Irish stonemasons used a secret language known as bearlager na saor (also as Bearla lagair)., said to have come down from the great ancestor of masons, Goban Saor (variously spelt and pronounced gabawn seer). The mythic Goban Saor – Goban the builder – was, and is, the subject of a body of folktale traditions that present him as a clever and greatly skilled artisan who always outwits those who try to harm him or to refuse his rightful fee for work done. It was he who handed down the closely guarded skills of the stonemason, together with their confidential speech.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, American word sleuths became aware of a curious language spoken by itinerant Irish workers, particularly stone masons. It was neither Old Irish, Gaelic or even Shelta, but seemed to have some similarities to all of these, as well as its own characteristics. One companion of itinerants, named A T Sinclair, inquired further into this among older Irish stone masons in Massachusetts and discovered that ‘On mentioning the subject to some old Irish masons here in Allston, I was surprised to find they could speak this language which they called “Bearla lagair na saor … a large number of other old Irishmen knew there was such a mason’s talk called ” Bearla lagair” ‘[1]
Sinclair’s informants told him this was a language known only to stonemasons and that no apprentice could claim his ‘indenture’, or trade qualification, without being able to speak it. Masons were forbidden to mention this speech to anyone who was not one of their guild, including their own families. The trade secrets also included special signs, skills and ways of using their tools, together with a variety of rules that must be followed and through which a mason could identify himself to another adept of the craft. Sinclair also collected stories about the Goban Saor, including this one which gives the origin of a famous stone mason’s mark:
Sometimes a love of adventure led the Goban Saor to wander incognito as a common workman. His renown as an architect and artistic sculptor was widespread. One simple story which amuses these workingmen is this. The Goban Saor once, in a foreign land, applied to the master- builder of a cathedral for work. ” What can you do? ” asked the master. “Try me and see,” was the laconic reply. Then the builder placed him in a work-shed alone by himself, and, pointing to a block of stone, said facetiously, “Carve from that a cat with two tails.” The shed was fastened at night, and the next morning Goban had disappeared. When the master unfastened the shed and looked in, he found that the block of stone had been most beautifully carved into a cat with two tails. With an exclamation of surprise, he ejaculated, “It was the Goban Saor himself! No other human being could do such superb work, or so quickly.”[2]
Sinclair gave a selection of Bearla lagair words, mostly those similar to the travellers’ language of Shelta, including:
Un twede dut na bini – do you speak Mason’s talk?
Minkur – low people
Shin – sing
Eolor – mortar
Glom -yell
Miar – devil, bad luck
Shihukh – whisky, with Sinclair’s comment ‘a large number of other words also’
Skrugal – throat
(NB – diacriticals removed here and throughout)
Bearla lagair was still being spoken by older Irish stonemasons resident in London during the 1970s and was reported to have been widely spoken among Cork stonemasons.[3]
In short, no one really knows exactly where this cryptolect comes from. But we do know that it existed as a secret language among Irish stonemasons and, perhaps, still does. The Stonemason’s Guild of St Stephen and St George maintains a ‘cosmopolitan’ version of Bearla lagaire developed around London and said to be a more sophisticated speech than the ‘argot used by rural rough masons’. The Guild says that the language, which they call ‘bine’, was regularly used in the UK and Ireland until the 1980s and that there are still stonemasons ‘who still hold and use the language today.’[4]
[3] Mudcat Café thread, ‘Goban Saor’, May and August 2002. See also Brian Cleeve, ‘The Secret Language’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 287 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 252-262, 363.
Frederick Deeming with a moustache drawn on the image in ink, Victoria Police Museum
Could he have been ‘Jack the Ripper? The remarkably evil life of Frederick Deeming is one of the most chilling stories of Australian, and global, crime. Even if he did not commit the Whitechapel murders of 1888, his known slayings make him one of the worst serial killers of the nineteenth century.
Beaten by his unstable father and imbued with fear of damnation by his God-obsessed mother, Frederick Bailey Deeming got off to a bad start in life almost as soon as he was born in Leicestershire, England in 1853. He was already known as ‘Mad Fred’ when he went to sea around the age of sixteen and soon became a cunning criminal. Fraud and false pretences were his favoured offences, though he also thieved from time to time.[i]
With an ability to turn on the charm and a persuasive way with words, the ruggedly handsome young sailor with blue eyes, fair hair and a ginger moustache had little trouble forming serious relationships with respectable women. In 1881 he married Marie James in England. By the middle of the next year he was in Sydney where he had jumped ship and started work as a plumber and gas fitter. By the time Marie arrived to join him he had already served a six-week sentence for stealing gas-burners. The couple would have four children over the next few years during which Deeming briefly ran his own plumbing business until he was declared bankrupt and serving two weeks for committing perjury. In January 1888 he turned up, alone, in Cape Town, South Africa where, using the alias Henry Lawson, he conducted several successful swindles.
Back in England in 1890, and still calling himself Henry Lawson, Deeming bigamously married Helen Matheson, using the proceeds of a fraud to pay for the wedding. Soon after, he had to quickly leave the country and escaped to Uruguay, South America. He was later arrested there, returned to England and given nine months in prison for fraud, though he avoided any charge of bigamy.
After release in 1891, Deeming took another alias, Albert Williams, and rented a house in Rainhill, Lancashire. By this time, his deserted wife and children had tracked him down and Marie revealed her husband’s bigamy to Helen. Apparently too embarrassed at the social stigma this would bring upon her, Helen did not inform the authorities. Deeming, now fearing what else Marie night reveal about him, made an elaborate pretence of reconciliation and convinced her and the children to join him at Rainhill. It was a fatal error.
Shortly after the reconciliation ‘Williams’, now posing as an army officer, married for a third time. The unlucky woman was Emily Mather who, after the expensive wedding, sailed with her new husband to India where he said he had a posting. But Deeming changed the arrangements and the newlyweds went to Melbourne instead. Here they rented a house in Windsor. Always ostentatious, even if mostly with other peoples’ money, the outwardly charming ‘Druin’, as Deeming was now styling himself, soon became well known in the suburb. But in January 1892, he and his third wife disappeared.
Now, a chain of events began that would lead to Deeming’s eventual downfall. The next tenant in the Windsor house complained of a foul smell in the premises. A hearthstone in the bedroom was pulled up to reveal Emily’s badly decomposed remains. She had been beaten around the head and her throat slashed. In the house police also found a copy of the invitation to the wedding banquet of A O Williams and Helen.
In a little over a week, the police tracked Deeming down to the Western Australian mining town of Southern Cross where he was calling himself Baron Swanston and posing as an engineer. After murdering Emily he had committed some further frauds and sailed to Sydney. There the apparently personable murderer soon convinced another young woman to become his fiancée. He then left for Western Australia, arranging with her to follow him when he was settled.
Deeming’s arrest ignited what would become a national and international press sensation. An English journalist used details from Australian sources to backtrack Deeming to his previous rented premises in Lancashire. The authorities there were prompted to investigate. Under the kitchen floor they found the bodies of Marie and the four children, all with their throats cut. The enormity of Deeming’s crimes was now apparent.
The press certainly thought so and went into one of the regular ‘feeding frenzies’ that have become all too familiar since. A kind of mass public hysteria arose, known as ‘Deemania’. The accused was called ‘a human tiger’ and his actions dubbed ‘the crime of the century’. He would also be described, inaccurately, as ‘ape-like’ and a forensic expert would later claim that his skull was similar to that of a gorilla.[ii]
Although entitled to the presumption of innocence, Deeming was effectively tried and found guilty in the newspapers of the English-speaking world. He was tried for the murder of Emily under the name of ‘Williams’. His defence, which included Alfred Deakin, destined to be an early Australian Prime Minister, argued that the accused had been denied a fair trial, which was probably true. Deeming was almost certainly an epileptic, having suffered from fits for much of his life. He may also have been a schizophrenic fantasist who actually became the identities he invented as he committed his crimes. But after an unwise address to the jury from the dock and some unconvincing psychiatric testimony, he was quickly found guilty and sentenced to death.
After being refused leave to appeal by the Privy Council, Edward Bailey Deeming, alias Albert Williams and at least four other pseudonyms, was hanged on 23 May 1892. Always a poser, he walked to the gallows smoking a cigar. His last words were reportedly ‘Lord, receive my spirit’. Outside the prison wall, twelve thousand people assembled to await the news that the monster was dead.
His death was celebrated in an English children’s street rhyme based on the then popular belief that Deeming was Jack the Ripper:
On the twenty-first of May, Frederick Deeming passed away; On the scaffold he did say — “Ta-ra-da-boom-di-ay!” “Ta-ra-da-boom-di-ay!” This is a happy day, An East End holiday, The Ripper’s gone away.[iii]
Deeming was undoubtedly guilty of the horrendous murders of his children and two wives, with the likely intent to kill another. But could he have been ‘Jack the Ripper?
In the overheated press speculations on the case, the fact that Deeming’s movements in 1888 were murky, together with the grisly nature of his crimes, led to speculation that he might have been the Whitechapel killer. Some credibility was attached to the claim when Deeming told fellow prisoners that he was the ripper and also expressed a murderous dislike of women. This was based on his venereal infection, probably of syphilis, contracted from a prostitute during his extensive travels. When directly questioned about this on the eve of his execution, deeming refused to confirm or deny the possibility.
But the theory has so many flaws that it is taken seriously by very few.[iv] A major problem is that Deeming’s murders bore little resemblance to the butchery of most of the Whitechapel victims. Nor were the women he killed prostitutes. Unlike the Whitechapel murderer, Deeming was not known to have taken trophies of his victims. Finally, wherever Deeming was during those bloody months of 1888 – probably South Africa – there is no evidence that he was anywhere near London, let alone the east end.
But there is no doubt that he slew Emily, the crime for which he eventually hanged, and that he also killed Marie and his children. He never confessed to any of these murders but while in prison during the lead up to his trial and as he awaited execution, Deeming wrote his autobiography, later destroyed, and poetry, which included the lines:
[iv] Over fifty books have been written about Deeming, often revolving around the unlikely belief that he was Jack the Ripper. See Worldcat Identities, ‘Deeming, Frederick Bailey 1853-1892, https://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n2007021186/, accessed July 2022.
Ritratto di Giovanni Tolu eseguito a Sassari dal fotografo Averardo Lori e tratto dal libro di Enrico Costa del 1897
As a boy, the neo-Marxist philosopher and writer, Antonio Gramsci was fascinated by the tales he heard of Giovanni Tolu, the Sardinian bandit. Gramsci went on to a celebrated career, dying in a fascist prison in 1937. Amongst other things, he was an influential theorist of power. Tolu was one of the powerless. Little-known, today, his story is a classic example of the outlaw hero, or ‘social bandit’.
The lofty granite mountains of Sardinia, groves of olives and grapes, scrubland and forested pathways are impenetrable to those who do not know them. Steep valleys and chasms complete this lonely landscape, ideal for bandits. But it was the fractured politics and economic conditions of the island that for centuries made it a byword for bandits.
Giovanni Tolu’s (1822-1896) banditry began in 1850. He was a hard-working and respectable farmer who came into conflict with the local priest, a man named Pittui. Smitten by the priest’s maid, Maria Francesca Meloni Ru, Tolu eloped with her in 1850. Marriage and almost everything else was controlled by the church then and when Pittui found the couple, the pregnant Maria was dragged back to her parents’ home. Enraged and insulted, Tolu later attacked the priest in the street, beating him almost to death. This dire act initiated his thirty or-so year bandit career.
Despite beating up the priest, Tolu was deeply religious and superstitious. He used violence like a good social bandit should – only when necessary and to defend himself. Like many other bandits in Catholic cultures, he also claimed to have always sought divine guidance before murdering, as his biographer described:
‘One day he decided to murder a certain Salvatoro Moro. As I went to his house … I begged the Mother of God to enlighten me and to show me whether this man really deserved death. I also commended my soul to God in case I should be surprised and killed by my enemy’. Tolu apparently received the answer he sought: ‘After I had slain Moro I loaded my gun afresh, after which I said a ‘Hail Mary’ and prayed for the repose of the departed soul. In this way I learned that I had killed the body but not the soul of my enemy.’[1]
Tolu also murdered one of his accomplices who betrayed him. Despite these killings, he had the reputation of a good bandit. He was pursued for thirty years but managed to elude all those who came after him, killing several Carabinieri. He was later reunited with his and Maria’s grown-up daughter and lived a more or less respectable, and highly respected, life among a supportive regional community until his arrest in 1880. He was tried in a local court for murder but acquitted because he was acting in self-defence.
Shortly before his death, Tolu is said to have delivered his life story to the Sardinian lawyer and writer, Enrico Costa. As Costa tells it, he was sitting in his garden one sunny day when the then 74-year-old brigand appeared and handed him a manuscript, saying ‘I want … to give in this way a warning to my colleagues, a lesson to flighty young men and a word of advice as to the manner ln which the government should treat the poor people’.
Unlikely as this incident is – Tolu was illiterate – Costa turned his story into a book that was popular throughout Italy. Although much romanticised, there is no doubt that Tolu was considered a friend of the Sardinian poor and that they actively supported him in his bandit life. Tolu did not leave to see his life in book form, he died in 1896, the year before Costa’s book appeared[2] and became a popular hit in Italy.
The murderer’s knife seems to hang o’er their head,
This demon is hiding in a mysterious way,
Pray Heaven the villain is taken today.
These verses are from one of a number of street, or ‘broadside’, ballads produced about the Whitechapel murders, perpetrated by someone known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’.
When the Ripper first struck, London’s east end was already a byword for depravity and crime. From its origins and later development into a seething dockland and sailortown the district was rookery of sin which frequently proved everybody right about the bad things it was commonly said to spawn. But this was something especially grotesque.
Perhaps twenty minutes before 4am on 31 August 1888, a passing workman discovered the still warm body of ‘Polly’ Nichols in Buck’s Row, not far from Bethnal Green. It was a dreadful sight. Her head was almost severed by a savage slash through the throat and her abdomen was deeply gashed with a very sharp instrument. Her dress was pulled up to her waist, possibly related to her work as a prostitute. The attending surgeon noted a wine glass and a lot of blood in the gutter.
‘Polly’ was the street name of Mary Ann Nichols. She was forty-three years old, though looked ten years younger, and stood just over five feet tall with greying brown hair and grey eyes. An alcoholic, Polly was seen staggering drunk an hour earlier and spoke of her intention to find a client to pay for her night’s doss.
Eight days later, another dead prostitute was found. Annie Chapman has been sliced up much like Polly Nichols, but this time the killer had removed and taken away some internal organs. Alongside her right shoulder lay her small intestine. The uterus and part of the bladder had been removed. The mutilated remains lay in a yard in Hanbury Street and were discovered just before 6am. The attending surgeon thought the horrific wounds must have been inflicted by someone with ‘great anatomical knowledge’.
On 30 September, the remains of ‘Long Liz’ Stride and Catherine Eddowes are found. Swedish-born Stride, 45 years old, has her throat sliced open. She is not mutilated, unlike poor Catherine, whose body is not far away in Mitre Square. In her forties and just five feet tall, her intestines have been sliced out and placed over her right shoulder; the killer has taken a kidney for a souvenir, or worse, along with her uterus. Many of her other organs are also mutilated, including her lower eyelids. When the remains arrive at the mortuary, ‘A piece of deceased’s ear dropped from the clothing’.
These murders were committed in the streets, giving the killer little time to perform whatever dark urges drove him. The next one took place in a lodging house bed in Miller’s Court. With no one to disturb him the serial murderer now dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ thoroughly mutilated twenty-five-year-old Mary Kelly, scattering most of her body parts around her and on the bedside table. Both her breasts had been removed.
Several other women had been murdered in the Whitechapel area before Polly Nichols died. The circumstances of their deaths were not the same as those of the five women who are generally accepted as bona fide Ripper victims, but the press, the police and the public all speculated about a serial killer at work in the area. And there were other murders after the death of Mary Kelly, fueling a hysteria and a macabre mystery that persists to the present. These events were also featured in several street ballads.
The ballad business was in decline by now, finally bested by the superior technology and more effective distribution of newspapers and the sensational ‘penny blood’ magazines. But by the following year, if not long before, at least two Ripper ballads were being sold in Scotland, where a couple of gents were regaled by a ballad seller on his route to Inverness with no less than two classics of the genre. ‘The Demon Jack the Ripper’ focused on the fate of the last victim:
“The demon Jack the Ripper,
Has begun his work once more,
His hate for women is bitter,
He delights in human gore,
The last victim Mary Kelly,
But twenty-six year of age,
Has been served much worse by London’s curse,
You will say I will engage.
Chorus
The demon Jack the Ripper,
Is at work once more,
In Spitalfields Mary Kelly he killed
and left her in her gore.
The rough and ready verses gave a fair account of the state of Mary’s remains:
In the room where she was living.
Her naked body was found,
The Ripper no clue was giving
To those who lived around.
Her body was cut in pieces,
And portions taken away,
Her flesh ’tis shown stripped from her bones,
A terrible sight she lay.
There were some details of Mary’s Irish background and how she ‘fell into shame when to London she came’. Finally, the ballad voiced the question on every mind – when were the police – now considering the use of bloodhounds – going to catch the Ripper?
Where’s the noted bloodhounds,
That such wonders were to do,
That Jack the Ripper is not found
It must seem strange to you.
The authorities in London,
must adopt some more secret plan
Without bloodhounds to hunt him down
For he must be Satan and not a man.
The other song offered by the peddler was ‘The London Murderer’, a catalogue of the Ripper’s crimes and their instant notoriety:
This murderous history has spread thro’ the world.
Of all these poor women to Eternity hurled.
Again, the question why ‘the great men of our modern times’ ‘fail to discover these cowardly crimes’ and the fear in the streets:
Five millions of people cannot rest in their bed,
The murderer’s knife seems to hang o’er their head,
This demon is hiding in a mysterious way,
Pray Heaven the villain is taken today.
The world has ne’er known such cruelty before,
Not even abroad on some savage shore,
Tho’ for a time this monster may flee,
Burnt at the stake this fiend ought to be.
The ballad seller was rewarded with the sale of a shillings-worth of his stock, and a nice tip from his listeners.[1] His songs perfectly reflected the combined fascination with the grisly murders and the fear they produced in the streets of London and much further afield. And they probably helped it to multiply and spread.
[1] From The Inverness Courier, 15 February 1889. See also Paul Slade’s excellent Planet Slade site for more on murder ballads and much more besides at http://www.planetslade.com/index.html. Interestingly, Catherine Eddowes may have been involved with the street ballad trade herself in and around her hometown, see
The ships of Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia, “Géographe” and the “Naturaliste”, at Kupang, Timor. State Library of South Australia
In April 1801 French navigator Nicolas Baudin’s expedition was sailing off the south coast of what is now Western Australia. In the spirit of the age, Baudin was making a voyage of scientific investigation, as well as discovery. He was, of course, also spying on the British colony of New South Wales, though that was not verified until much later.[1]
The voyagers hoped not only to find new places and chart new coastlines but also to make contact with any Indigenous inhabitants they encountered. Equipped with his flagship Géographe and Naturaliste, under the command of Jacques Félix Emmanuel Hamelin, he was originally accompanied by a large group of scientists, artists and gardeners, though many of these became too ill to complete the voyage, five dying. Many of Baudin’s sailors were also at various stages of the extended expedition. One was lost in the large expanse of the Indian Ocean Baudin named Geographe Bay.
Or was he?
Timothée Armand Thomas Joseph Ambroise Vasse was born into a bourgeoise family in Dieppe, France in 1774. He grew up and was educated between Rouen, where his father was a legal official, and Dieppe, where members of his extended family lived. During the French Revolution he joined the army, was wounded and later discharged. After a few years as a civil servant, he vanished and joined Baudin’s expedition as a junior assistant helmsman on the Naturaliste. Vasse was in trouble by the time Naturaliste reached Isle de France. Captain Hamelin planned to dismiss him there but lost so many other sailors through desertion that he was forced to keep the troublesome twenty-seven-year-old aboard his ship.
On 30 May 1801, the voyagers encountered what is now Geographe Bay. They landed in small boats and set up camp while the scientists conducted their investigations of the flora and fauna in the area. A few days later, one of the boats was sunk at the Wonnerup Inlet and had to be abandoned. The shore party was rescued but some equipment was left behind.
Three days later, Vasse was aboard a small boat attempting to recover the equipment. But once again the small boat was swamped by the surf. The crew were washed ashore and only saved by a heroic sailor from another boat who swam ashore through the dangerous waters carrying a rope by which the castaways were able to haul themselves into the other boat.
Except for Timothée Vasse. Said to have been drinking, he lost his grip on the lifeline and sank into the surf. With no further sign of him, Vasse was presumed drowned and Hamelin made sail, apparently without bothering to confirm the fatality.
The fate of Timothée Vasse would have been simply another footnote in the long history of lost sailors if not for the rumours. Soon after the return of Baudin’s expedition to France in 1803 Parisians began hearing stories that Vasse had not drowned but had survived and been cast away on a strange and very distant shore. Baudin himself was dead by now, but the official expedition account, written by the zoologist on the expedition Francois Peron, discounted the possibility that Vasse had survived. But the rumours persisted and were published in European newspapers. According to these accounts, Vasse lived with the local people for some years then walked hundreds of kilometres of coast to eventually be picked up by an American whaler, handed to the British and subsequently imprisoned in England.
No other Europeans are known to have visited Geographe Bay until after the foundation of the Swan River colony in 1829. When early settlers came into contact with the Wardandi (Wardanup and other spellings) people of the southwest region they began to hear other stories. In 1838 George Fletcher Moore was told while visiting the Wonnerup area that Vasse did not drown. With the help of the local people, he lived for several years and died of natural causes somewhere between present day Dunsborough and Busselton.
He seems to have remained almost constantly upon the beach, looking out
for the return of his own ship, or the chance arrival of some other. He pined away gradually in anxiety, becoming daily, as the natives express it, weril, weril (thin, thin.) At last they were absent for some time, on a hunting expedition, and on their return they found him lying dead on the beach, within a stone s throw of the water’s edge.
They describe the body as being then swollen and bloated, either from incipient decomposition, or dropsical disease. His remains were not disturbed even for the purpose of burial, and the bones are yet to be seen.[2]
There were other versions of the tale. In one, Vasse was thought to have eventually been murdered. A ‘society in Paris’ was said to be offering a reward for the recovery of his bones – ‘the natives know where they are’, wrote one of the Swan River colony’s early settlers, Georgiana Molloy, in 1841.[3] In another, based on European features observed among Indigenous people around Geographe Bay, it was suggested that Vasse had fathered children with Wardandi women.[4]
Some attempts have since been made to resolve these conflicting possibilities. Among several books and articles on the subject[5] is one written by a descendant of Timothée Vasse. According to Alain Serieyx, family tradition holds that the lost sailor did survive and eventually return to France.[6] The book is a speculative fiction based on this belief but adds another thread to a fascinating tale.
Whether or not Timothée Vasse lived, pined, and died as a lone white man on a distant continent will never be known for sure. Whatever his fate, his memory is preserved in the name of the Vasse River and of the Vasse region of southwestern Australia.
[1] Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby (transl. and eds.), French Designs on Colonial New South Wales: François Péron’s Memoir on the English Settlements in New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land and the Archipelagos of the Great Pacific Ocean, The Friends of the State Library of South Australia Inc., Adelaide, 2014.
[2]The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal 5 May 1838, p. 71.
[3] Alexandra Hasluck, Georgiana Molloy: portrait with background, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1955.
[4] Oldfield, Augustus. “On the Aborigines of Australia.” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, vol. 3, 1865, pp. 215–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3014165. Accessed July 2023, P. 219. Oldfield mistakenly thought Vasse was one of Baudin’s scientists, but his opinion was based on his own observations of the Geographe Bay area.
Everyone laughs at something, or someone, though not necessarily the same things or ones. Humour is notoriously culture-specific and often does not translate across ethnic, religious, linguistic and other borders, even those of taste.
On the other hand, global storying is full of tricksters and funsters who carry out a remarkably similar set of pranks, japes and general mischief.
Often, these are designed to puncture the pretensions of the high and mighty, to ridicule the rich and to take the pompous down a peg or two.
Others revolve around the most basic common denominator of bodily functions. A Korean story of a character called ‘General Pumpkin’ belongs to a group of stories concerned with titanic farts, a theme that also appears in German tradition and in the 1001 Nights.
General Pumpkin
The son of a rich man eats nothing but pumpkins. Fields of them. So greedy for pumpkins was the boy that he eventually bankrupted his family. He was not popular in his home village because his gluttonous pumpkin consumption made him fart loudly, frequently and with overpowering odour. When they could no longer stand the stink, they turned the boy out of their village.
The boy wandered from village to village, working frequently because he was so big and string from eating pumpkins and because he only wanted to be paid in pumpkins. But after a few days he always lost these jobs because his titanic farting was too much for everyone to bear.
One day he arrived at a famous and wealthy temple, high up in the mountains. The Abbot saw the large boy and thought that he would be able to help the monks deal with the robbers who were harassing the temple. The robber leader would disguise himself as a traveller and stay at the temple so that he could let his band of brigands in during the night. This had been going on for some time and the monks were sick of losing their property.
So, the Abbott quickly invited the boy inside and asked him what he liked to eat. The monks happily cooked the enormous amount of pumpkins the gluttonous boy demanded, then asked for his help. That night, the robber chief again entered the temple with his usual intention of letting his men inside. He was curious about the many pumpkins he saw and was told that a ‘General Pumpkin’ was staying at the monastery. The robber asked how many men the General had and was told that he was alone and would eat all the pumpkins himself. The robber decided to hold off letting his men into the buildings while he waited to witness this startling sight.
Meanwhile, General Pumpkin told the monks to take their drums to every corner of the monastery and hide until midnight. As the robber chief waited, inside the monastery and his men massed outside the walls, a sudden rumble thundered through the premises filling the air with a dreadful stench. General Pumpkin had farted. The monks pounded on their drums and at the same time, a great wind sprang up and blew down the monastery walls, killing the robber chief and all his men.
The Abbott and the monks were grateful, despite the stink, and allowed General Pumpkin to live at the monastery and supplied him with as many pumpkins as he wanted. He lived there for many years and in old age was asked to help three rich young brothers rid their family of a white tiger that has killed their father. In the process of helping, General Pumpkin accidentally let go one of his great farts, killing the tiger. Unfortunately, so explosive was the fart that it killed him as well. The three brothers found his remains in a pool of shit. They gave him a fitting burial and mourned him as they did their father.[i]
General Pumpkin’s humorous gluttony is put to good purpose, though eventually ends his life. The incongruous nature of the story is found in many other forms of folk humour.
[i] Retold from Zong In-Sob, Folk Tales from Korea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952), no. 36, pp. 66-68, who apparently had the story from an earlier collection published in Seoul in 1925. Several other versions on the internet.
A mask by an unidentified Makonde artist of the mid-20th century QCC Art Gallery of the City University of New York, Smithsonian Magazine.
Once, they were thought to be. Then they were not. Now, it seems possible that many might be.
Recent genetic research into the origins of the Swahili people of East Africa strongly suggests that the ancient account of their kings, known as the Kilwa Chronicle, is substantially correct. In that narrative, the Swahili people of Africa are said to have originated in Persia (Iran) and began mixing with Africans one thousand or more years ago.[1]
Other research over the last decade or so has also provided support for the likelihood that traditional narratives, previously dismissed as fables, probably do record events that happened in deep time.
The frenzy of story collecting that accompanied the mercantile and colonial expansion of Europe from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century led to the first attempts to understand the world’s massive body of folk and traditional narrative. Excited scholars proposed many theories of the origins and diffusion of these tales. Was it simply coincidence that the same stories, in one or another variation, appeared time and time again among cultures not known to have ever had any direct connection? How old were they? Could they be true?
The answer to the first question may be ‘as old as time’, at least human time.
Using the Gaia space telescope, astronomers studying the constellations and how they appear in various mythologies across the world have recently added further evidence for the antiquity of story. The star pattern known as the Pleiades was the object of mythmaking in many ancient cultures, many of which refer to seven stars that make it up. Today, we can only see six stars, but 100 000 years ago, seven stars would have been visible, strongly suggesting that the Australian Aboriginal Seven Sisters songline, the Greek story of the seven daughters of Atlas and similar storylines in African, Native American and Asian traditions had their origins in the way things were one hundred millennia ago.[2]
The answer to the second question is equally momentous.
Stories of a great flood appear so often in so many of the world’s narrative traditions that many have concluded there must have been some such event or events in antiquity. Noah and his Ark may be the most familiar to many, but there are an immense number of variations on the theme. Until recently, the trend has been to dismiss oral traditions of historical or pre-historic events as fantasy. But research linking scientific evidence with indigenous stories has brought about a more nuanced interpretation.[3] One topic which can now be linked to provable pre-historic events is the inundation of land. Twenty or more Australian Aboriginal stories of such events are thought to be around 10 000 years old.[4]
One of those traditions is that of the Narrinyeri (Ngarrindjeri and other spellings) people of Lake Alexandrina and the Lower Murray region of what is now South Australia. They recounted a tradition of their great ancestor, Nurundere (also Martummere) to German Lutheran missionary, Heinrich Meyer, in the 1840s. This version of the story, part of a longer sequence, tells how Nurundere came to create a passage between Kangaroo Island and the mainland by causing the sea to ‘flow’ and so punishing his two fleeing wives.[5] Kangaroo Island was separated from what is now the mainland of South Australia around seven thousand years ago.
In 2020, archaeologists working in north-western Australia discovered Aboriginal settlements beneath the sea near the Burrup Peninsula at Cape Brugieres. The drowning of these sites is thought to have occurred between 7000 to 8500 years ago.[6]
Using weather patterns and other evidence, researchers have discovered that Polynesian oral traditions of sunken lands can be correlated with geological events.[7] Subsequent research in Australia found evidence that Aboriginal stories of a great flood on the east coast of the continent reflect a verified rising of sea levels around 7000 years in the past.[8]
Related research suggests that indigenous traditions in both Australia and Brazil might carry memories of the megafauna who were extinct by 40 000 years ago.[9] Adrienne Mayor has looked closely at the connections between fossil remains and First American myths and legends and at the archaeological evidence for warrior women.[10] Other researchers have used DNA evidence to trace the migration of narrative motifs from South Siberia to North America around twelve thousand years ago.[11]
In 2020, a team of geologists suggested that the Gunditjmara story explaining the origins of the volcano they call Budj Bim might relate to an event that occurred in southeastern Australia around 37 000 years ago. They suggest that ‘If aspects of oral traditions pertaining to Budj Bim or its surrounding lava landforms reflect volcanic activity, this could be interpreted as evidence for these being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence’.[12]
The extensive amount of archaeological and palaeontological research currently underway in all parts of the world is revealing new evidence of human occupation, journeying and interacting.[13] In recent years some of these discoveries and interpretations of them have rewritten the history of humankind. Some important parts of that history are held in age old tales.
[1] Brielle, E.S., Fleisher, J., Wynne-Jones, S. et al. ‘Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast’. Nature 615, 866–873 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05754-w.
[2] Efrosyni Boutsikas, Stephen C. McCluskey and John Steele (eds), Advancing Cultural Astronomy: Studies in Honour of Clive Ruggles, Springer International Publishing, 2021.
[3] Timothy Burberry, Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events, Routledge, 2021.
[4] Patrick Nunn, The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World, Bloomsbury, London, 2018.
[5] Collected by Meyer and quoted in Rev George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, E S Wigg & Son, Adelaide, 1879, pp. 60-61.
[6] Benjamin J, O’Leary M, McDonald J, Wiseman C, McCarthy J, Beckett E, et al. (2020) ‘Aboriginal artefacts on the continental shelf reveal ancient drowned cultural landscapes in northwest Australia’. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0233912.
[7] Patrick D Nunn, Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2009.
[8] Patrick D. Nunn & Nicholas J. Reid (2016) ‘Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago’, Australian Geographer, 47:1, 11-47, DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539.See also Patrick Nunn, The Edge of Memory.
[10] Adrienne Mayor, Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton University Press, 2005 and The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton University Press, 2014.
[11] Korotayev, Andrey. ‘Genes and Myths: Which Genes and Myths Did the Different Waves of the Peopling of Americas Bring to the New World.’ History & Mathematics (2017): n. pag. Print.
[12] Erin L. Matchan, David Phillips, Fred Jourdan, and Korien Oostingh, ‘Early human occupation of southeastern Australia: New insights from 40Ar/39Ar dating of young volcanoes’, Geology, Volume 48, Number 4, 1 April 2020 at
After surviving, this must have been one of the first questions our earliest ancestors asked themselves. It might have been asked around the same time that they wondered where they had come from and how their part of the world originated. It seems likely that the stories they evolved to explain what we generally think of as ‘creation’ also included guidelines for living together and for coexisting with the animals, plants and natural phenomena of the planet.
This consciousness may have evolved around the same time as language and the ability to shape it into narratives that could be told by one to another – and another and another, in a multi-generational chain of tellings. When writing evolved, those stories, perhaps thousands of years old by then, could be written down. They were. The earliest written works we have are tales of unknowable forces, titanic beings and tectonic configurations of earth, sky, land and sea. They are also tales of interaction between gods, monsters, demigods, heroes and, eventually, everyday mortals.[1]
Creation stories were told probably by all peoples wherever they came together into communities to get on with the business of living and dying. As well as engaging with the unknowable cosmic conundrums plumbed by all origin myths and, later, by organised religions, people needed to develop ways of getting on and getting by. This meant figuring out what worked, what did not and agreeing on the rules for living together.
How should procreation be managed? The universal human problem of ensuring a degree of separation in the gene pool was worked out and encoded in stories.
What should be done with the aged? Despatched when they could no longer contribute to the tribe, clan, or supportive group in which they had lived out their lives? Or did they have something unique to provide to the group? Wisdom, perhaps?
What is fair, equitable? What is not? Who should decide, and how?
Evil? What did that consist of and how could it be avoided or otherwise managed?
The unknowable. In deep time, pretty well everything in the natural world and beyond – including death. And then what?
These, and other fundamentals, were dealt with through narratives – myths, legends, fables, ‘fairy’ tales, as we now term them. Not only were stories like these evolved, told, written and ultimately printed around the world, they tended to be remarkably similar to each other. Mystical beings made the world. Gods – or a god – ran the afterlife. Heroes brought fire, descended to the underworld, or slew monsters, mostly to the ultimate benefit of their people. A great flood drowned the earth. Evil spirits abounded. Devils and demons had to be outwitted. Animals, places and everything else had to be named and their characteristics accounted for. People did stupid things. People did wicked things. Sometimes they were held to account and received their just desserts. Often, whether saints or sinners, the protagonists of stories were transformed. Or not. Life not only had to be lived, it had to be storied.
These processes, at once banal and profound, have been going on in storytelling since as long as we know.[2] As well as their speech, people hold onto the tales carried within their language. Many of these are carried on the tongue rather than the page. But even where oral communication has been largely replaced by print and visual media, the same old tales continue to be told in books, films, digital games.[3]
How old are these stories? The answer to that question may be ‘as old as time’, at least human time.
Using the Gaia space telescope, astronomers studying the constellations and how they appear in various mythologies across the world have recently added further evidence for the antiquity of story. The star pattern known as the Pleiades was the object of mythmaking in many ancient cultures, many of which refer to seven stars that make it up. Today, we can only see six stars, but 100 000 years ago, seven stars would have been visible, strongly suggesting that the Australian Aboriginal Seven Sisters songline, the Greek story of the seven daughters of Atlas and similar storylines in African, Native American and Asian traditions had their origins one hundred millennia ago.[4]
Could these stories possibly be true? Do they somehow record historical, or even pre-historical, events?
The truth that western scholars sought, and mostly still do, is an objective reality based on verifiable evidence. That version is generally given in a linear sequence, originally through chronicles, later in histories, that present a more or less coherent narrative of events through time. But this is a very European notion. Elsewhere in the world, time is not streaming from past to present and into the future.
The Australian Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ (a western attempt to describe it), like many other indigenous mythologies and spiritualities, exists in an ‘always-ever’ form in which these neat chronological divisions do not exist. The past is here now and the future is held in the past, all of which could well be happening right now. And is. I have been told by Aboriginal people of evil night beings who lurk at a particular location. The traditional owners of what is now known as ‘Nyungar country’ in Western Australia, will not go near that place after dark.
Nor are stories of the past necessarily told through one voice or perspective. The people who migrated south through the tenth to thirteenth centuries into what is now Mexico evolved a culturally diplomatic form of storytelling that made space for the interpretations of different, previously warring groups who were now allied through intermarriage and common interest. When the stories of these people, who we know as ‘Aztecs’, were told, different speakers could stand up and tell their version of particular, usually traumatic, events.
In these tellings, chronology had little purchase as stories flowed between different periods, often in what western scholars perceived as confusing repetition and so, as evidence of degraded or incoherent and fragmentary forms of oral transmission. Modern scholarship has revealed that repetition was a necessary feature of Aztec historical storytelling. Their historical truth was a communal, consensual one, a composite of the various and often conflictual meanings of what had happened to them.[5]
Humankind’s body of story remains in obscure publications and vast archives around the world, many of which are not even catalogued, let alone fathomed.[6] These narrative treasures, known and still unknown, are the fundamental cultural heritage of humanity. To allow them to languish is to abandon the roots of our being and the lessons they contain for living and dying on planet earth. Confronting though it may be, this is the human condition.
Scientists also speculate that the very act of telling stories, of whatever kind, is itself essential to being human and surviving. Our brains process stories, whether ‘true’ or ‘fictional’, in ways that we find compelling as we try and understand the world and our place in it. Through telling and retelling ‘the metanarrative of human culture spins a half-real, half-fictional reality’.[7] Through this reality we achieve empathy, the state that allows us to share and comprehend the emotions of others as presented in stories that rehearse the primalities of existence. Fundamentally, these are benefits of cooperating with each other and understanding the consequences of not doing so.[8]
It seems that we instinctively respond to the deep meanings within these narratives. Anthropologist and author David Bowles recounts how his study of the Nahuatl indigenous Mexican myth brought him to a sense of self through an understanding that the Aztec, and all humanity, inhabit ‘a liminal space between creation and destruction, order and chaos’, understanding this fundamental equilibrium is ‘A gift bequeathed by the ancients to all of us, their biological and spiritual children alike.’[9] We can’t all learn to speak Nahuatl, but we can read the stories in translation and gain something of Bowles’s insight into self and the cosmos.
In keeping with the reworking of the past to present different views, traditional stories are frequently reinterpreted by fiction writers, especially from a feminist perspective. Psychologists and others involved in various forms of therapy are drawing on ancient traditions to help patients with a range of psychological, emotional and other problems.[10]
The meanings and purposes of the tales may differ between cultures, often in ways that outsiders cannot comprehend. But the global reverberation of the same narratives told across time and space resonates of common concerns beyond specific periods, places and storytellers. Story and storying confirm the essential oneness of human beings, now scientifically proven by genetics, with any two individuals differing by a negligible measure of DNA.[11]
* Referencing Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (1992)
[1] McCarthy, J., Sebo, E., & Firth, M. (2023). ‘Parallels for cetacean trap feeding and tread-water feeding in the historical record across two millennia’. Marine Mammal Science, 1– 12. https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.13009.
[2] Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K. et al. ‘Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling’. Nat Commun 8, 1853 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02036-8.
[3] Claudia Schwabe (ed), The Fairy Tale and Its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture, Special Issue of Humanities 2016, 5, 81; doi:10.3390/h5040081, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities, accessed June 2017.
[4] Efrosyni Boutsikas, Stephen C. McCluskey and John Steele (eds), Advancing Cultural Astronomy: Studies in Honour of Clive Ruggles, Springer International Publishing, 2021.
[6] A case in point is the discovery of a field collection of tales made in Germany at the time the Grimms were busy elsewhere, see Franz Xaver von Schonwerth (Author), Erika Eichenseer (Editor), Engelbert Suss (Illustrator), Maria Tatar (Translator), The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales, Penguin, 2015. Many of the stories are like those collected and/or anthologised by the Grimms, yet they are given without editing and are often darkly or perplexingly different to those that have become canonical through the unbalancing influence of the heavily edited tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
[7] Le Hunte, Bem & Golembiewski, ‘Stories have the power to save us: A neurological framework for the imperative to tell stories’, Arts and Social Sciences Journal, 5(2), January 2014.
[10] The works of Carl Jung on ‘archetypes’ and of Joseph Campbell on the hero’s journey are the most influential. For other theories of heroic narrative and its significance see Robert A Segal (ed), In Quest of the Hero, Princeton University Press, 1990 for a survey of the main theories up to the 1990s.
GRISTLY HISTORY 