Kuniya

Kuniya is the woma python ancestral being of the Tjukurpa of Uluru, a senior woman who travelled from the country to the east carrying her eggs, which she deposited in a bend of the rock at Kuniya Piti on the eastern end. While she was camped there her young nephew was set upon and killed by a party of Liru, the venomous-snake people who had come from the west. Consumed by grief and rage, Kuniya performed a dance of fury, took up handfuls of sand that she charged with deadly power, and with her wana (digging stick) struck one of the Liru warriors two mortal blows to the head near the Mutitjulu waterhole. The two deep fissures in the cliff above the waterhole are held to be the wounds of that blow, and the sinuous ridges of the eastern face are her body. The Kuniya and Liru narrative is among the best-attested Western Desert myths, recorded in detail by Charles Mountford and later by Robert Layton in his history of the rock.

Domains

• serpents and pythons
• ancestral law tjukurpa

Powers

• channel lethal ancestral rage
• inscribe the land with her deeds

Epithets

• Minyma Kuniya — Kuniya Woman / Senior Python WomanParks Australia, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, 'The Kuniya and Liru stories' (primary)

Relations

• enemy: LiruThe Kuniya python people and the Liru venomous-snake people fought the great battle recorded in the rock of Uluru's southern face.Mountford, C. P. (1965), Ayers Rock: Its People, Their Beliefs and Their Art, pp. 30-45 (secondary)

Sources

• Kuniya is the woma python ancestral woman who carried her eggs to Uluru and avenged her nephew by killing a Liru man near Mutitjulu.: Mountford, C. P. (1965), Ayers Rock: Its People, Their Beliefs and Their Art, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. 30-45 (secondary); Layton, Robert (1986), Uluru: An Aboriginal History of Ayers Rock, AIAS, Canberra, pp. 5-9 (secondary)