Namarrkon

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When the long dry breaks in the Top End of the Australian north, it does not break gently. For weeks the heat thickens and the air goes still; the clouds pile into towers along the sandstone escarpment, dark at the base, anvil-flat at the top. Then the first storm comes in off the floodplain, and the sky cracks open with a white branch of fire that strikes the ground and walks across it, and the thunder follows in a long rolling blow. The Bininj peoples of western Arnhem Land, who have read this country for longer than any other living tradition has read any country, know whose work that is. The storm has a maker, and the maker has a name. He is Namarrkon, the Lightning Man, and the splitting of the trees is the swing of the stone axes that grow from his body.

The being of the build-up

Namarrkon — the spelling shifts across the languages of the region, Namarrgon, Namarrkun, the sounds caught differently by different ears — belongs to the western edge of Arnhem Land, the broken sandstone country that rises behind the Kakadu floodplain and runs east into the great plateau the geologists call some of the oldest exposed rock on earth. This is the Country of the Bininj, the word the Kunwinjku-speaking peoples use for themselves, the human beings; the stone country and the wetlands below it are theirs and have been theirs across a span the documentary record now measures in tens of millennia. He is one of the powers who shaped that Country in the creation-time and who has not left it.

In the Bininj understanding he is a creation ancestor — an ancestral being in the proper sense, one of those who in the first time traveled the land, made its forms, set down the Law by which people must live, and then took up a fixed place in it. He gave shape to the seasons. He is not a personification of the storm laid over a blank sky by people reaching for an explanation; within the frame, the order runs the other way. The storm is what Namarrkon does. The lightning is the visible track of an ancestor still at work in the world he made.

His wife is Barrkinj — Barrginj in another rendering — and she lives apart from him, in the country to the south. Their children are the Alyurr. These are not metaphor: the Alyurr are the small, brilliant orange-and-blue grasshoppers that the entomologists call Leichhardt’s grasshopper, an insect found in only a handful of places on earth, Kakadu among them. They appear in the build-up, in their thousands, climbing the spike-rush that grows on the stone country, and the people say they are calling out to their father. When they call, he answers — with the storms, with the lightning, with the thunder that announces that the wet is coming. The cosmology and the natural calendar are, here, one thing: the grasshopper that rises before the rains is the child of the being who brings them.

The axes and the band

The form Namarrkon takes in the art of the region is among the most recognizable images in the whole of Aboriginal Australia, and it is worth describing exactly, because the description is the cosmology in miniature. He is drawn as a figure encircled by a band — an arc of lightning that runs from his hands up and over his head and down to his feet, so that the whole body is strung within a single curved line. That band is the lightning itself, and it ties him to the storm-clouds; he is, quite literally, wired into the weather. Out of his head, his elbows, and his knees grow stone axes. With these he strikes. He splits the heaped monsoon cloud, and the strike is the lightning; the blow is the thunder. The axes that crown his head are, around Kakadu, also read as the antennae of the grasshopper, his children — the two readings holding together in the one image, the way images in this tradition characteristically carry more than one truth at once.

He lives in the sky now, and he watches. A Dreaming place a short distance from the escarpment is held to be his, and one telling speaks of an eye he left there to keep watch — for the coming of the monsoon, and for the wife who lives away to the south. The watching is not idle. Namarrkon is a keeper of the Law as well as a maker of weather. He is creative — he had his part in the making of the landscape — but he is also a punisher of those who break the order the ancestors laid down. The same lightning that announces the rains can be turned on the wrongdoer. To stand under his sky is to stand under a power that is at once the engine of the year’s renewal and the sanction behind the rules by which life in this Country is lived.

This places Namarrkon at the center of a cosmos organized not around a single creation but around a calendar — the hard, double-hinged year of the tropical north. The Bininj reckon not two seasons but six, each named, each read off the land and the sky and the behavior of plants and animals. The long build-up before the rains is Gunumeleng, the time of the gathering heat and the first afternoon storms, when people in the old pattern of life moved up off the flooding plain to shelter in the stone country. The true wet, the time of the violent monsoon — the electrifying thunderstorms, the flooding, the country turned vivid green — is Gudjewg. The first lightning of Gunumeleng is the sign that Namarrkon has stirred. To know the seasons is to know him; the meteorology and the theology are not separable.

It is worth marking what kind of knowledge this is, and what kind it is not. Much of Aboriginal religious life is restricted — knowledge held within particular groups, men’s or women’s, opened only to those who have been brought through the proper ceremony, and not for outsiders. What can be set down here is the public account: the figure as he is painted in the galleries open to visitors, the role explained on the boards the traditional owners have approved, the seasonal frame any attentive person on the country can learn to read. The deeper substance of the ceremonies and the songs that belong to Namarrkon is not a thing to be reconstructed or guessed at from the outside, and it is not attempted here.

The galleries of the stone country

To stand in front of Namarrkon, one goes to Burrungkuy — the place long known on the maps as Nourlangie, an anglicized fragment of a longer Bininj name for the area. It is an outlier of the Arnhem Land escarpment in the south of what is now Kakadu National Park, a long wall of red and ochre sandstone with shelters worn into its base. The upper part of the formation is Burrunggui; the lower, where the great painted wall is, is Anbangbang. There, on a panel that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, the Lightning Man is painted in his band of lightning, with the stone axes on his joints, beside his wife Barrkinj and beside Namondjok, another ancestral being who is said to dwell in the sky and to be seen only at night.

The Anbangbang gallery panel at Burrungkuy (Nourlangie): Namondjok, Namarrkon the Lightning Man, and his wife Barrkinj. Photograph by Dustin M. Ramsey, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5.

The painting on this particular wall is not ancient in its present surface, and that fact is itself central to how the tradition works. The figures visible today were put there in the wet season of 1963–64 by Najombolmi — also written Nayombolmi, and known to white Australians as “Barramundi Charlie” — a Badmardi man held to be the most prolific known rock artist anywhere, with hundreds of works documented across the western Arnhem country. He worked with a second artist, Nym Djimongurr — a sequence reconstructed in detail by researchers working with the family, in a first-hand account of how the most iconic rock art in Kakadu came to be made. He did not invent the figures; he renewed them. In this tradition a painting is not a finished object to be preserved untouched but a living thing whose power can be kept up by repainting, so that the ancestor it shows stays present and potent. To paint Namarrkon again is to keep Namarrkon’s force in the rock. Najombolmi had hunted and lived across this country his whole life and had seen it taken into the orbit of pastoral leases and buffalo shooters and, later, the apparatus of a national park; the act of returning to the wall and laying the ancestors down again was, among other things, an assertion that the Country and its powers were still there to be honored.

The Burrungkuy (Nourlangie) outlier of the Arnhem Land escarpment at dawn. Photograph by Travelstine, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

There is a further point in this, easy to miss. The figures of the Anbangbang panel were repainted within living memory, by a named man, in a season that can be dated to the year — and yet the being he painted is held to belong to the creation-time, before measured time. This is the proper way to hold what W. E. H. Stanner, the anthropologist who spent his working life trying to render Aboriginal religion into English, called the Dreaming, and was careful to say was badly served by the older word “Dreamtime,” a coinage of nineteenth-century ethnographers that makes the whole thing sound like a long-ago of the kind that is over. It is not over. Stanner reached for the word everywhen. The creation is not a past event but a standing condition: the ancestors did their work in the first time and are present in the Country now, and an act in the present — a repainting, a ceremony, the first storm of the build-up — touches the creation directly. Najombolmi laying Namarrkon down again in 1964 is not a copy of an old picture. It is the same act the first painter performed, in the same continuous order.

The walls around Burrungkuy and the related galleries hold far more than one being. There is Nabulwinjbulwinj, a dangerous spirit; there are the slender, elongated Mimih spirits of the rock; there is the long human record of hunters and animals and the X-ray figures for which the region’s painting is famous, in which the bones and organs of a fish or a creature are shown as if seen through the flesh. Western Arnhem Land carries one of the longest continuous bodies of figurative art on the planet, with images at some sites reckoned to reach back many thousands of years. Namarrkon is one being in a crowded and articulated cosmos; what makes him stand out is the immediacy of his work, written every wet season across the actual sky above the gallery that shows him.

Where Namarrkon stands

It is tempting, from outside, to fold Namarrkon into a single Aboriginal pantheon, but the tradition does not work that way, and the differences are the point. Across the great span of the continent the ancestral beings are local — bound to particular Countries, particular peoples, particular stretches of land and Law. The being who in the south-east is spoken of as a sky-figure and a giver of initiation, the Baiame of the inland rivers, is not Namarrkon; the eagle-creator Bunjil of the Kulin Country in the far south is not Namarrkon; the great mouthless rain-spirits of the Kimberley, the Wandjina, whose images carry their own strict protocols, are not Namarrkon. Even the water-serpent of the wet — the being often gathered up under the English name Rainbow Serpent, and present in the Arnhem cosmology in its own right — is a distinct power, the one whose rains follow once Namarrkon’s storms have torn the season open. What Namarrkon is, and what no other being is in quite the same way, is the lightning: the specific, violent, sky-splitting force of the monsoon’s arrival, made into an ancestor and held in the Law of one Country.

The written record of Namarrkon, like the written record of every Aboriginal tradition, comes at a distance worth naming. For tens of thousands of years the knowledge moved by mouth, by song, by ceremony, and by the painted wall — not by the page. The first outsiders to write any of it down were explorers and buffalo shooters, then missionaries, then ethnographers who arrived with their own categories and, often enough, their own contempt; the early colonial archive habitually filed a cosmology as old and as worked-out as any in the world under words meant to diminish it. A good deal of what reached print was filtered through that distance before it ever reached a reader. The authority that now matters most runs the other way: the traditional owners of the Country, speaking for the beings who are theirs, on the boards and in the published accounts they have shaped, and increasingly in the words of Bininj people themselves rather than the visitors who once spoke over them. Christian missions did come to the region, and many people in western Arnhem Land today live within both frames at once; but Namarrkon was never displaced from his sky, and the storms never stopped reporting to anyone the work of a stranger.

That Country is, today, the heart of one of Australia’s great protected landscapes. Kakadu was inscribed on the World Heritage List in stages — 1981, with extensions in 1987 and 1992 — and stands as one of the few sites listed for both its natural and its cultural value, the rock art galleries among the reasons. The land is owned by its Aboriginal traditional owners, the Bininj and Mungguy, and leased to the Director of National Parks for joint management; the boards that explain Namarrkon to visitors are written with the people whose ancestor he is. The deep antiquity of human life here is part of the documentary record too — occupation of the wider region runs back tens of thousands of years, with the oldest securely dated sites in the north of the continent now pushing toward sixty-five thousand. Against that depth, the 1963–64 repainting at Anbangbang is a single recent gesture in a practice without measurable beginning.

What the storms still do each wet is the simplest evidence of all that the tradition is unbroken. The build-up comes; the Alyurr climb the spike-rush and call; the towers gather over the escarpment; the first white branch strikes the stone country and the thunder rolls down the wall where his image is painted. For the people who hold this Country, that is not a memory of something once believed about the weather. It is Namarrkon, in the sky he was given, doing the work he was made to do — and watching, as he has always watched, to see that the Law is kept below.

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