Mudungkala is the primordial creator of Tiwi cosmology. In the Palaneri, the formative 'creation time' when the world was dark and the earth flat, this old blind woman rose from the earth at Murupianga in the south-east of Melville Island, clasping three infant children to her breast, and crawled slowly northward. Fresh water bubbled up in her track to become the tideways of the Clarence and Dundas Straits that separate the Tiwi homeland from the Australian mainland; judging the land too large, she scored the Apsley Strait to divide Bathurst from Melville Island. She decreed that the bare islands be clothed with vegetation and stocked with animals so that the three children she left behind would have food, and then vanished. Her children are the culture hero Purukupali and the two Sun-women Wuriupranala and Murupiangkala, from whom the Tiwi descend.