Quinkin

Out past the last of the cook-fires, in the blue hour when the sandstone still gives back the heat of the day, a child hears a father calling and walks toward the sound. This is how the Imjim hunts. The voice is borrowed, pitched just right, and it drifts from the wrong direction. By the time the child understands, the scrub has closed behind them and the red mountain is nearer than home.

The Quinkins are the spirit people of the sandstone country on Cape York Peninsula, and they come in two very different builds. The Timara are thin to the point of absurdity, long-armed and long-legged, stretched like a shadow thrown at sunset, narrow enough to fold themselves into a seam in the rock and be gone. The Imjim are their opposite in every line: squat, round-bellied, heavy-headed, armed with long teeth and longer claws, and finished off with a thick knobbed tail. That tail is not for balance. An Imjim moves by planting it and springing, covering the ridges in great kangaroo bounds, faster over broken ground than any person could run.

What sets the Quinkins apart from the spirits of other traditions is that they belong to the ground itself. They are not sky beings or callers from some far court. They live in the fissures of the escarpment, in the cool dark of the shelters, in the tumbled galleries of stone above the Laura River. Those walls are crowded with them, elongated ochre figures laid down over a span of time so long it strains belief, tens of thousands of years of hands coming back to the same rock. To the Yalanji people who hold this country, the Quinkins were painted there because that is where they already lived.

For all their strangeness, the Timara are not the ones to be afraid of. They are whimsical and mischievous, fond of a trick and a laugh at somebody’s expense, but their mischief has a floor to it and their instincts run kind. Above everything, they will not stand for the stealing of children. When an Imjim goes hunting the young, it is a Timara that is most likely to spoil the ambush, unfolding out of a rock seam on those impossible legs at the worst possible moment for the hunter.

The Imjim carry no such scruple. They want children, and the ones they catch they haul back to caves inside the great red mountain, into a darkness the light does not enter. They are patient in the way that only something with all the time in the world can be. Their trick is the voice. An Imjim can throw the sound of a mother, a father, a friend, and lay it down just far enough into the trees that a trusting child keeps walking toward it, and then a little farther, and then it is too late.

The best known of their stories begins on an ordinary afternoon. A boy named Moonbi and his sister Leealin hear their father’s voice somewhere out in the bush and set off to find him, step by trusting step, not knowing that the voice is an Imjim’s lure and that the camp is falling away behind them. The land they cross is beautiful and utterly indifferent, dry grass, warm stone, the smell of dust and eucalyptus, and none of it will help them. It is the tall thin spirits, in the end, who put themselves between the children and the mountain. That is the shape of nearly every Quinkin story: the round hungry ones reaching for the young, the tall foolish ones getting in the way.

Not every Quinkin fits the two neat kinds. Turramulli looms over the rest, a giant among them, big enough to make even an Imjim look small, and the tales that carry his name are the ones kept for anyone grown too sure of themselves. The stories do not always agree on where the Quinkins came from or how they should be counted. What they agree on is the country, and the fact that it is full.

Their powers are the powers of a thing that owns its ground. They know every crack and cave and dry watercourse. They can vanish into stone. The Imjim can mimic any voice and cross the ridges in leaps no runner can match, and the pull they exert always runs one way, toward the red mountain and the dark. The Timara can reach and stretch and appear from nowhere, and they are quick enough to undo a hunt already in motion.

Their limits are the same as their strength, turned around. The Quinkins are creatures of particular places, tied to the sandstone and the shelters, and they are weakest where a person is least alone. Open cleared ground, the light and noise of the camp, company and a watchful adult, all of it works against them. The Imjim, for all their appetite, are not clever, and their greed leaves them open to the Timara, who are not strong but are never quite where they are expected to be. A child kept close and kept in the light is a child the Quinkins cannot easily take.

They never left. The galleries are still there above the river, the red figures still stretched across the stone, and the country is still reckoned to have its spirit people in it, watching from the rock the way they always have.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Quinkin?

The Quinkin are a class of spirit beings from the Aboriginal traditions of Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland, Australia. They live in the sandstone escarpments and rock shelters of an area now called Quinkan Country, near Laura, where they appear as tall ochre figures in some of the world’s oldest rock art. They come in two distinct kinds, the tall thin Timara and the short round Imjim.

What is the difference between the Timara and the Imjim?

The Timara are extremely tall and thin, with long arms and legs, and are humorous, tricky, but ultimately protective spirits who guard children. The Imjim are short, fat-bellied and big-headed, with long teeth, claws, and a heavy knobbed tail they use to leap across the land like a kangaroo. The Imjim are the dangerous ones, and the Timara most often act to stop them.

Do the Quinkin steal children?

The Imjim kind of Quinkin steal children, luring them away by imitating the voices of parents or friends and drawing them toward caves inside a great red mountain. The Timara kind work against this, trying to protect children and thwart the Imjim. This tension between the two builds is the heart of most Quinkin stories.

Where do the Quinkin come from?

The Quinkin belong to the sandstone country of Cape York Peninsula and are considered native to the land itself rather than visitors from the sky or elsewhere. They are depicted in the rock-art galleries above the Laura River, painted over tens of thousands of years, and the Yalanji people regard them as beings who were always living in that stone.

Are the Quinkin good or evil?

The Quinkin are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, which is what makes them unusual. The Imjim are malevolent child-stealers, while the Timara are whimsical, kind-hearted protectors, so the class as a whole holds both natures at once depending on which kind is meant.

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