as much fish as they need. In this way the creature protected both the young and the river’s fishery from human carelessness and greed.