Mutjinga Myth Research Paper

Over a long period of time, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have developed an elaborate body of myths, legends, and stories that gave expression to an Aboriginal cosmology, or understanding of the world. This body of myths, known collectively as the Dreamtime, served to “anchor the landscape and its human and animal inhabitants to distant events and mythical ancestors. In this cosmology, long before humans appears, ancestral beings emerged from the earth and traversed the land” as explained in the introduction of the Mutjinga myth. Moreover, Aboriginals also tied everything in the physical world with a spiritual form, which is the central motif of the Mutjinga myth, as Mutjinga is the woman responsible for taking care of these spirits - and her ability to communicate with them gives her

When living things died, their spirits went to a secret cave where they remained until it was time for them to be born again. Mutjinga was caretaker of this cave.” The belief in spiritual beings and a woman who acts a spiritual leader is a significant element of Dreamtime cosmology that fuels the story and the tale it tells. Aboriginals believed that spirits would return to a cave where Mutjinga was responsible for the totems, or physical representations, to which they would return to, giving her a multitude of powers that tie into the plot of the myth and the themes it wishes to convey. Additionally, another element of Dreamtime cosmology that appears in the myth is the setting in which it is based - and the landscape described correlates to Aboriginal understandings of ancestral beings that shaped the land that they inhabited. The story explains, “In the Dreamtime, in the land of the Murinbata people, a great river flowed from the hills through a wide plain to the sea. As it is today, the land then was rich with much fish and