The Tjurunga of Central Australia: Objects Not to Be Seen

In 1896, at the telegraph station in Alice Springs, Arrernte men held a long cycle of ceremonies in front of two outsiders: the biologist Baldwin Spencer and the telegraph master Francis Gillen. Among the things the men revealed were flat, oval boards of wood and stone, carved with circles, lines and arcs. They called them tjurunga (in older spelling, churinga). Three years later Spencer and Gillen published photographs of them. Today those photographs are treated as something that should never have been printed, and this entry does not reproduce any.

What tjurunga are

• Sacred objects of the Arrernte and neighbouring peoples of Central Australia, made of wood or stone, usually oval and incised with designs.
• In Arrernte belief they are bound to ancestral beings of the Altyerre, the Dreaming, and to particular places, songs and ceremonies. A tjurunga can be spoken of as the body or the spirit of an ancestor.
• They are secret-sacred: held by men of the right kin and country, stored hidden, and shown only in ceremony to those entitled to see them. Seeing them without that right, or showing them to others, is a serious offence in Arrernte law.

Taken into theory

Spencer and Gillen's The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) and the missionary Carl Strehlow's studies made the Arrernte one of the most discussed peoples in the history of anthropology. In 1912 the French sociologist Émile Durkheim built much of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life on their evidence: the tjurunga became his model of the sacred, set apart from the everyday. Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913) also drew on this literature. Few of these theorists ever met an Arrernte person.

Collected, and returned

Tjurunga were sold, traded and taken into museums and private collections throughout the twentieth century. The largest single collection was made by Carl Strehlow's son, the linguist T. G. H. Strehlow, who from the 1930s recorded songs and ceremonies and received many objects from senior men who, he said, entrusted them to him for safekeeping. After his death in 1978 the collection became the subject of a long and bitter dispute. It is now held by the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs, whose board controls access, and Arrernte people work with the Centre on how the objects should be cared for. Museums in Australia and overseas are returning secret-sacred objects to their communities.

Symbology and sacred encoding

A map in a design. The circles, lines and tracks cut into a tjurunga are said to record an ancestor's journey and the places it made, a kind of sacred map that can be read only by those who know the story. This entry does not describe any particular design.

Secrecy as part of the meaning. For a tjurunga, being hidden is not incidental: its power depends on being seen only by the right people at the right time. That is why this archive treats the refusal to show them as part of the record, not a gap in it.

Connections

Aboriginal Australian Dreaming (ch61). Compare the Benin Bronzes (V64) for another history of taking and returning sacred objects.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/tjurunga.html