Rainbow Serpent

After the wet breaks in the north, a band of colour lifts off one waterhole and comes down at another across the floodplain, and the old people will tell you it is not weather. It is the serpent shifting house. It has left one deep pool and gone arching over the paperbarks to settle in the next, and while it travels the country goes quiet and careful.

No single people owns this being and no single name holds it. To the Kunwinjku of western Arnhem Land it is Ngalyod, and behind Ngalyod stands Yingarna, the first mother who carried the clans in her belly. The Noongar of the southwest call their serpent Wagyl, the one whose sliding body cut the course of the Swan and the Canning. The Yolngu know Yurlungur, the great copper python of the Wawilak story; the Warumungu speak of Wollunqua; other countries carry Almudj, Borlung, Ungud, Goorialla and dozens more. The umbrella term in English was fixed in 1926 by the anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who wanted one label for a figure that ran the length of the continent under too many names to list. The label caught, and the galleries and museums have used it ever since. The animal was old long before it had an English name. Its likeness has been painted on the rock walls of Arnhem Land for at least six thousand years, which makes it one of the oldest religious images anywhere on earth, and some who study those walls trace its arrival to the drowning of the old coastline when the seas rose at the close of the last ice age. Look closely and its body sometimes wears the frills of a pipefish, a creature of the flooded saltwater country.

The stories of how it made the world differ from place to place, but the shape of them is the same. In the Dreaming the land lay flat and unfinished, and the serpent moved beneath it, sleeping. Then it pushed up through the crust and set out across the surface. Where it dragged its enormous weight it left gorges and the winding beds of rivers; where it coiled to rest it pressed out the waterholes; and the water it carried spilled to fill them. In some tellings it called the animals and the first people up out of its own belly or out of the ground, waking them and sending each to its country.

It is rarely just a snake. The serpent borrows from the strongest and strangest animals of its territory, so that a single body may show a crocodile’s teeth and a crocodile’s ridged tail, the blunt head of a horse or a kangaroo, the scales of a barramundi, feelers at the mouth like a catfish, a beard of trailing waterweed, sometimes a mane. In bark painting the whole length is filled with fine cross-hatching, the rarrk that stands for ancestral power, so the creature seems to hum on the surface of the wood. It is long enough to be a river. It is long enough, when it lifts, to be the rainbow itself.

What it guards is water, and not just any water but the deep permanent pools that hold through the dry when everything else cracks and browns. Those places are cold at the bottom and dark green, and they belong to the serpent. Treated well, it answers with rain, with fish, with children and full seasons. Roused, it is a killer without much interest in who deserves it: it drowns, it floods the camps, or it shuts the sky and holds the rain back until the country dies of thirst. It sends sores and sickness. Above all it cannot stand noise and filth at its waterholes, or the breaking of the Law, and it does not wait long to answer either.

So a woman coming to a strange waterhole will call out first, letting the country know who she is, and rub underarm sweat into the water so the serpent tastes a person it can place. That much is ordinary caution. The other kind of encounter is the one the ceremonies remember: the Wawilak sisters camped by a sacred well, and when their blood fell into the water Yurlungur rose out of it, straightened up as tall as a standing tree, and swallowed them and their children whole. In time he brought them up again, and out of that swallowing and return came some of the greatest ceremony of the Yolngu.

The version most outsiders have met came through the Lardil artist Dick Roughsey, who painted and told the travels of Goorialla. The great serpent goes north looking for his own people, and a storm catches two young men, the Bil-bil brothers, out in the open. They beg shelter and Goorialla opens his mouth and takes them in. When the people find the young men gone they track the serpent to a mountain and cut him open, and the brothers, changed now, rise out of him as the first rainbow lorikeets.

His power is simply water, complete and without appeal: he makes the rivers, calls down the monsoon, lives in the arc of the rainbow between one pool and the next, and in swallowing and giving back he remakes whatever passes through him. His limits are the other face of the same thing. He is tied to particular waterholes and named places and does not roam far from them. Once provoked he strikes wide and blind, so the danger he poses is partly the danger of not being controllable, even by those who honour him. In the swallowing stories his belly can be opened and what he took can be lifted out alive. And for all that he enforces the Law, he is not above it; the country remembers when he too has had to answer for the water he spilled.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Rainbow Serpent?

The Rainbow Serpent is a giant ancestral snake and creator being found across the mythologies of many Aboriginal Australian peoples. It is closely tied to water, rain and the rainbow, and it shaped the land during the Dreaming by carving rivers and filling the waterholes. Different peoples know it under different names, such as Ngalyod, Wagyl and Yurlungur.

Is the Rainbow Serpent good or evil?

The Rainbow Serpent is both a giver of life and a destroyer, depending on how it is treated. When respected it brings rain, fish and fertility, but when offended or when Law is broken it can cause floods, drowning, drought and sickness. It is best understood as a powerful force that rewards proper behaviour and punishes disrespect.

Where does the Rainbow Serpent live?

The Rainbow Serpent lives in deep, permanent waterholes that hold water through the dry season, and these places are considered both sacred and dangerous. It is said to travel between waterholes as the rainbow arcing across the sky. Disturbing its water with noise or filth is believed to rouse it.

Why is the Rainbow Serpent important in Aboriginal culture?

The Rainbow Serpent is one of the most widespread and ancient ancestral beings in Aboriginal Australia, connected to creation, water, fertility, Law and ceremony. Its image has been painted in Arnhem Land rock shelters for at least six thousand years, making it among the oldest religious figures known. Major ceremonies, including those tied to the Yolngu Wawilak story, come directly from its myths.

Who named the Rainbow Serpent?

The English name “Rainbow Serpent” was fixed in 1926 by the anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who needed a single term for a being known across Australia under many local names. The name was adopted for use in galleries and museums and has been standard ever since. The being itself is far older and is known traditionally by names such as Ngalyod, Wagyl, Wollunqua and Goorialla.

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