Aboriginal flood narratives and the thunder complex in Southeast Asia

Abstract

The ancestors of the dingo were brought to mainland Australia around 4000 years ago by people who arrived by boat. The identity of these voyagers from the north, however, and the nature of their interactions with the Aboriginal population of Australia, are unknown. Here, we propose that Indigenous flood narratives from the Kimberley contain evidence for contact between Aboriginal people and early Asian seafarers in the form of the “thunder complex”. The latter is a very specific repertoire of taboos, rituals and stories that occurs widely among ethnographically known societies of Indonesia, the Philippines and peninsular Malaysia, but has not previously been identified in Australia. Among Southeast Asian groups, this cultural complex revolves around the idea that certain prohibited acts perpetrated against animals – especially “mocking” them by treating them as though they were human – precipitate a punitive storm and/or flooding. We show that in some oral traditions of the Kimberley region animal mockery is similarly held to be the causative agent behind disastrous flooding events that took place in the past creationary epoch. We contend that this localised Aboriginal variant of the thunder complex reflects an episode of close interaction with early Austronesian-speaking voyagers who introduced ancestral dingoes to mainland Australia, apparently via the Kimberley coast.