Mindye

Mindye (Myndie, Mindi) is the great snake of the Kulin peoples: very long, very thick in the body and very powerful, known to all the tribes as all the tribes are known to him. He inhabits a country called Lill-go-ner, north-north-west of Melbourne, near a mountain called Bu-ker-bun-nel, and he is under the dominion of Bunjil (Pund-jel), who sends him out when a tribe is wicked to give them diseases or destroy them. William Thomas recorded the myth in detail, and it was printed with an engraving in Brough Smyth's Aborigines of Victoria. The Woiwurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung understood the catastrophic smallpox epidemics that swept the Kulin lands in the 1790s and around 1830 as visitations of Mindye, who hisses and spreads white particles from his mouth from which the disease is breathed in; any plague was said to be brought by Mindye or by his little ones.

Domains

• serpents
• pestilence
• retribution

Powers

• to spread sickness over whole communities by hissing out white dust
• to destroy or afflict any tribe at Bunjil's command

Relations

• subordinate to: Bunjil

Sources

• R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1 (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1878), pp. 443-446
• Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800 (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005)
• Aldo Massola, Bunjil's Cave: Myths, Legends and Superstitions of the Aborigines of South-East Australia (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1968)