Numbakulla

A young gum tree, stripped of its bark and stood upright in red sand, with blood painted along its whole length until the wood went dark and tacky and the air near it smelled of iron. A crosspiece near the top. A man climbing, hand over hand, and a second man starting up after him and finding the blood too slick to hold. That is the last thing the Arrernte record shows of Numbakulla, and a hundred years of argument about Aboriginal religion has balanced on it.

He arose out of nothing. That is not a flourish, it is very nearly the whole of what the word means. At Lamburkna, far to the south in country the ethnographers assigned to the Dieri, something came into existence without cause and then started walking north, across the ground that would later be Urabunna, Luritja, Arrernte and Ilpirra land. It made the shape of things as it went: mountains, rivers, sand-hills, the flats between them, and every kind of animal and plant. Nothing in the account suggests effort. The world simply accumulated behind him like footprints.

He was full. That is the strange, insistent detail, the one physical claim the tradition actually commits to. Inside his body were the kuruna, the spirit children, in numbers the Arrernte men who spoke to Spencer put in the plainest terms available: there were a very great many of them, and they came out from inside Numbakulla. Nobody describes his outside. There is no skin, no colour, no size given anywhere, which is unusual for a being credited with this much, and the silence has never been filled in by anyone with the right to fill it.

Back at Lamburkna he cut a cave into rock and called it a storehouse, though there was as yet nothing to store. Then he made the things it was for: flat oval objects of wood and stone, one design for each totem, wild cat and emu and kangaroo, the hakea flower, the small yelka bulb that women dig for. Into one of them he put a single kuruna. The spirit came out of the object and stood up as a man, the first of the Achilpa, the wild cat people, and Numbakulla went on filling the rest until there were ancestors enough for a country.

He showed that first man everything. How the ceremonies ran, which belonged to which totem, what order they came in. Then he made a design on the ground outside and planted a pole in the middle of it, a gum trunk with a crosspiece lashed near the top, and painted the pole all over with blood so that it would be easier to climb.

He told the man to follow him up. He reached the crosspiece. The man got some way and then the blood did what blood does on smooth wood, and his hands went out from under him, and he came down. Numbakulla went on alone, drew the pole up after him, and was never seen again. The ladder went with him.

What the ancestors kept was a copy. In the long wandering that follows, the Achilpa groups move across Central Australia in small parties, performing ceremonies, initiating young men, leaving some of their number behind at the places they stop, and wherever they camped they set the pole up and made it lean in the direction they meant to travel next. It was a compass built out of a memory. At a place called Okinyumpa the old headman pulled at it too hard, the shaft snapped off just above the ground, and a tall stone stands there now for the piece that stayed buried. They carried the broken remainder to Unjiacherta, arriving worn out, and found people already camped there with better poles than the stump they had left. They were too tired and too ashamed to paint themselves for ceremony. They lay down together and died where they lay, and a hill covered in big stones rose over the spot.

That ending made Numbakulla famous outside Australia, and it made him famous for the wrong reason. Mircea Eliade took the pole as a pure specimen of the axis mundi, the world-pillar that turns empty space into a habitable centre, and read the deaths as proof that people cannot live without one. In The Sacred and the Profane he told it as though Spencer and Gillen had stood there and watched it happen, which they had not; it is an event in the ancestral past, not an incident in the 1890s. Spencer and Gillen also give a different reason for the ancestors not raising the pole. In their text the party is too tired and sad to paint up, and the pole goes unraised because it is inferior to the ones their hosts already own. The connection between the broken pole and the dying is Eliade’s, not theirs.

Sam Gill set the two texts side by side, sentence by numbered sentence, in Storytracking, and concluded that although nearly every phrase could be traced back to Spencer and Gillen, the passage as a whole was almost completely concocted, with nothing in the original supporting the point it was being used to prove. Jonathan Z. Smith had already used the same story to take apart the entire notion of sacred space as something given rather than made. And underneath both critiques sits a plainer problem. In the 1899 book the creators were two beings called Ungambikula, who came down out of the western sky with great stone knives, cut the unformed Inapertwa into people, and afterwards turned themselves into small lizards. In the 1927 revision, written after Spencer went back to Alice Springs alone in 1926, Numbakulla replaced Ungambikula everywhere, singular where there had been a pair, a supreme ancestor overshadowing all the rest. Gill’s reading of the word is that it is not a name at all but something closer to a description: jump up, out of nothing.

The dispute was bitter while the men were alive. Carl Strehlow, a Lutheran missionary at Hermannsburg who worked in the language rather than in pidgin, reported a high being called Altjira and denied that the word Spencer and Gillen had turned into “dreamtime” meant anything of the kind. Spencer wrote to Frazer and to Andrew Lang calling it utter misleading nonsense from a man who had never watched a ceremony. Strehlow’s answer was that Spencer had never properly learned the language he was quoting. Both charges were partly true, and the being at the centre of them has the shape they left him.

His powers, on the page, are close to absolute. He makes matter and country from nothing, carries every future person inside himself, converts spirit into object and object into person, and hands down a working religion complete on the first attempt. His limits are stranger and more interesting. He can be climbed away from and cannot be followed; the one thing he leaves behind snaps in an old man’s hands; and the further anyone tracks him back toward the people who were supposed to have told the story, the less of him there turns out to be. The tall stone at Okinyumpa was standing before any of the argument started.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Numbakulla?

Numbakulla is a creator being of Central Australia, recorded among the Arrernte by Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen. In their account he arose out of nothing at a place called Lamburkna, travelled north making mountains, rivers, animals and plants, produced the first Achilpa ancestor from a spirit child, taught the ceremonies, and then climbed a sacred pole into the sky and vanished.

What is the kauwa-auwa, the sacred pole?

The kauwa-auwa is the pole Numbakulla planted in the middle of a ground design before he left, a gum trunk with a crosspiece near the top, painted with blood so he could climb it. He drew the original up after him, and the Achilpa ancestors carried a copy on their wanderings, setting it up at each camp and leaning it toward the direction they intended to travel.

Why did the Achilpa ancestors die when their pole broke?

In Spencer and Gillen’s telling the pole snapped when an old headman pulled it out of the ground at Okinyumpa, and the group carried the broken piece to Unjiacherta, where they arrived exhausted, did not raise it because it was poorer than the poles already there, and lay down and died. Mircea Eliade later presented the deaths as a direct consequence of losing the pole, but that link is his interpretation rather than something the original text states.

Is Numbakulla the same as Ungambikula?

They occupy the same place in the story but they are not identical. Spencer and Gillen’s 1899 book gives two beings called Ungambikula who came from the western sky and carved the unformed Inapertwa into human beings, while the 1927 revision replaces them with a single supreme figure called Numbakulla, following Spencer’s return to Alice Springs in 1926.

Is Numbakulla a genuine Arrernte deity?

The name is genuinely recorded, but its status is disputed. Sam Gill’s line-by-line tracking of the material argues that the word is closer to a phrase meaning “jump up, out of nothing” than to a personal name, and that the famous version of the story owes far more to the men who collected and reused it than to the Arrernte people who were supposed to have told it.

Related Entries

Inapertwa, Wati-kutjara, Dirawong, Wondjina, Julunggul, Rainbow Serpent, Baiame, Bunjil, Yggdrasil