The Dieri people inhabited the Tirari Desert. The Lutheran missionaries that established the Bethesda Mission on the Cooper in their first report stated that the Dieri ‘are cannibals and lead an unchaste life’ and infanticide was reportedly widespread. Persuading the Dieri to listen to what the missionaries wanted to teach them was difficult, as the Dieri were nomadic. They came and went as they pleased and found Christian concepts problematic. ‘You say that Jesus is everywhere, but I haven’t seen his tracks anywhere,’, they said. ‘We like fire; it would be nice in hell.’
The Dieri practised bone pointing-, a unique Aboriginal ritual that was documented by the Lutherans. In revenge for some offence, an aggrieved Dieri would single out the perpetrator, and point at him with a bone that had been ritually decorated. The person so pointed at would go away and die. The missionaries were baffled by the phenomenon, and struggled to come to terms with it. They did everything they could to save the victims but it was no use; they seemed simply to will themselves to death.
On a modest concrete plinth outside the South Australian Museum is a stone object of great interest and antiquity—a tree, so say the Dieri people of the lower Cooper, that once held up the sky.
In 1859, when he was exploring the eastern shore of Lake Eyre, Alfred Howitt was told by the Dieri—‘an idle, incorrigibly treacherous, lying race’ as he then thought them—of three sacred stone trees. One was on the Clayton River, another west of Killalpaninna on the Cooper, the third on Salt Creek-later to be named the Warburton.
When Pastor Reuther at Killalpaninna got to hear about this, he sent an eight-horse cart 40 kilometres to retrieve the one from the Cooper. It was dragged back over the sandhills and set up outside his house. Somewhat surprisingly, the missionary then asked the Dieri to enact their pagan rituals around the tree. They set about it with gusto, tearing their flesh and painting the tree with their blood.
When Reuter retired in 1906, he had the tree sewn into canvas bags and carted down to Marree, where it was put on the Ghan and taken south. It was uncovered in a back yard in coastal Victor Harbor many years later and given to the South Australian Museum. No one’s found the other two: somewhere out there in the sandhills they’re most likely still holding up the sky. |
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