The Story Of The Rainbow Serpent

Western Arnhem Land holds the oldest surviving record: paintings of a serpent, worked onto rock shelter walls as early as six thousand years ago, not long after the seas rose to their present shorelines at the end of the last Ice Age. That rock art is not the tradition's point of origin, only the earliest point at which it became visible to us, because a story that is told and never written leaves no founding date, only the trace of its telling. What is certain from the art, the ceremony attached to it, and the accounts collected since colonisation is that there was never one serpent and one story. Across the continent, distinct peoples hold distinct beings, tied to particular waterholes, rivers and stretches of country, each with its own name, its own law and its own custodians: the Kunwinjku of western Arnhem Land tell of Ngalyod, the Noongar of the south-west tell of the Wagyl, the Yolngu of north-east Arnhem Land tell of Yurlunggur, the great serpent of the Wagilag Sisters story. In 1926 the anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown compared accounts from dozens of language groups and gave the whole pattern a single English name for the convenience of scholarship, noting that the belief was not confined to any one part of the country but very widespread. That single name travelled far outside Australia. The plurality it described did not disappear into it: each nation's serpent, and each nation's law about that serpent, remained its own, taught and painted and sung long before Radcliffe-Brown wrote anything down, and long after.

The question of who

Nobody wrote this down first, because nobody needed to. Authority over a story like this belongs to specific people: a Kunwinjku elder can speak for Ngalyod, a Noongar elder for the Wagyl, a Yolngu custodian for Yurlunggur, and none of them speaks for the others, because the beings and the law around them are not interchangeable. Ownership here is real and exact. It is simply distributed across hundreds of custodians rather than concentrated in one name, which is a different thing from having no author at all.

How it nearly did not

No scribe or shelfmark protects an oral tradition; it survives only for as long as someone keeps teaching it. Twentieth-century mission and reserve policy banned Aboriginal language and ceremony outright in many places, cutting at exactly the chain a story like this depends on. That the telling continues, unbroken, in the communities that hold it, is the whole of its survival story.

Six thousand years

• c. 4000 BCE First known rainbow serpent images appear in Arnhem Land rock art, painted as the seas rose after the last Ice Age; some estimates place the earliest images 2,000 years earlier still
• 1836 Francis Armstrong records the Waugal, the Noongar serpent of the Swan and Canning Rivers, set down seven years after Perth's founding
• 1926 Radcliffe-Brown names it in print, The Rainbow-Serpent Myth of Australia surveys accounts from dozens of language groups under one English term
• 1975 Dick Roughsey publishes The Rainbow Serpent, a Lardil man's own telling, aimed at children; it wins the CBCA Picture Book of the Year the following year
• 1996 Taçon, Wilson and Chippindale publish the first systematic rock-art dating study, 107 paintings analysed; the model turns out to be a pipefish, not a python or a crocodile
• 2021 Shino Konishi publishes a scholarly reappraisal of the tradition's modern commercial use, argues that souvenir and mascot versions strip the being of its harsher, older meanings
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