Nargun

Behind a thin sheet of falling water, where Woolshed Creek narrows and slides over a lip of rock, there is a low dark opening beneath an overhang. In the wet months the waterfall closes over it entirely and the pool below churns pale and cold. In the dry, the mouth of the cave shows plainly, fringed once by stalactites that hung like broken teeth until visitors snapped them off for souvenirs. The Kurnai people of East Gippsland knew this place as the Den of Nargun, and they did not bring their children near it. Something waited inside that spears could not touch.

The Nargun was made of stone. Not clad in it, not crouched among it, but stone through and through, grey and cold and heavy, except for her hands, her arms, and her breast, which were flesh. The old accounts speak of her as female, though little else about her shape is fixed. She was strong enough to take hold of a grown person and drag them back into the rock, and once she had you in the dark of the den there was no getting out again.

She hunted by patience and by place. A traveller passing too close to the waterfall, or a child who wandered down to the rockpool to play at its green edge, was enough. A stone arm would come out of the shadow under the overhang, close around them, and the pool would swallow the sound. Weapons were no use. A spear thrown at the Nargun turned in the air and came back at the thrower; a boomerang flung at her curved home to strike the hand that loosed it.

There is no grand tale of a warrior who bested the Nargun, because the whole point of her was that no one did. The stories told around Kurnai campfires ran the other way. A man who went in after her with a spear, the tellings say, only armed her, since whatever he threw came back at him sharpened out of the dark. You could not fight the Nargun. You could only keep away from her.

She was not always spoken of as a single creature. In Kurnai belief, caves in general were the dens of nargun, and a nargun was any of a kind of treacherous, half-stone being that lurked in such hollows. The famous one belonged to the cave on Woolshed Creek, a small tributary of the Mitchell River, but the name covered a whole category of danger tied to dark openings in the rock. Alfred Howitt, who spent decades among the peoples of the south-east and was the first outsider to record the den, set the belief down in the 1870s: the caves were the homes of these beings, part flesh and mostly stone.

There was a truth folded inside the terror. The Den of Nargun was a women’s place, used by Kurnai women for initiation and for the passing on of knowledge, and it was not to be wandered into by the young or the uninitiated. A monster that stole children into the rock and turned back every weapon was, among other things, a very efficient way of keeping children clear of a sacred cave and clear of fast, deep water at the same time. The fear did real work. Downstream, a second and quieter site called Deadcock Den held the same significance for the women, and the same distance was kept from it.

The place still carries the weight of the story. Water falls across the entrance in a cool constant curtain, and inside the air is damp and close, the few surviving stalactites dripping in the dark. The pool at the base is deep and green and slow, and the gully around it is thick with fern. Standing there, it is easy to understand why a people would set a stone-bodied hunter in the shadow and tell their children she was hungry.

The Nargun has outlived the campfires. In 1973 the Australian writer Patricia Wrightson made her the centre of a children’s novel, The Nargun and the Stars, and reshaped her considerably in doing so: a vast, ancient, indestructible thing of stone that grinds slowly across a valley crushing whatever it meets, and in a later book she becomes many. That roaming, world-eating Nargun is Wrightson’s invention. The being the Kurnai described did not march across the country. She belonged to one cave and its pool, and that belonging was both her strength and her limit. Bound to her den, unharmed by anything thrown at her, strong enough to pull a living person into solid rock, she was also fixed in place, a danger a person could always simply choose not to approach. Her power was total within the shadow of the overhang and reached no further than the water’s edge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Nargun in Aboriginal mythology?

The Nargun is a fierce creature from the mythology of the Gunaikurnai (Kurnai) people of East Gippsland in Victoria, Australia. It was a being made almost entirely of stone, except for its hands, arms, and breast, that lived in a cave and dragged unwary travellers and straying children into the dark. Any weapon thrown at it was turned back on the attacker.

Where is the Den of Nargun?

The Den of Nargun is a cave behind a small waterfall on Woolshed Creek, a tributary of the Mitchell River, in Mitchell River National Park in East Gippsland, Victoria. Its existence was first recorded by the anthropologist Alfred Howitt. It remains an Aboriginal site of cultural significance and lies on the Bataluk Cultural Trail.

How can the Nargun be killed?

In the traditional stories the Nargun cannot be killed or harmed by weapons. Spears and boomerangs thrown at it turn in the air and strike the person who threw them. The only real protection was to stay away from its den, which was the whole purpose of the stories.

What was the Den of Nargun actually used for?

Beyond the legend, the Den of Nargun was a sacred women’s place among the Gunaikurnai, used for initiation and for passing on knowledge. The frightening stories of a child-stealing stone creature helped keep children and the uninitiated away from the sacred cave and its deep, fast water.

Is the Nargun the same creature as in “The Nargun and the Stars”?

The Nargun appears in Patricia Wrightson’s 1973 children’s novel The Nargun and the Stars, but that version is a modern literary reinvention. Wrightson’s Nargun is a huge, indestructible stone being that slowly moves across the land destroying everything in its path. The traditional Gunaikurnai Nargun was tied to a single cave and did not roam.

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