Mungoon-Gali

Also Known As: also Mungoongarlee, Mungoongali; from the Yuwaalaraay word mangun-gaali, the lace monitor
Region/Culture: Euahlayi (Yuwaalaraay) people, north-west New South Wales, Australia
Mythos: Aboriginal
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A giant goanna whose once-venomous bite made him the terror of the early world, until a cunning snake robbed him of his poison.
Role in Mythos: Through his defeat he explains why snakes rather than lizards carry venom, and why snakes and goannas remain enemies.
Relation to Humans: In the first days Mungoon-Gali hunted people relentlessly, living almost entirely on their flesh and killing so many that the tribes feared they would be wiped out. After his poison was stolen he lost the power to kill them, though as a great medicine man he kept for the goannas a secret cure that outlived his monstrous days.

A lace monitor pours itself up a tree trunk in one grey ripple, claws ticking against the bark, and nothing about it suggests that its ancestor once ate people for preference. In the first days the goannas were giants, and the largest of them was Mungoon-Gali, longer than a tall man and thick through the body as a fallen log. He wore his weapon where no enemy could pry it loose, folded inside his own mouth, a small soft bag of venom. Back then it was the lizards that killed with a bite, and the snakes that went about harmless.

He hunted people. Not now and then, not when other food failed, but as the thing he liked best, and he killed so many of them that whole tribes began to count their dead and wonder how long they had left. The bush learned his shape the way it learns a drought. Wherever the red earth held the wide drag of his belly and the deep punch of his claws, people went another way, and even that was not always far enough.

On a bright still morning he would come out gorged from the day before and hunt again anyway, taking three of the Daens one after another before the sun was high, eating the parts he favoured and carrying the rest back to lie on through the heat. Then he would roll onto his side in the dust and sleep, slow and heavy and certain that nothing in the country could touch him.

The tribes met at a water-hole to find an answer and could not find one. Bohrah the kangaroo, who was bigger than the goanna, said plainly that size was no help, because anyone who fought Mungoon-Gali would take the poison and die of it as the people did. Dinewan the emu had nothing better to offer. Strength was useless against him. They were breaking up, beaten, when the black snake Ouyouboolooey slid down to the water and asked what the trouble was.

He had relations among the people too, he said, and he would save them, but not with his body. He would have the poison bag out of Mungoon-Gali before the sun went down, and he would do it without a fight. The others laughed. He was smaller than the goanna, slower, weaker, and the hidden bag was the goanna’s alone. He let them laugh and went off through the trees to think.

His plan was patience and a lie. He waited until Mungoon-Gali had killed and eaten and dropped into his thick after-meal sleep, then crept into the camp with his club raised over the sleeping skull. There his own greed stopped his arm. Why crack the head, he thought, when the bag inside it could make him the most feared creature in the land? So he sat down to wait, and when the goanna woke and lunged, the snake called out that he carried word of a plot against him and would trade it only for the safety of holding the poison while he spoke.

Mungoon-Gali could have killed him and chose instead to listen, and that was the whole of his undoing. He could not bear not to know. He reached into his own mouth, drew out the venom bag, warned that its touch was death to anyone unused to it, and passed it across. The snake took it, slipped it quietly into his own mouth, and told the goanna in full how he had just been robbed. He was into the grass and gone before the heavy-bellied lizard could heave himself upright.

The tribes wanted the bag destroyed. Ouyouboolooey refused, kept it, and warned them that anyone who troubled him would now die for it. That is why the snakes have carried the poison ever since and the goannas have gone without, and why a snake and a goanna still cannot cross paths without fighting. The quarrel over a stolen thing never ended. It only spread out into every snake and every goanna that came after.

Another country tells the story differently. In the Riverina, during a drought that killed everything unable to find water, Mungoon-Gali and his tribe of giant goannas drank in secret from a spring hidden in the mountain rock. His youngest wife, Kubbitha the black duck, followed their tracks up into the ranges, rested exhausted in a cave, and was woken by a mountain spirit who told her what to do. She drove her yam stick into the heart of the mountain, and the water that burst out ran down and became the Murrumbidgee. The same giant lizard, a devourer of men in one telling and the keeper of a river’s first water in another.

No two tellings agree on how big he really was. The oldest say he shrank along with the world and its animals, and that even now a big goanna runs to five feet from tongue to tail, while the first Mungoon-Gali was something far past that. His power was simple, the venom and the sheer mass of him, and so were his weaknesses, both of them his own doing. The heavy meal slowed him when speed would have saved everything, and his need to hear the plot put the one thing no one could take from him straight into a thief’s mouth. But he kept a last secret, because he was a great wirreenun as well as a monster. He knew a plant that undoes snakebite, and the goannas know it still, running to it the moment a snake strikes them, so the poison the snake stole from him can never quite finish its work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mungoon-Gali?

Mungoon-Gali is a giant goanna from the Aboriginal mythology of the Euahlayi (Yuwaalaraay) people of north-west New South Wales. In the first days he terrorised the tribes with a venomous bite and a taste for human flesh, killing so many people that they feared for their survival. His name comes from mangun-gaali, the Yuwaalaraay word for the lace monitor, the largest goanna of the region.

How did Mungoon-Gali lose his venom?

Mungoon-Gali was tricked out of his poison by Ouyouboolooey the black snake, who refused to fight him and used cunning instead. The snake waited until the goanna was gorged and asleep, then claimed to know of a plot against him and offered the warning only in exchange for holding the venom bag for safety. Once Mungoon-Gali handed it over, the snake put the poison in his own mouth and fled before the heavy lizard could catch him.

Why does this myth say snakes are venomous and goannas are not?

The story is an explanation for a fact of the Australian bush: that snakes carry deadly venom and goannas do not. In the beginning the arrangement was reversed, and only when Ouyouboolooey stole and kept Mungoon-Gali’s poison bag did the venom pass to the snakes for good. It also explains why snakes and goannas are said to attack each other on sight, a feud left over from that theft.

What does Mungoon-Gali look like?

Mungoon-Gali is described as an enormous monitor lizard, far larger in the first days than any goanna alive now, though even the shrunken modern goanna is said to reach about five feet from tongue to tail. His deadly weapon was a hidden bag of venom carried inside his mouth rather than any visible feature. Beyond his great size and his poison, the old tellings dwell more on what he did than on the details of his hide.

What is the goannas’ secret cure for snakebite?

Although Mungoon-Gali lost his venom, he was also a powerful wirreenun, or medicine man, and he knew of a plant that neutralises snake poison. According to the myth, goannas still know this remedy and rush to the plant whenever a snake bites them, which is why the venom the snake stole can never fully harm them. The identity of the plant remains the goannas’ own secret.