Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [241]
1788 First British settlement at Botany Bay, Australia.
First penal settlement established at Port Jackson (future Sydney), and the “first fleet” of convicts lands in New South Wales.
1789 Smallpox ravages the Aborigines of New South Wales in Australia.
Mutiny on the HMS Bounty; mutineers settle on Pitcairn Island.
1797 First Christian missionaries reach Tahiti.
1810 Hawaiian islands united by King Kamehameha.
1851 Gold discovered in Australia; thousands of settlers flock to Victoria, Australia.
1864 The practice of transporting prisoners to Australia is abolished.
1892 The queen of Hawaii is deposed; U.S. troops move to annex the islands.
1894 Sanford Dole proclaims the Republic of Hawaii. Hawaii is annexed by the United States in 1894 and made a U.S. territory in 1900.
Which mythic character created the Pacific Islands?
Probably the most famous Polynesian demigod was the trickster Maui, for whom the Hawaiian island of Maui is named. According to some myths, the trickster Maui is born very small, so his mother throws him away in the ocean. Surviving this attempted infanticide, Maui grows up into an oversexed trickster hero, who creates the Pacific islands by fishing them up from the bottom of the sea. The possessor of a prodigious penis, as so many tricksters are, Maui is chosen to satisfy the boundless desire of the goddess Hina. Both the bringer of fire and the cause of death, he is also credited with slowing down the sun to make days longer, either by using the jawbone of his dead grandmother or by lassoing the sun with a rope made from Hina’s hair.
In one Polynesian myth, Maui is challenged by the sun god to enter the body of the goddess of death and pass from her vagina to her mouth. If he succeeds, Maui will become immortal. Attempting to accomplish this feat as the goddess sleeps, Maui is foiled when a bird sees him and laughs, waking the sleeping goddess. She kills Maui, ensuring that humanity would always suffer death.
MYTHIC VOICES
The most puzzling question for whites was…why these people should display such a marked sense of territory while having no apparent cult of private property…. Certainly they had few external signs of religious belief: no temples or altars or priests, no venerated images set up in public places, no evidence of sacrifice or of communal prayer…. They carried their conception of the sacred, of mythic time and ancestral origins with them as they walked. These were embodied in the landscape; every hill and valley, each kind of animal and tree, had its place in a systematic but unwritten whole. Take away this territory and they were deprived not of “property”…but of their embodied history, their locus of myth, their “dreaming”…. To deprive the Aborigines of their territory…was to condemn them to spiritual death.
—ROBERT HUGHES, The Fatal Shore
What is Dreamtime?
A different but very rich tradition of the Pacific world belongs to the ancestors of today’s Aborigines, or indigenous people,*who first arrived in Australia from southeastern Asia perhaps as much as 65,000 years ago. Rock engravings in Australia have been dated to 45,000 years ago, and evidence of the world’s first known cremation dates to 26,000 years ago in southern Australia. Presumably these people had hopscotched the land bridge that existed between the Pacific islands at times when Ice Age climate kept sea levels lower than they are today. The number of Aborigines in Australia at the time the British arrived to create a massive penal colony in 1788 range from 300,000 to 750,000 people, scattered among at least 500 tribes. As in Africa and the Americas, a number of diverse factors nearly brought about the extinction of the Aboriginal people. These factors included disease, fighting with the British colonists, and the general depredations of