Australian Legendary Tales: folk-lore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies — Background and Themes

Reciprocity Refused, Punishment Delivered

Several tales turn on a refusal to share or help, followed by catastrophic retribution. In 'Mooregoo the Mopoke, and Bahloo the Moon,' the mopoke denies the moon a rug or weapon, insisting 'I never lend my rugs.' Bahloo builds his own shelter, then unleashes endless rain that drowns Mooregoo and destroys his possessions. The punishment is not supernatural but natural—a flood—and it matches the crime of hoarding. Similarly, in 'Dinewan the Emu, and Goomblegubbon the Bustard,' the bustard's wives and children cross a river to join another camp, leaving him stranded because he cannot swim. He calls for help, but no one answers; the next morning the opposite camp is burned, and he never sees his family again. The pattern is consistent: a character refuses a request or violates a social bond, and the narrative eliminates them or leaves them isolated. These are cautionary tales about the necessity of generosity within a kinship network.

Pain as Provision: Self-Mutilation and Social Pressure

In 'Ouyan the Curlew,' the hawk mother berates her son for not hunting, saying 'You must not stay always in the camp like an old woman; you must go and hunt as other men do, lest the women laugh at you.' Unable to kill an emu, Ouyan cuts flesh from his own legs, reasoning that 'sharper would cut the tongues of the women, and deeper would be the wounds they would make.' The women eat the flesh hungrily, fall ill, and the next day send him out again—and again he returns with his own flesh. The tale is remarkable for its explicit depiction of self-harm as a response to gendered shame. The mother's hunger and the women's jeers are more terrifying than physical pain. Parker records Ouyan's cries—'Yuckay! Yuckay'—as a repeated refrain, anchoring the story in aural detail. The narrative does not moralize; it simply presents the cycle of demand and desperate compliance.

Material Culture and the Weight of Objects

Parker's tales are dense with named artifacts: boomerangs, nullah-nullahs, neilahmans, opossum rugs sewn with sinew and threaded with emu-bone needles. In 'Mooregoo the Mopoke,' the mopoke's pride in his craftsmanship is emphasized—'Well had he carved the weapons with the teeth of opossums, and brightly had he painted the inside of the rugs with coloured designs.' The objects are not props but extensions of character: Mooregoo's refusal to share them is what destroys him. In 'Dinewan the Emu,' the bustard's spears are picked up as he tracks his wives. The material world is precise and functional. Parker's glossary at the end defines terms like dardurr (a bark shelter) and comebo (a wooden knife), grounding the English text in Noongahburrah vocabulary. These details give the tales a tactile specificity that generic animal stories lack.

Parker's collection is best read as a document of encounter—a settler's attempt to transcribe oral narratives for a distant audience. The tales resist easy moralizing; they are stark, repetitive, and often unresolved. Readers should attend to what is not explained: the gaps in motivation, the abrupt endings, the unexplained customs. The glossary and the single native-text appendix offer a glimpse of the original language, but the English versions remain mediated. Approach these stories as fragments of a system of knowledge, not as children's entertainment.

I found myself thinking about Langloh Parker's old tales—how the Noongahburrah stories held such weight in their caution, each animal paying for broken trust—and it drifted me toward Johnny Nut and the Golden Goose — Story, Setting & Ideas. There's a similar quiet sternness there, a reckoning hiding behind whimsy. Both feel less like entertainment, more like remembered warnings passed along in a hushed voice.