Wunggurr

Wunggurr (also recorded as Ungud or Unggud in Ngarinyin contexts) is the Rainbow Serpent of the Worrorra and their neighbours, and simultaneously a pervasive creative life-force. In the Dreaming, Wunggurr made the rivers and deep permanent pools and continues to dwell in them; spirit-children found at these waterholes become human beings, so every person is tied to a Wunggurr place. Ethnographers from A. Capell and A. P. Elkin onward have described Wunggurr as the power that animates the Wanjina and all species of things, and the native-title community of the region is formally known as the Wanjina-Wunggurr community.

Domains

• waters and waterholes
• creation and fertility

Powers

• to carve out rivers and deep waterholes and dwell within them
• to send spirit-children into waterholes from which human beings are conceived

Relations

• creator of: WandjinaIn Wanjina-Wunggurr cosmology, Wunggurr is the diffuse creative life-force underlying and animating the Wanjina themselves, who are among its particular manifestations.Valda Blundell & Donny Woolagoodja, Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh: Sam Woolagoodja and the Enduring Power of Lalai, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005 (secondary)

Sources

• Wunggurr is the Worrorra name for the Rainbow Serpent, the creator life-force that shaped waterholes, provides spirit-children, and underlies the power of the Wanjina; the whole regional culture is named the Wanjina-Wunggurr bloc after it.: A. Capell, 'Mythology in Northern Kimberley, North-West Australia', Oceania 9(4), 1939 (secondary); Anthony Redmond, 'Places That Move', in Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative, and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea, University of Hawai'i Press, 2001 (secondary); Mark Clendon, Worrorra: A Language of the North-West Kimberley Coast, University of Adelaide Press, 2014 (secondary)