Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

The people of the area between Brewarrinaandand Walgett tell of a Big Dry, when times were very hard. They camped at Greeah, one of the last remaining of the waterholes. The people had camped under some giant gum trees that grew around the waterhole, and in the tallest of these trees, Mullyan the eagle had its nest. It hunted animals to feed its young, but when its usual prey became scarce during a long drought it started taking babies from the mothers in the camp below. Using their spears to protect them against attack from above the men cut the tree down. The eagles were killed and the base of the tree went into the waterhole, the water flowed along it to the where the nest was. The bones of the animals that had been eaten by the eagles sunk into the sodden ground of what they called Cuddie, 'natural water'.

Aboriginal Dreamtime and the megafauna

Sources & Further reading

1. Jennifer Isaacs, Australia Dreaming: 40,000 years of Aboriginal History, New Holland Publishers