"IT MUST be so pretty with all the dear little kangaroos flying about," says the Duchess of Berwick in Lady Windermere's Fan. And judging by Neighbours and A Country Practice, most of us would agree that Australia seems a pleasant little spot. At certain times of the year, however, it is very dry indeed, and its long time inhabitants, the Aborigines, had their own tried and tested methods for bringing on the rain.
Rain, to the Aborigines, was personified in the Rainbow Serpent, who spent most of his time in deep and permanent water holes, but who was visible from time to time in the form of the rainbow or a waterfall. The activities of the Rainbow Serpent, insofar as they affected earthly beings, were controlled by the Mura mura, the ancestral spirits of the Aborigines who lived in the sky, and who had the power to release the rain from the clouds. Rain making in its many guises was an attempt to persuade the Mura mura that they should do just that.
Rain making rites were not necessarily the function of a particular individual. Usually, however, there emerged one or two rain makers in a local group who specialised in this activity, and who were believed to have the power, on entering a trance like state, of visiting the sky to receive the necessary powers from their ancestral spirits.
The rites took various forms. Typically the rain maker might be decorated with coloured feathers to depict the rain, and he would perform a special dance at sunset to the accompaniment of appropriate invocations to the Mura mura. Sometimes, however, the ritual was more elaborate. In some tribes it was the custom to assemble all the old men of the community around two large stones representing rainclouds; two rain makers then pierced their arms and allowed the blood, which represented rain, to trickle down over their senior citizens. When the ceremony was over, the two stones were placed in the highest tree nearby, and everybody settled down to wait.
The efforts of the Aboriginal rain makers were often rewarded with success, because they drew on their rich store of knowledge of the local weather to perform their rituals in seasons and at times when rain might reasonably have been expected anyway. Failure, if it occurred was assumed to be due to the Mura mura being angry with the group, to improper procedures during the ritual, to someone having neglected to observe a sacrosanct taboo, or most likely of all, to the counter magic of an enemy group.