Dreaming Stories from our Area

The Story of Five Islands - (Oola-boola-woo)

In Alcherigna, Oola-boola-woo, the West Wind, lived on top of Merringong (the Illawarra Range). With the West wind were his six little daughters Mimosa, Wilga, Lilli Pilli, Wattle, Clematis and Geera.

Sometimes the children’s cousins, who lived  in a seaside camp just north of Red Point, came up the mountain for a visit. The little children brought gifts of fish, pretty seashells, fruit and flowers, but Mimosa, an unpleasant child, was sulky and disagreeable to the visitors. When her sisters played and laughed with their cousins, Mimosa scratched and fought. Oola- boola-woo was so annoyed at his daughter’s rude behaviour he snatched off the piece of the mountain upon which she sat, and threw it out to sea.

How strange to see a large piece of rock flying through the air with the little black girl, Mimosa, clinging to it! Plop! went the great rock into the sea, giving Mimosa a shower bath, which cooled her naughty temper. “Whoosh, gurgle, goggle”, she cried, coughing and choking. She looked about and was startled to see she was some distance from the land. In fact, she was on an island, to which neither her sisters nor her friends could swim, for fear of sharks. Poor Mimosa! Too late she regretted her naughtiness. Day after day she sat on the island, until she turned into a mermaid, slid into the sea and swam about.

Mimosa’s fate should have been a lesson to her sisters, but bye and bye, they grew lazy, careless and disobedient. One evening Oola-boola-woo, the West Wind, came home at sunset to find Wilga lying on a warm rock, playing with a pt lizard. She had not washed her face or combed her hair, nor had she tidied the house. Oola-boola-woo felt that his patience was at an end. He had had a hard day blowing up dust storms in the west and had helped fan a great bushfire, near Appin, so he was tired.

Taking a big breath, he blew Wilga and her rock out to sea. How surprised the people in the camp were next morning, to see two islands in the sea, not far from the coast. It wasn’t long until Lilli Pilli, Wattle and Clematis were blown out to sea, on pieces of rock so that there were five islands, with five little mermaids sunning themselves.

So Geera was the only child left in Oola-boola-woo’s home on the mountain top. How lonely she was! Her father was often away, so there was no one to talk to. There was no one to play with, for the children in the camp had long grown tired of climbing the mountain side to visit the unruly family on the top. Geera sat hunched, with her arms around her ankles, gazing down at the smoke of the blacks’ camp, or staring out at the five islands. Year after year she sat, so still and quiet that she eventually turned to stone. Dust and dead leaves fell upon her, grass and wild flowers grew over her and so she became part of the mountain range.

She is now known as Mount Keira.

The Birth of The Butterflies

The end of winter was here and gone. The wild screaming winds that blew through the tree tops, stripping branches and leaves bending their tops until they were curved like the boomerangs of our tribesman.

The birds took shelter from the icy winter winds and insects even burrowed into the ground. When animals huddled into any shelter they could find. In places where snow lay white on the ground even man must live on the foods he had stored for the long winter months while the wild winter winds and rain turned the world into a place of desolation. The tribesman crouches in his small shelter made of barks and branches. Slowly it ends.

The winds stop blowing one day and all living things hear a single roll of thunder. This is the sign that “Mayra” the spirit of spring has left her home and is coming and melting the snow and ice of the mountain areas and touches the trees and plants with her warm fingers.

Mayra is golden. The wattle and trees burst into flowers – they’re living clouds of green and yellow as trees and plants rejoice in the presence of spring.

The air is full of music with the waking of the birds – the very earth becomes a carpet of glowing colour. Insects peer cautiously from their hiding places.

When they see Mayra the spirit of spring they rush in the sunlight and spread their wings or uncoil their bodies from their long sleep.

Animals are full of this new found joy and in men and animals the blood races in the veins and happiness returns to earth. If only it would be spring forever. Some-one sighs but Mayra knows that she is welcome only because she has chased away the spirits of gloom and coldness. She (Mayra) knows that eternal spring would become warying.

After the first rush of joy, she watches the sun as it grows in strength when the heat of summer sun becomes unbearable, Mayra knows it is time to be on her way.

But next year the spirit of spring will be back –

And that is why the dreaming story of the birth of the butterfly is sok important as seasons move from one to another, so does life and the first death.

So in the dreaming a long time ago there was the Birth of the Butterflies

When the world was young, the birds and animals had a common language and there was no death. No creature had any experience of death’s mystery, until one day a young cockatoo fell from a tree and broke its neck. The birds and animals could not wake it, and a meeting of the wise ones decided that the spirits had taken back the bird to change it into another form.

Everyone thought this a reasonable explanation. But to prove the theory the leaders called for volunteers who would imitate the dead cockatoo by going up into the sky for the whole winter. During this time they would not be allowed to see, hear smell or taste anything. In the spring they were to return to earth to relate their experience to others. The caterpillars offered to try this experiment, and went up into the sky in a huge cloud.

On the first warm day of the spring a pair of excited dragonflies told the gathering that the caterpillars were returning with new bodies. Soon the dragonflies led back into the camp a great pageant of white, yellow, red, blue and green creatures – the first butterflies, and proof that the spirits had changed the caterpillars’ bodies into another form.

They clusters in large groups on the trees and bushes, and everything looked so gay and colourful that the wise ones decided that this was a good and happy thing that had happened, and decreed it must be so. Since then, caterpillars always spend winter hidden in cocoons, preparing for their dramatic change into one of spring’s most beautiful symbols.