Comments

Dirrangun

from Reference 11

When I was a child there was this dark man and woman was sitting around with this old clever man talking and by some unknown reason this old clever man became terribly burnt. So they rang the Grafton Ambulance to take him to hospital for treatment but when they got him there they couldn't save him.

So that evening when most of the elders in our tribe got home from work and the children home from school. This is what happened in my time.

The children were playing, the elders were sitting around talking just before dusk we could hear this rumbling and roaring coming from the south so all the kids ran home to their parents because they got frightened. But the elders of the tribe got out and started talking in the lingo and while they were talking a light came from the south and landed at the feet of those two people that old clever man was drinking with. So the elders of our tribe started talking in the lingo again and they told us that the old man that got burnt was dead.

That was his sign of telling the people that he has gone to his hunting ground but died a very wild man.

This story was told to me by Lucy Daly of the Bundjalung tribe who gave me this account, she lives at the Aboriginal reserve at Baryulgil on the upper Clarence River, standing outside her hut she pointed out to me the mountain which features in this myth.

Somewhere in the mountains near Tooloom in those forests of tall trees, somewhere in those mountains hidden by drifting mists, the old woman Dirrangun ( a witch) kept hidden a sacred spring. This old woman didn't want anyone to mow where the water was. It was good-water and she was sick and there was a young man called a bulagaan (a handsome man). He was a very well built young man, he was handsome. She asked this bulagaan if he would go and get the water. She sent him up to this sacred spring to get the water, she had to direct him and tell where it was so the bulagaan set off into the mountains to get some of the water in a bark coolamon ( a piece of wood hollowed out to hold food Or water). When the bulagaan got to the water he found the Dirrangun had dammed the water up, the bulagaan broke the dam and the water started to run away. When Dirrangun. saw the water coming she started to try and dam the water but the water began to come faster and wider. These mountains that you see are the dams Dirrangun made to stop the water coming, but the water broke through them. And at last the water came down and went into the sea which we call in the language Burraga. That's how this river the Clarence came to be, this Mount Ogilvie here, that's one of the dams Dirrangun made. The gorge down below Baryulgil is the place the last dam that Dirrangun made but the water broke through. When the water got down to Yamba Dirrangun realised that she couldn't stop it so she cursed it and made it salt so that no one could drink it. Somewhere in the mouth of the Clarence is the last stand of Dirrangun as she tried to stop the water, she threw herself in front of the water to try and stop it with herself but the water just rushed over and she was turned into stone.