Mudungkala

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.

Children

• Murupiangkala, the second Sun-woman
• Purukupali
• Tjapara, the Moon-man
• Wuriupranala, the Sun-woman

Domains

• creation of land
• ancestral motherhood

Powers

• to shape the Tiwi islands and their dividing straits as she crawls
• to command that the bare islands be covered with plants and animals

Epithets

• MudungkalaMountford, C.P. (1958). The Tiwi: Their Art, Myth and Ceremony. London: Phoenix House. (secondary)

Sources

• Mudungkala is the blind ancestral earth-mother of the Tiwi who emerged from the ground at Murupianga during the Palaneri, created the islands of Bathurst and Melville and their straits, and bore the three first ancestors (Purukupali and the two Sun-women) before vanishing.: Mountford, C.P. (1958). The Tiwi: Their Art, Myth and Ceremony. London: Phoenix House. (secondary); Isaacs, J. (1992). Tiwi: Art, History, Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. (secondary); Hamacher, D.W. & Banks, K. (2018). Twin Suns in Australian Aboriginal Traditions. Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 21(2&3), 107-114. (secondary)