Mutjingga (the Old Woman)

Mutjingga, whom Stanner renders simply as 'the Old Woman', is the ancestral Mother at the heart of the most important Murinbata ceremony, the bullroarer initiation known secretly as Karwadi and publicly as the Punj. In her myth she was left to care for a group of children while their elders foraged; instead she swallowed them alive and crawled away down a river-bed. The men pursued her, speared her in the legs, and cut open her belly, lifting the children out still living. The rite re-enacts this engulfment and recovery: the novices are told that the Mother will come and swallow them and then bring them up again, dramatising a ritual death and rebirth. With Kunmanggur and Kukpi she is one of the three principal beings of Murinbata religion recorded by W. E. H. Stanner; Stanner saw the rise of her cult, against the decline of Kunmanggur's, as in part a response to the upheavals of colonisation, a reading discussed by L. R. Hiatt.

Domains

• initiation
• law ceremony

Powers

• to swallow the children whole and yield them up again

Epithets

• KarwadiW. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monograph No. 11, 1963) (secondary)

Sources

• Mutjingga, 'the Old Woman' or Mother, is the central ancestral being of the Murinbata bullroarer initiation (Karwadi/Punj), who in the myth swallowed the children left in her care and was speared and cut open so they could be recovered, a swallowing and rebirth re-enacted upon the novices.: W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monograph No. 11; Sydney: University of Sydney, 1963; repr. Sydney University Press, 2014) (secondary); L. R. Hiatt, Arguments about Aborigines: Australia and the Evolution of Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (secondary)