Yara-ma-yha-who

Also Known As: Unaipon’s own spelling Yara ma tha who; the hyphenated form comes from W. Ramsay Smith’s 1930 printing
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Aboriginal Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A small red man who drains blood through suckers on his hands and feet, swallows his victim whole, and brings him back up alive and diminished.
Role in Mythos: A cautionary being of southeastern Aboriginal storytelling, used to teach children where it is safe to shelter and where it is not.
Relation to Humans: It preys on people who rest alone beneath thick-leafed trees, particularly children who wander from the group. Survivors are returned to their families shorter, redder, and one encounter closer to becoming a Yara-ma-yha-who themselves.

The wild fig keeps its shade when everything around it has given up, and that is the trouble with it. Out in the southeastern scrub the ground under a big fig is cool and littered with fallen fruit going sweet and sour at once, and the leaves overhead are thick enough that you cannot see through them from below. A person walking since morning will look at that shade and stop walking. This is the entire mechanism of the story. The tree does the work, and the thing in the tree only has to be patient.

What waits up there is not large. He stands no higher than a child of ten, and his skin is red. The head is far too big for the body, the arms and legs are thin as sticks, and the belly hangs round and slack, which is the shape of something that eats in single enormous meals and then does nothing for a long while. His mouth is wide and completely empty. No teeth, not even the blunt little teeth of a toddler. At the ends of his fingers and toes are suckers, the kind an octopus has, and they are the only tools he owns. He makes no spear, no club, no net. David Unaipon, who wrote the fullest account of him, called him an exceptionally funny fellow with a strange way about him after he captured a person.

He does not hunt. Hunting would require crossing open ground, and he is bad at open ground. Instead he sits in the crown of the fig with his legs folded and waits, sometimes for days, while parrots come and go through the branches and the heat builds under the canopy. When someone finally settles below and lets their shoulders drop, he comes down on them the way a cat comes off a fencepost, all at once and without a sound.

Then the suckers go on. Hands and feet pressed flat to the body, and the blood comes up through them. He is careful about it. Unaipon was specific on this point: the creature does not try to take all of it, but leaves enough to keep the person alive while he walks around to raise an appetite. That small domestic detail is worse than any amount of savagery. He strolls. He works up a hunger. Then he comes back, lies down on the ground facing the body, crawls forward on his belly like a goanna, opens his mouth wide the way a snake unhinges itself, and takes the person in head first. When the job is nearly done he stands up on his short legs and dances, round and round, until the last of the man has gone down inside him.

After that he drinks water and sleeps.

He wakes and does, in Unaipon’s phrase, exactly what the whale did to Jonah. The victim comes back out into the light, slick and blinking and alive. And here the story turns from a monster tale into something colder, because the person can stand up and walk home. It doesn’t kill you. What it does is take a piece of your size. Whoever comes out of that belly is shorter than the one who went in, and there is a red tint to the skin that was not there before. A second encounter takes another portion. After the third, the change is finished, and the thing that walks away from the fig tree is no longer looking for its family. It is looking for shade and someone to sit in it.

His limits are as precise as his method, and they follow from it. He works by daylight and takes only the living, so the old counsel is to lie perfectly still and play dead until the sun goes down. He cannot chase; he can only drop. He cannot bite; he can only suck and swallow. Everything he can do depends on a person choosing to sit under the wrong tree, which means the whole of his power rests on somebody else’s decision. Underneath the horror there is a piece of hard country knowledge being handed down: in the beating heat of summer or a winter hailstorm, the rock ledges of the cliffs are the better shelter, and the thick-boughed trees where animals hide are not. Emily Zarka, who studies monster narratives at Arizona State University, has pointed out how neatly the creature packages that lesson.

The way we have the story at all is worth saying plainly. In 1924 and 1925 David Unaipon, a Ngarrindjeri man born at the Point McLeay Mission in 1872, travelled through South Australia collecting the tales of his own people and their neighbours, most of them from the Lower Murray. He posted the manuscript to Angus and Robertson in Sydney and sold the copyright, and in 1930 the collection appeared as Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals under the name of W. Ramsay Smith, a Scottish doctor and the Chief Medical Officer of South Australia, almost word for word and with no acknowledgement of the man who wrote it. Smith altered the spelling to the hyphenated form the world now uses. Unaipon’s own text was restored to him by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker and published under his own title, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, by Melbourne University Press in 2001. Mary-Anne Gale has argued that a further twenty-one legends printed by Smith were Unaipon’s too. Nearly everything anyone writes about the Yara-ma-yha-who descends from those few pages, which is a thin channel for a being this famous, and it is honest to say so.

The modern guesses about what he really is came later and from outside. Bernard Heuvelmans, writing in 1958, floated the tarsier carried south by Malay contact, and others have reached for Thylacoleo carnifex, the extinct marsupial that is thought to have dropped onto prey from branches. Both are speculation about a story, not evidence from one. The stranger fate was what colonists did with him on arrival: they heard blood-drinker, said vampire, and let Dracula swallow the competition. What was lost in that translation was the shape of the original warning, which was never really about blood. Listen, the tellings say, for the call coming down through the leaves. Yara ma, yara ma, which way hast thou gone?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Yara-ma-yha-who?

The Yara-ma-yha-who is a small red blood-drinking creature from southeastern Australian Aboriginal storytelling. It stands no taller than a ten-year-old child, has an oversized head, a wide toothless mouth, and suckers on its fingers and toes. It lives in thick-leafed trees, especially the wild fig, and drops on people who rest in the shade below.

What does the Yara-ma-yha-who do to its victims?

It drains blood through the suckers on its hands and feet, deliberately leaving enough to keep the person alive, then walks around to build an appetite before swallowing them whole and head first. After drinking water and sleeping, it regurgitates the victim, who survives but comes out shorter and with a reddish tint to the skin. Three such encounters turn the victim into a Yara-ma-yha-who.

How do you escape a Yara-ma-yha-who?

The traditional advice is to lie completely still and play dead until sunset, because the creature is active only in daylight and takes only living prey. It has no weapons and no teeth and cannot chase anyone down, since its entire method depends on ambushing a person who has chosen to sit beneath its tree. Avoiding thick-boughed trees for shelter avoids the creature altogether.

Who first wrote down the Yara-ma-yha-who story?

David Unaipon, a Ngarrindjeri writer born at Point McLeay Mission in 1872, collected the story in 1924 and 1925 while gathering tales across South Australia. His manuscript was published in 1930 as Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals under the name of W. Ramsay Smith, who took credit for the work. Unaipon’s original text was restored and published under his own name as Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines in 2001.

Is the Yara-ma-yha-who a vampire?

Not in the European sense, although colonists labelled it one on first contact. The Yara-ma-yha-who hunts in daylight rather than at night, does not kill its victims, and drinks blood only as the first stage of swallowing a person whole. Its purpose in the tellings is practical, warning listeners away from sheltering under dense trees.