Introduction To Things That Want To Kill You (Australia)

Continuing our tour of world mythologies, let’s change it up a bit and move to a different continent, one that’s both more naturally dangerous and yet never produced a Genghis Khan figure… potentially because something ate him.

In the late 18th century, the American colonies did something that wasn’t exactly expected by the British Empire: they threw tea into the ocean. Now, to you and me this may sound like a minor offense, but the empire, being British, was gravely offended. By some accounts there was a skirmish afterwards and to this day we Americans only enjoy tea in ironic fashion like a nation of Hipsters.

But the end result left the British with a new found problem. You see, they hadn’t been using any of their own land for prisons. After all, who wants to live next to thieves, murderers and drunkards? So what they’d done for a long time was send them somewhere far from anything remotely looking like civilization: Georgia. This makes a great deal of sense – after all, to this day the only signs of human settlement in that region is the city looking thing you see out the windows as you come to and from their really big airport.

But with Georgia gone there was a need to send them somewhere else. That place had to be isolated, far from anything that remotely looked like civilization to prevent the prisoners from feeling human or like they mattered to the crown. It had to be unimportant to the empire so that they wouldn’t be taking up precious space from something like a tea crop or the shops where they made those powdered wigs. But, most importantly, to make sure that this place was punishment it had to be completely hostile to human life.

The answer came to them in a continent that had, to that point, only been known for being a peculiarity on sea maps that the Dutch had poked at a few times. Aside from that, very little was known about the place. After all, it’s hard to learn much when all you have are the terrified journal entries of the poor souls who’d wandered into the place like Jurassic Park. Still, before the bloodstains on the page it sounded like just the right place. So before long the prisoners were moved to their new home.

Australia: Land of Awfultunity

To understand the culture of Australia, their folklore and their urban legends, much like Russia, it helps to understand the back-story of the region. For you see, when the white people arrived to the penal colony to be erected on Australia, they encountered people who had been living in that region for thousands of years.

Pictured: People who are so done with Australia’s shit

Everyone realizes that Australia is the continent that holds a grudge against all life forms trying to live on it. After all, this is the place that’s home to cute fluffy things that also happen to have hidden poison barbs.

Weeds that cause chemical burns so bad that people have actually killed themselves to escape the pain.

Crocodiles of such tremendous size that they could eat anything they damn well please.

Oh, and snakes that can eat those Crocodiles.

When you put people there, you’re intending for them to die or live in constant fear of the things that go bump in the day, night and mid-day brunch. Things are out to kill you at every moment of every day in Australia. People have long wondered how certain figures to come out of Australia were able to be so nonchalant about what were clearly dangerous animals. The answer is simple; Steve Irwin was comfortable around killer animals because killer animals were roaming outside his window every night he went to sleep. And given the fact the place started out as a penal colony, sometimes the most dangerous animal in Australia is still… man.

So when they got there and they encountered a culture of people who had been living in that environment for thousands of years and countless generations, they found a group of people who had very few fucks left to give. I’ve often talked about how creatures in folklore are based in the fears that people have in their day to day lives. For a lot of people in Europe and Asia this required adding a supernatural twist to the intangibles or the human element. But for the Aborigines it was pretty easy to know what to be afraid of – everything else.

Thus, the Aboriginal culture didn’t stray very far from the animist roots of most modern religions. They didn’t need to put a face on their fears because their fears already had a face. That face may have been the face of a big fucking crocodile, but it was still a face none-the-less.

Aw look, he’s smiling

This means that many of the things that are focused on in the stories of the Aborigines are based on what was already around them. They would create stories of crocodiles that just happened to be bigger than the crocodiles they already knew or spiders that happened to hold grudges. These are things that could happen anytime one of them just wandered too far away from their home. So everything was just a bigger version of what they knew, plants, animals, even the universe.

But that’s where things get fun, because the universe in the Aboriginal mythology is a beautifully complicated structure that may bend some minds just thinking about it. For, you see, the Aborigines believe in a thing called the Dreamtime. Dreamtime is almost like a singularity as everything that is, was or ever will be is already in the Dreamtime. Dreamtime stretches throughout the past, present, and future and can be accessed by mortal beings. Ancestors exist in the Dreamtime and all worldly knowledge can be accessed from those ancestors. In essence, the spiritual plane of the Aboriginal people is the embodiment of infinity. For the rest of the world, this usually requires a great deal of weed to envision.

“So, like, what if we’ve always been here and always will be?”

For the Aborigines, it was just better than what they were already dealing with.

Of course, with that much mind bending and thought provoking stuff, when they did happen to create a cryptid that was more than just “really big crocodile”, it was pretty wild stuff. We’ll take a look at those in the next Altered Mythologies entry and you can probably expect some crazy shit. After all, they existed for centuries in a place that was more out of control than Georgia and their equivalent to Florida was an island populated with adorable little murder machines.

And they don’t even need “stand your ground”.