The Rainbow Serpent

Two words in this file's title are English inventions with a date. "Dream-times" first appears on page 185 of a paper by Francis James Gillen, the Alice Springs telegraph stationmaster, in the 1896 Horn Expedition report; it does not survive into Spencer and Gillen's famous 1899 book, which glosses Alcheringa as "the far past times" and uses the word "dream" five times in 240,000 words, never as a translation. "Rainbow Serpent" was fixed as a pan-Australian category by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in 1926, and the printed index to volume I of Oceania shows the merger happening: three fieldworkers describing three different regions, filed in 1930 under one heading. The beings underneath are not one. In Bininj Kunwok, Ngalyod is female, the daughter of Yingarna the mother rainbow serpent, and the dictionary speaks of rainbow serpents in the plural, living in deep waterholes, still detectable by marrkidjbu. The oldest evidence is painted: about 6,000 years old, and shaped, one archaeological argument holds, like a small marine pipefish.

Two of the four words in the title of this file are English inventions with a date, an author and a page number. The beings they were placed on top of are older, more numerous, and mostly female. Start with the second word. In September 1896 the Carlton printers Ford and Son turned out Part IV — Anthropology of the Report on the Work of the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia, edited by Baldwin Spencer. Pages 161 to 196 carry a separate paper by Francis James Gillen, the post and telegraph stationmaster at Alice Springs, who was also Special Magistrate and Sub-Protector of Aborigines. On page 185, explaining how the Arrernte account for fire, Gillen writes that their ancestors lived in the distant past, ulchurringa, "which really means in the dream-times, for this is the manner in which the natives always speak of the long ago". That sentence is the earliest use on record of the English expression. It is plural, it is parenthetical, and it belongs to a stationmaster, not to a professor. The expression then vanishes. Spencer and Gillen's famous monograph of 1899, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, runs to roughly 240,000 words and uses "Alcheringa" 298 times; the word "dream" occurs five times in the whole book and never once as a translation of it. The footnote on page 73 says only "the name applied to the far distant past with which the earliest traditions of the tribe deal", and the glossary repeats it: "Name given to the far past times in which the mythical ancestors of the tribe are supposed to have lived". Far past times, not dream times. When W. E. H. Stanner opened his 1953 essay The Dreaming by crediting "Spencer and Gillen" with having "immortalised" the phrase, he was, as the linguists Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka put it in 2015, "speaking somewhat loosely": they trace it back past Spencer, past the 1899 book, to Gillen alone, in 1896, on page 185. Behind Gillen stand the Arrernte speakers who gave him the word, and they are named nowhere. Now the label. In 1926 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown published "The Rainbow-Serpent Myth of Australia" in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (volume 56, pages 19-25), assembling accounts from peoples across the south-east — Kamilaroi, Yuwaalaraay, Wiradjuri, Wongaibon, Weilwan — under a single heading. Catherine H. Berndt, writing the Encyclopedia of Religion entry on the subject in 1987, summarises the position he reached as making the being "perhaps the most important nature-deity", the embodiment of "the creative and destructive power of nature". The moment the category hardened can be read off a printed index. The October-December 1930 issue of Oceania, the journal's first volume, carried three papers on the same theme at once: Radcliffe-Brown on the south-east, Ursula McConnel on North Queensland, A. P. Elkin on the north-west, with Ralph Piddington on the Karadjeri water-serpent alongside. When the volume was indexed, all of them were filed under one entry — "Rainbow-Serpent— in North Queensland .. 347, 348 / in North-West Australia 349-351 / in South-East Australia 342-346" — with a cross-reference reading "Serpent myths. See Rainbow-Serpent". Three regions, three fieldworkers, three sets of beings, one heading. The pan-Australian Rainbow Serpent is visible there being made. The beings themselves are the part the label flattens. In Bininj Kunwok, the language of western Arnhem Land and part of Kakadu, the community language centre's dictionary carries ngalyod as a headword: "Rainbow serpent, daughter of the Mother One Rainbow Yingarna. The rainbow serpent is a central figure in traditional Bininj religion. She is the creator of places and is active during the wet season and is associated with rain and bodies of water. Rainbow serpents live in deep waterholes and rivers. Marrkidjbu are able to discern their presence and control them." Four things in that entry contradict the standard English retelling. She is female — the dictionary's grammar note explains that "the feminine prefix reflects the conception of the rainbow serpent as a generative figure, 'the mother one'". She is a daughter, not a first cause: Yingarna is "Mother rainbow serpent, the mother of ngalyod, really 'biggest one'", a "female creation ancestor, who emerged from the sea to the north and travelled throughout many lands", dropping off particular people and foods in particular places and telling each which language to speak. There is more than one of them: the entry says rainbow serpents, plural, live in deep waterholes. And they are not left in the past — marrkidjbu, men with special power, can still detect and control them. The same dictionary shows how deep the being runs in the vocabulary. Delek, the white ochre used in painting, is defined as kaolin and huntite and then as "the faeces or vomitus of ngalyod", with a named djang or sacred site for it at kudjarnngal near Manmoyi. Larraddi is an intransitive verb that exists for one purpose: "there is a light given off by Ngalyod (the Rainbow Serpent), esp. in the sky in the distance". Djarnkerrk, the Antilopine kangaroo, is "offspring of Yingarna the Rainbow Serpent". The dialect table under ngalmudj lists the regional forms in a row: ngalyod in Kunwinjku and Kuninjku, ngalmudj in Kune, almudj in Kundjeyhmi, the Kakadu language, with bolung given as a synonym. These are not variant spellings of one name. They are the reason the English umbrella had to be invented. The oldest evidence is on rock. In 1996 Paul Taçon, Meredith Wilson and Christopher Chippindale published "Birth of the Rainbow Serpent in Arnhem Land rock art and oral history" in Archaeology in Oceania, analysing 107 painted images. They dated the earliest of them to around 6,000 years ago and argued that the odd anatomy of the early figures — the snout, the projections behind the head, the trailer, the spines on the tail — matches no snake but a small marine fish, the ribboned pipefish Haliichthys taeniophorus of the northern Australian coast, which would have arrived in country as post-glacial seas flooded the plains. At Ubirr in Kakadu, Parks Australia records that the Rainbow Serpent "painted her image on the rock as she passed through Ubirr to remind people of her presence" — the pronoun in the park's own text is her.

There is no single place to visit, and that is part of the point: the beings gathered under this English label belong to many different countries, from the Kimberley to Cape York to the Swan River. The one publicly signposted site where Australia's park service names a painted Rainbow Serpent on the rock is Ubirr, in the East Alligator (Erre) region of Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory. Parks Australia's own map point for it is -12.411359, 132.957727; that is about 32 km from Jabiru, the park township, and about 230 km from Darwin, both measured in a straight line, so allow more by road. Ubirr is reached on a sealed 2WD road and the walk through the galleries is short, with a steeper climb to the Nadab lookout at the end. The main gallery also holds X-ray paintings of fish, waterfowl, mussels, wallabies, goanna and yams, most of them from the last 1,500 years, a thylacine, and a contact-period figure of a European in shirt and boots with his hands in his pockets, painted around the 1880s. Burrungkuy (Nourlangie), further south in the park, is open year-round and is the other major art site. A park pass is required and is easiest bought online in advance. As advertised by Parks Australia in August 2026, it is valid seven days and priced by season: in the tropical summer (1 November to 14 May) $25 adult, $12.50 child aged 5-15, $19 concession, $65 family; in the dry (15 May to 31 October) $40, $20, $30 and $100. Northern Territory residents are exempt. Prices and dates change — check before you travel. Seasons matter more than hours here. In the tropical summer the water rises, opening times shorten, and the road to Ubirr can flood; when Magela Creek is up, the Guluyambi cruise is the way across. Parks Australia publishes a live Kakadu Access Report, and it is the thing to read the morning you set out rather than the week before. Arnhem Land proper, east of the East Alligator River, is Aboriginal freehold land and is not open to casual visitors: entry requires a permit from the Northern Land Council, applied for in advance. Within Kakadu, some places are closed to visitors altogether and are marked as such; the sensible rule is that the signage at a site is the traditional owners speaking, and it is the authority, not a suggestion.