Minkani (the muramura beneath the sandhill)

Minkani is a muramura of the Diyari who lies alive beneath a sandhill at Kudna-ngauana near Cooper Creek. In the legend recorded by the missionary Otto Siebert, the hunter muramura Anti-etya burrowed deeper and deeper into his sandhill and abides there as the Mura-mura Minkani. At his periodic ceremony, held by the Diyari together with neighbouring Lake Eyre peoples such as the Yaurorka, Yantruwunta and Ngameni, the men dig with great care until the 'elbow' of the muramura is uncovered; two men then stand over him and let blood from their opened arm veins fall upon him while the Minkani song is sung. The participants, in a frenzy, strike at one another with their weapons on the mile-long return to camp, until the women rush out and hold shields over their husbands to end the fighting. The blood shed in this combat, mixed with earth from Minkani's cave, is scattered over the sandhills so that they will bring forth the young carpet-snakes (woma) and goannas (kapiri) hidden within them. Howitt judged that the 'body' of Minkani answered to the fossil bones found in the deltas of the rivers entering Lake Eyre, which the Diyari call kadimarkara, and the tradition has figured ever since in discussion of how such desert narratives relate to the remote past.

Domains

• carpet snake increase
• goanna increase

Powers

• to make the sandhills bring forth young carpet-snakes and goannas
• to lie living beneath the earth

Epithets

• Mura-mura Minkani

Sources

• A.W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London: Macmillan, 1904)
• A.W. Howitt & Otto Siebert, 'Legends of the Dieri and Kindred Tribes of Central Australia', Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 34 (1904)
• M.A. Smith, 'The historiography of kardimarkara: reading a desert tradition as cultural memory of the remote past', Journal of Social Archaeology 19(1) (2019)