Atlas Essay — 2026-08-10
Myths That Remember Sahul
Flood traditions of Australia, lutruwita (Tasmania) and New Guinea
The water does not arrive once. It cuts Spencer Gulf through a marsh. It races over a Noongar plain. It fills Yotefa Bay where gardens once stood. In Gippsland the creator’s son makes the first pair of bullroarers, children carry one home to the women, and the country goes down under the sea. In Arnhem Land a python wakes, rises into the sky and calls up the first monsoon, and the roaring board swung at his ceremony is not a picture of him but his body, his fangs and his voice. Across the old continent of Sahul, ninety-five traditions give the flood a face, a path and a place — and not one of them stops at the drowning. Water takes a world apart and hands back another, and the world it hands back is the one people are living in: the coastline, the island, the crossing that can no longer be walked, the wet season, the clan, and the law about who may hear a sacred sound.
Country became sea
At the glacial minimum, Sahul was not Australia with a temporary northern bridge attached. It was a continent in its own right. New Guinea formed its mountain wall. Cape York reached north across the Torres plain. Lake Carpentaria occupied an interior basin. The Arafura shelf was open country. Lutruwita/Tasmania joined the mainland through the Bassian plain. The modern coastline cuts through that older geography like a watermark.
The retreat came in a human lifetime and over many lifetimes. Alan Williams and colleagues estimate that Sahul lost about 2.12 million square kilometres of continental shelf after the glacial maximum, roughly ninety percent of it between 14,600 and 8,000 years ago. The average coast moved 139 kilometres inland; in some regions it travelled more than 300. Lake Carpentaria admitted marine water, the Bassian corridor broke, the western shelves narrowed and the low country between New Guinea and Australia became Torres Strait.
The companion essay Old Sahul reconstructs that continental world through archaeology, ancestry, language and exchange. The map here turns to the human record of its ending and to later water catastrophes remembered in the same continental field. These are not versions of one flood. They remember rising seas, storms, rivers, broken coastal barriers, tsunamis and volcanic collapse; the gold rings mark other ways water made and erased places. Together they show what flooding means from the ground: a path closes, an island appears, an old coast becomes reef, a community leaves.
The southern arc
Along the southern coast, stories do not merely say that water rose. They remember the shape of what was lost. Narungga country holds Spencer Gulf as a former plain: level ground, a marsh in the middle, lagoons where the gulf now opens. A giant kangaroo cuts the channel and marine water pours north. The remembered feature is diagnostic because a long gulf occupies the old lowland. Nunn and Reid compare its depths with a coastline between about 9,330 and 12,460 years ago.
The first survey treated Spencer Gulf as one dot. Narungga-led work makes the record richer. On Guuranda/Yorke Peninsula, Badhara and Ngarna narratives also describe the coast splitting, the sea invading and Wardang/Waraldi becoming island country. Amy Roberts, Adrian Mollenmans, Lester-Irabinna Rigney and Geoffrey Bailey compare Wardang’s separation with a shoreline about 8,500 to 7,400 years old. The map therefore gives this tradition its own dot rather than making one Narungga narrative stand for an entire coast.
Farther south, Ngarrindjeri traditions send Ngurunderi’s fleeing wives toward Karta, Kangaroo Island. They cross the former land bridge when he calls up the water: wave follows wave, driving them toward The Pages, while Backstairs Passage becomes sea. The spelling Ngurunderi follows a recent study coauthored by the Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Corporation; written records also give Ngurunduri, Nurundere, Nurunduri and Ooroondorie. At MacDonnell Bay a productive country is covered by a sea that never returns. Around Narrm/Port Phillip, the bay lies where people once hunted kangaroo on dry land. These are different moral worlds laid over the same physical reversal—familiar country becoming impassable water.
“Long ago there was land to the south of Gippsland where there is now sea.”
Fison & Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880), p. 269
Gippsland gives the southern arc its most startling ritual scene. Kurnai children find a turndun, the local bullroarer, and carry it home. The instrument belongs to restricted men’s ceremony; the children show it to women. Immediately the ground crumbles and all is water. Nunn and Reid place the comparison on the northern edge of the lost Bassian country, between about 9,240 and 12,460 years ago. The story binds shoreline, prohibition and catastrophe into one irreversible moment.
On the eastern edge of the same arc, Dharawal traditions remember ancestors crossing swamps where Botany Bay now lies. Storm waves alter the passage and leave a bay. The water in these accounts is never an abstract global curve. It enters a marsh, crosses a lip, cuts a route and stays.
Reef, gulf and islands
North of Botany Bay, the stories track an increasingly wide drowned shelf. Quandamooka accounts explain the opening of channels around Moreton and North Stradbroke through wind, shell and broken ground; these belong to a mobile coast where channels also changed recently. Hinchinbrook is Bandjin and Girramay Country; Palm Island is Manbarra Country. A broader Dyirbal-language account remembers Giɽugar walking to islands now reached across water. The story retains the fact that an island journey was once a land journey.
Farther north, Butchulla oral histories speak of walking across the Great Sandy Strait to K’gari. A Butchulla-led research team is reconstructing those paths from oral history, seafloor depth and shallow marine survey. The remembered crossing is clear, while the date and exact drowned route remain under study.
Near Cairns, the old coast is named with exceptional clarity. Gungganyji and coastal Yidiny traditions place the shoreline at the outer Barrier Reef and say that water drove people from former homes into their present territories. It is a story of forced relocation, not simply an etiological tale about an island. Nunn and Reid compare it with shoreline positions roughly 9,960 to 13,310 years old—the oldest interval in their eastern Australian set.
Across the Gulf of Carpentaria, Garnguur’s ancestral raft cuts channels through country that had joined the Wellesley Islands to the mainland. At Elcho Island, Djanggawul crosses country before the sea rushes through and leaves a sandbar. Goulburn Islands people flee an advancing flood on paperbark. At Cape Don, a struck sacred rock calls prolonged rain and island loss. Mudangkala, an old blind woman, crawls from the mainland with children on her back; water fills the tracks behind her and the Tiwi Islands take form.
The sequence around northern Australia is unusually dense because the shelf was broad and low. Sea-level rise did not trim a fixed coast. It reorganised the map: islands emerged from hills, passages replaced foot routes, and stories carried the old adjacency after the land ceased to carry it.
The western shelf broke into islands
At Brue Reef in Bardi and Jawi country, Juljinabur is remembered as inhabited land before the sea covered it. At Wadjemup/Rottnest, Whadjuk Noongar tradition says that wooded country lay west of the modern mainland until the ground split with a great noise and the sea rushed in. New modelling by Ingrid Harben and colleagues places Wadjemup’s islanding around 7,000 to 6,500 years ago. Here narrative geography and shelf reconstruction point to the same transformation: an island that was once not an island.
At Gathaagudu/Shark Bay, Malgana ancestral routes run from the mainland toward Wirruwana/Dirk Hartog, Bernier and Dorre islands across sandy bottom and freshwater seeps. Farther south, Wudjari Elders describe cultural corridors whose storylines continue from the mainland through the Recherche islands and out into the ocean. Their joint management plan places those corridors beside the much lower Ice Age shoreline. Neither record needs to be forced into a single dramatic flood scene: each preserves social geography extending across drowned Country.
The south-western coast then offers a string of distinct water events. Cape Chatham remembers a broad plain reaching toward White-topped Rocks offshore; two women see the sea racing over it. Oyster Harbour forms when a dog scratches a vast hollow and water enters. At Bremer Bay, willy-wagtails pierce mud springs, hear the water roar and release an overflowing lake to the sea. The Cape Chatham plain fits land lost after the Ice Age. Oyster Harbour and Bremer Bay also preserve the behaviour of barrier coasts that can open, close and flood within recent memory.
Along the Great Australian Bight, water advances as a power that people meet and redirect. At Eucla, Wati Nyiinyii uproots water-bearing trees and a flood moves south until people drive bundled spears into the escarpment to stop it. Near Fowler’s Bay, a Bidjandjara tradition from the Great Victoria Desert tells how the brothers Malgaru and Jaul puncture a kangaroo-skin waterbag at the dry coast and release an onrushing sea. Both accounts turn a slow continental transformation into one break in a container. Country holds water until an action lets it loose.
The water was inside something
That is not a local habit of the Bight. Two thousand kilometres east, at Lake Tyers in Gippsland, a giant Frog held every drop of the world’s water inside himself until No-yang the Eel twisted and wriggled and made him laugh, and it all came out at once and drowned many; Booran the Pelican cut a great canoe and sailed among the islands left standing above the flood, keeping people alive. Three thousand kilometres north of that, on the Pennefather River at the top of Cape York, Thunder was still shaping the first human bones when his younger son spoiled them and ignored the order to leave. Lightning drove the boy into the ground, and salt water sprang from the place he went in and spread over the country until the new sea stopped his mother at Kokowarra.
And on the Barka the container is opened on purpose, and what is inside it is not only water. Up near Bourke, Kuluwarra let the Ngatji — the Rainbow Serpent — out of his waterbag, and the Ngatji lives in the river still; Thirri shaped the channel, the bends and the islands after the Ngatji had gone through with the water. What came out of the bag was the Barka, the Darling. The people take their name from the river it made, and the law that follows is stated as law: look after the Ngatji, the channel, the floodplains and the waters under the ground. William “Badger” Bates put that account into his statement to the Murray–Darling Basin Royal Commission in 2018 — a waterbag story doing current legal work.
Five peoples, on every side of the continent, one grammar. All the water in the world is held inside something — a kangaroo-skin waterbag, a stand of water-bearing trees, the body of a frog, the ground itself, a bag with a river’s serpent in it — and the sea is what happened when the container opened. The coastal traditions of this map tell the opposite story: there the water comes from outside and takes. Here it was always present, and the shoreline is the mark of the moment it got out. Two of the five already carry published comparisons with a coastline between about 7,990 and 12,460 years old, so the container is not a curiosity beside the drowned-coast corpus. It is carrying part of the same weight, in a different idiom.
The Bassian crossing closed
Lutruwita was connected to the mainland by a broad plain before the final path across Bass Strait drowned. George Augustus Robinson recorded an east-coast palawa tradition in 1831: people had come from a distant country over land, and the sea formed afterward. His own gloss tried to route the crossing from Wilsons Promontory toward Cape Portland. The durable point inside the record is simpler—the ancestors came by land before island and mainland were divided.
Duane Hamacher and colleagues used the shallowest continuous Bassian route to estimate when such a crossing ceased. Their bathymetric model places the final drowning around 11,960 years ago, with a wider twelve-to-fourteen-thousand-year window. The Kurnai tradition on the northern shore and the palawa tradition on the southern shore face the same vanished plain from opposite edges.
A later Cotton-family archive names a northern land, Moo-Ai, overwhelmed by a “Big Sea Water Flow” as Vetea’s people move toward the Tasmanian coast. Its reconstructed text has a later and contested documentary history. Robinson’s 1831 note supplies the map’s anchor and preserves the same geographic reversal: arrival by land, separation by sea.
When the Bassian corridor closed, lutruwita became an island and its communities lived through a profound contraction of their human world. The tradition keeps the crossing in social memory after the crossing itself disappears from sight.
New Guinea’s waters rise from river, sea and volcano
New Guinea’s water record is far larger than a few famous floods. Many of the mapped stories come from Freerk Kamma’s 1978 collection, whose first section records deluges before a second turns to flooded lakes, bays and islands. Gold-ringed stories concern springs, channels, lakes and shifting rivers rather than a clear flood.
At Tambunum on the Middle Sepik, Eastern Iatmul tradition tells how Wobowi and Mendangumeli open water-lily holes. Torrents surge from the ground and flood the region. Eric Silverman places the story inside the ecological rhythm of the Sepik, where annual water surrounds houses, alters travel and makes the village a temporary island. This is river flood as cosmogony: the landscape does every year, in lesser form, what the ancestors did once.
Kamma’s northern chain runs from Raja Ampat to Jayapura. In Manyalibit Bay, a tidal flood carries two brothers inside a hollow tree from Supiori and both separates and joins human worlds. At Amberbaken, darkness, earthquakes and water drown mountains. Around Biak, three distinct narratives remember a dry plain becoming Cenderawasih Bay, a wall of sea driving people toward high ground, and a pumpkin-floater repopulating Biak-Supiori. At Yapen a whale carries seawater upriver. In Waropen, old sago country becomes mangrove swamp. And in Wandamen Bay the flood moves a men’s house: after boys violated the authority of a sacred snake, floodwater carried the Anio Sara men’s house and its institution toward Dusner — the offence against a serpent, the punishment a flood, and the cargo a ceremonial house.
In the Southern Highlands the flood is women’s work from start to finish. At first the Kutubu valley held no lake, and the women who lived in it were perpetually thirsty, living on rain caught in leaves. Their dog Niyibe kept coming back out of the forest with a wet muzzle, so they tied a cord to his leg and followed it to a spring hidden beneath a giant fig. They could not get at the water, so they cut the tree down with stone axes, and it burst out of the opening. The women ran up the mountainsides and made magic that stopped the water rising any further. The felled tree is the shape of the country now: its trunk is the long body of Lake Kutubu, its branches the bays, its broken limbs the rivers and creeks, and ground the tree never touched stayed above the water as islands. Palms on the cliffs carry the women’s hair and clothing, and the survivors are the four principal lake villages. Women release the water and women halt it — the one flood on this map opened and closed by the same hands.
The collection is densest around Sarmi and Sawar, where six mapped narratives tell of a sea that rises after people alter the sky, a deck-garden canoe, a ceremonial house remade as a raft, a mother’s revenge and repeated floods attached to named rocks and settlements. Near Jayapura, Lake Sentani begins when released water fills a valley. Kamma then records seven versions of dry Iria becoming Yotefa Bay. They disagree about agency—conflict, a punctured fish pond, emptied water vessels, black magic—but converge on an old plain beneath the bay. Sea gardens and the island Injemoch remain its visible fragments inside the narratives.
Laurie Bragge’s Sepik archive adds a different water geography. A Gaikarobi account begins with almost everything underwater: the water withdraws into the sea and a small patch of ground grows into New Guinea. Bragge separately places Gaikarobi near the shore of a former inland sea in his reconstruction of the Sepik plain. Other clan histories make water the cause of movement. A tide destroys Glaskom and Marakom and sends Mongwalion survivors through swamp country toward Kutbug; at Sauinabit, rising water destroys an ancestral settlement before the account continues at Aurimbit. A Sawos cosmology looks forward rather than back: when Manam turns, the sea returns west and covers Aibom, Chambri and Ambunti. Three gold-ringed stories widen the view from flood to water-made landscape. Dibkel opens the Walio River, and the Sepik erases the lake at Kalok, old Munkoswi and Mauwanjatop. Both histories run through Kubkain—the Kubka recorded for this Upper Sepik bullroarer—beside the Leonard Schultze/Walio River. Gubat and Ginjit leave Parembei to make Lake Malingai and its Indabu channel; Bragge also writes the village name as Parambei, the Palimbei of this monumental Central Iatmul bullroarer. The nearby Sawos record links that floodplain to the region’s restricted sounding instruments.
South and east, the waters change again. Muyu and Mandobo sources make River Kao the first river and tell how a giant fish returns as a wall of water. At Arso, killing the sacred crocodile Watoewa releases hot ground water and rain; the Sawia/Arso bullroarer record places the instrument in the same borderland. At Sissano, people remembered a great wave from the west; lagoon deposits offer an event between AD 1440 and 1600 as the leading comparison. Near Aitape, Adam Amod’s Ali Island account makes a flood and a drifting breadfruit tree the beginning of island settlement. Off the Madang coast, Bel-community narrators remember Yomba or Kinembla at Hankow Reef as inhabited country that disappeared. Their versions preserve several mechanisms—rough sea, earthquake, great wave or its own eruption—and some explicitly place the loss before Arop’s eruption.
Eastern Papua and the islands bring the map out of the Sepik-heavy archive. At Wamira in Goodenough Bay, the sea climbs the hills until Raudalo, king of snakes, drives it down Tauaga and back to shore. Near Gavi, Lake Wapogi rises after fishers disturb Abaia, its great eel; an elder who abstains survives in a tree and the flood becomes the charter for a fish taboo. On West Fergusson Island, Ipapaya releases a blocked spring and the water sweeps her grandfather into the sea—a local spring story rather than a regional flood. In New Britain the sea has an owner, and the owner is an old woman. In the Baining telling she kept the only salt water there was in a small hole in the ground, covered with barkcloth, until her two sons tore the cover off; the water came up and kept coming until only rocks with a little earth on them stood above it. Seeing it would swallow everything, she went down to the water’s edge and planted twigs along it, and the sea came no further. The twigs are the shoreline — from that day the sea has a bound it does not cross — and the fuller telling runs straight on into gardening, canoe-building and the beginnings of the coastal people. A woman owned the water, her sons let it out, and a woman fixed the world’s coastline. At Lehinga, an Ilahita Arapesh flood carries sleeping musicians downstream in a casuarina and ends with the settlement of Malahun. That village-making current belongs beside the Atlas’s Ilahita Arapesh record of flutes, bullroarers and Nggwal initiation. A Taupota bullroarer from Milne Bay provides the nearest mapped instrument context for the southeastern Papua traditions without turning proximity into proof of a connection.
Other early collections fill spaces between those clusters. In the Kabadi district beside Yule Island, Lohero’s bone makes a stream become a sea over the lowland, driving people step by step onto the highest peaks; when it recedes, some return and others build on the ridges. The nearby Roro Islands record anchors an instrument tradition in the same Central Province coast. At old Berlin Harbour, now Aitape, a Valman story makes the eating of a forbidden fish release water from the ground. On the Mimika coast, two Tuga women dam a river after their osprey-son is killed; the flood covers mountains and scatters canoe survivors toward Paniai and western shores. That diaspora now sits beside the Atlas’s Kamoro record. Farther north, a Mamberamo account makes the river itself the weapon: cutting the vine that holds a fallen tree releases water over the land and Mount Vanessa.
The southern Fly and offshore island arc carries another concentration. Landtman’s Kiwai and Mawata texts preserve a classic deluge at Ipisia beside a companion tale in which a woman drinks the sea dry and releases it again, an island-loss story for Gimini, and a vanished-island whirlpool at Merewoiwo near Aibinio. At Boigu, men cut a channel and make a swamp and well; near Madiri, a sawfish opens a coastal route to the sea. Neither water story describes a flood or involves the instrument. Boigu nevertheless appears in a separate Kiwai origin story, where the first bullroarer names itself bigu or boigu; Iasa, the source locality of the Madiri tale, is also where Haddon collected the carved madubu now carried in the Kiwai record. Slone’s Wantok pages carry the geography east: on the Kandrian coast, Koran Rainge cuts one long island into Kangro, Pugi and Aviglo; behind Baluan in Manus, Lep Island sinks beneath rain, thunder, earthquake and flood, leaving only reef.
The northern stories belong to different kinds of water history: bay and island origins, river floods, ritual deluges, tsunamis, volcanic waves, migrations and a future return of the sea. Some tell how a spring, channel, lake or river came into being without describing a flood. Seeing those differences makes the drowned-land traditions clearer; the stories do not all need to remember the same kind of event.
“Blowing the Flutes Caused a Flood”
Thomas Slone’s public index gives that exact title to tale 217. Its village index places 217 under Korogo, Torembi and Yamok; the language index places it under both Iatmul and Sawos. Without the full translated narrative, the title can be placed regionally but cannot yet become a numbered map entry. It is nevertheless particularly important because the flutes are not ordinary music.
In Eastern Iatmul ceremonial life, Eric Silverman describes bamboo flutes as hidden voices of crocodile spirits. During initiation, novices encounter the flutes together with bullroarers. Women may hear the flutes but are forbidden to see them. Men also tell a women-first charter: women once held the sacred instruments; ancestral men sounded a bullroarer to frighten them and then took the flutes and other sacra. The flute is not a bullroarer, but here the two perform the same work—restricted instruments voicing spirits and organising initiation inside one ritual system. Records from Kanganamun, Palimbei, Mindimbit, Niaura and neighbouring Sawos country make that instrument field concrete.
The regional juxtaposition does not rest on Slone’s title alone. In Kamma’s Arso narrative, the world rebuilt after the flood includes three sacred bamboo flutes. In Nimboran, the flood refuge becomes a mountain from which flute, gong and song can still be heard. These are separate traditions, not parts of Silverman’s Eastern Iatmul account. Together they show that deluge, ceremonial houses and sacred sound repeatedly meet across northern New Guinea; Silverman supplies the one documented system here in which bullroarers and hidden flutes are explicitly paired.
A Mamberamo account makes the connection even more direct. Gottfried Oosterwal describes sacred flute ceremonies as the work that keeps rain, rivers, crops, birth and the larger natural order moving correctly. If the flutes are not sounded, clouds darken the sun, rain does not stop, rivers cover the land and the world ends. This is not an account of an old flood caused by one performance. It is the institution’s standing claim: restricted flutes prevent the deluge. Read beside Slone’s “Blowing the Flutes Caused a Flood,” it shows that flute and flood can be opposed as well as joined—the sacred sound may release dangerous water, or hold cosmic water in its proper course.
A 2023 survey by Valdis Gauss counts twenty-nine New Guinean deluge narratives in Kamma, about two dozen in Slone and nine flood-related items in Laurie Bragge, inside a New Guinea list of 118 flood narratives. Not all describe the same kind of event: some use a flood as the setting for war or migration, while others explain a lake, channel or vanished settlement. Landtman’s Kiwai–Mawata collection and Slone’s archived Wantok pages add still more complete, placeable stories. The scale of the northern tradition is unmistakable.
Beyond the mapped entries, Slone’s index names “The Story of the Flood,” “The Flood,” “A Big Flood,” “Where Did the Sea Come From?,” “The Cloud that Sank the Island,” “How Did the Sea Arise?,” “A Flood Ruined a Village,” “A Flood Drowned People,” “A Flood Killed the People of Wurins Village” and “Mawo’s Story Is the Ancestor Story of How the Sea Arose.” The Ilahita settlement story is the one in this group whose complete plot and Lehinga anchor are publicly recoverable. The others presently survive here as titles rather than mappable narratives.
The python, the monsoon and the voice
The Wagilag Sisters walked through Arnhem Land naming what they came to — the animals, the plants, the stars, the places — and at the waterhole of Mirarrmina they stopped. Their presence woke Yurlunggur, the great python who lived in the water. He rose out of it into the sky, and the clouds and the thunder of the first monsoon came up behind him, and the rain he called flooded the earth. He swallowed the sisters and their children. Then he cast the sisters out again, because they belonged to his own moiety and he had eaten his own kind.
What that flood installs is the year, and everything hung on it. The wet season begins here; so does the ceremonial ground at Mirarrmina; so do the rules of authority, kinship, territory and marriage that people live under afterwards. It is the fullest statement on this map of what water is for: it takes a world apart and hands back the one with the law in it.
And the instrument is inside the story rather than beside it. The bullroarer swung at this ceremony is Yurlunggur. Not an emblem of him and not a noise made in his honour: swung hard on its cord, it is his voice. The National Gallery of Victoria’s account of the Yolngu instrument is exact about the anatomy — the blade is the snake’s body, the human-hair cord its fangs, and the sound it makes is the snake speaking. One complete example, blade and cord and handle together, which is more than most museum roarers keep, was collected at Milingimbi itself, in the country the cycle runs through.
Set the two halves together and there is no distance left to bridge. The being who makes the first flood, the serpent, and the object in the hand are one thing. Everywhere else on this map the instrument stands near the flood — same people, same coast, same ritual office, one remove away. Here the flood, the snake and the bullroarer are a single body.
Three Yolngu water traditions run through this same coastline and none of them is a version of the others. The python’s monsoon is one. The Djanggawul crossing at Elcho Island, where the sea rushes through a route ancestors had walked, is a second, and it is the only one with a published comparison to island separation attached. A Gumatj mourning story in which two sisters’ deaths bring weeks of rain and bark rafts carry the survivors out to the islands is a third. One people, one shore, three different pieces of work.
The forbidden roar at the edge of the flood
Gippsland has the other one, and it runs the other way.
Mungan-ngaua, the creator, taught the ancestral Kurnai what they use — their implements, their canoes, their weapons, the names they inherit. His son Tundun made the first pair of bullroarers and conducted the Jeraeil, the initiation at which they are sounded. The two are a married pair: Tundun the man and Rukut Tundun the woman. Then the instruments were shown to the women. Fire came out of the sky, and a sea came in and drowned nearly the whole of humanity; the few who came through became the Muk-kurnai, and Tundun and his wife went into the water and became porpoises.
Fison and Howitt’s short telling keeps the middle of that and nothing else: children find a turndun, they show it to women, and immediately the ground crumbles and all is water. Nunn and Reid place the comparison on the northern edge of the lost Bassian country, between about 9,240 and 12,460 years ago — the same drowned plain the palawa remember from the far shore.
So in Gippsland the roaring board is not a witness to the flood and not a warning of it. It is the cause. In Arnhem Land the instrument is the flood’s voice; in Gippsland it is the flood’s occasion. Two ends of a continent, and in both the sacred sound and the drowning of the country are one event.
Elsewhere the instrument keeps its distance from the plot, and the distance is worth marking. In Bardi and Jawi Country, Juljinabur’s drowned island and Djamar rising from the sea whirling a bullroarer belong to separate ancestral complexes. Butchulla histories remember walking to K’gari before it became an island; a Butchulla dictionary records Bon’da’ban as a ceremonial noise-maker for men only, without placing it in the crossing story. Tiwi creation makes the contrast sharpest: Mudangkala carves the island channels in ancestral time, while a 1914 account reports no bullroarers on Melville or Bathurst islands at all.
A second, independent story complex concerns who first held ritual authority. Across northern Australia and New Guinea, traditions place women at the beginning of institutions later controlled by men. In the Yolngu Djanggawul cycle, ancestral sisters carry sacred objects and men take over a rite. In the Manggawila cycle, the transfer of ritual authority is again narrated through gender. The companion essay Nggwal and Djanggawul follows this women-first architecture across the Arafura world; When Women Owned the Bullroarer follows it more widely; and Always From the North follows the concentration of named forms in New Guinea.
In the south, water punishes an exposure of ritual knowledge. In the north, myth authorises a transfer of it. Both are making social order out of who may hold or hear a sacred power, and in both the flood is the instrument by which the order is fixed.
Floodwater moves institutions
The sea displaced people before it divided modern nations. The Cairns tradition says so plainly: former coastal homes lay toward the Barrier Reef, and advancing water drove communities toward their present territories. The Atlas records bullroarers among Gungganyji at Cape Grafton and probably Yidinji near Cairns, on the same broad coast whose flood traditions remember retreat from the reef. Archaeological models reach the same human consequence at continental scale. When shelves hundreds of kilometres wide disappeared, routes contracted, neighbours converged and populations reorganised around new coasts.
This matters to a central proposal of the Bullroarer Atlas. The great post-Ice-Age migrations were not only movements through empty space. They carried marriages, ritual rights, songs, technologies and institutions. Forced relocation created new meetings between communities. In that environment, a bullroarer cult could travel by adoption and alliance even when the migrating population was too small to leave a simple genetic trail.
The Atlas proposal: post-Ice-Age displacement helped carry bullroarer institutions across Sahul and onward through wider migration networks.
The flood traditions supply the human mechanism—lost homes, compressed territories, altered routes and newly adjacent peoples. The mapped stories attest those displacements. The worldwide diffusion of the institution is the Atlas’s inference from that history.
Lay the flood map beside the ritual map and a larger pattern comes into view: the most dramatic redistribution of human geography at the end of the Ice Age coincides with one of the great eras of population movement. The bullroarer is light, memorable, easy to make and socially powerful. Institutions like it can move farther than objects.
All mapped traditions
Every mapped tradition appears below. One number may hold a closely related group: the seven tellings of Yotefa Bay’s creation share a number because neighbouring communities describe the same drowned plain. Different stories from the same place keep separate numbers when their actions, survivors or consequences differ.
How to read the last column. Some traditions have been compared directly with shoreline change after the Ice Age. Others closely match a drowned plain, a new island or a changed coastal wetland without providing a date.
River floods, tsunamis, volcanic waves and barrier breaches belong to later or recurring hazards. Ritual deluges, migrations and undated floods remain because they record how water reordered law, settlement and ceremonial life. The distinction is visible here and in each story card; inclusion on the map is not by itself a claim of Pleistocene age.
Water made or erased a place marks eight stories about a spring, channel, lake, shifting river, lost settlement or coastal route rather than a clear flood. Ipisia keeps one ordinary point because its flood and its separate story of the sea withdrawing share the same place.
Complete tradition table
| # | Place and community | What the story remembers | Event comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia and lutruwita | |||
| 1 | Spencer Gulf — Narungga | Level plain, marsh and lagoons before the gulf | Sea covers the former coast, 9,330–12,460 years ago |
| 2 | Karta — Ngarrindjeri | Wave after wave opens Backstairs Passage | Island separation, 10,080–10,950 years ago |
| 3 | MacDonnell Bay — Buandig source | Bountiful country covered by a sea that stays | Sea covers the former coast, 8,590–12,460 years ago |
| 4 | Narrm — Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung sources | Dry kangaroo ground becomes Port Phillip Bay | The bay fills in more than one stage |
| 5 | Gippsland — Kurnai / Gunaikurnai | Forbidden turndun disclosure and collapsing land | Bassian plain drowned, 9,240–12,460 years ago |
| 6 | Botany Bay — Dharawal | Swamps and crossings where the bay now lies | The bay fills, 7,930–9,560 years ago |
| 7 | Moreton–Stradbroke — Quandamooka sources | Wind and broken ground cut island channels | Recent or recurring channel change |
| 8 | Hinchinbrook–Palm geographic cluster — distinct Bandjin/Girramay, Manbarra and broader Dyirbal-language sources | Several island-country traditions; Giɽugar’s land walk belongs to the broader Dyirbal-language account | Island separation, 7,450–9,680 years ago |
| 9 | Cairns–Barrier Reef — Gungganyji and Yidiny | Old reef coast, lost homes and inland flight | Sea covers the former coast, 9,960–13,310 years ago |
| 10 | Wellesley Islands — Lardil, Kaiadilt, Yangkaal and Gangalidda | Garnguur cuts channels through joined country | Island separation, 7,450–9,140 years ago |
| 11 | Elcho Island — Yolngu | Sea rushes across Djanggawul’s route | Island separation, 7,450–9,140 years ago |
| 12 | Goulburn Islands | Paperbark-raft escape from advancing water | Sea covers the former coast, 8,890–9,680 years ago |
| 13 | Cape Don — Aragaládi source | Rain, sinking island and canoe survivors | Coastal change; exact island uncertain |
| 14 | Tiwi Islands — Tiwi | Mudangkala carves islands as water follows | Channel formation, 8,210–9,680 years ago |
| 15 | Brue Reef — Bardi and Jawi | An inhabited island becomes reef | Island drowned, 7,250–9,140 years ago |
| 16 | Wadjemup — Whadjuk Noongar | Wooded country splits and sea rushes through | Island separation, about 7,000–6,500 years ago |
| 17 | Cape Chatham — Noongar source | A broad plain drowned before two witnesses | Sea covers the former coast, 11,730–13,070 years ago |
| 18 | Oyster Harbour — Menang Noongar source | A hollow opens to the sea and forms a harbour | Postglacial or later estuary opening |
| 19 | Bremer Bay — Wirlomin Noongar source | Springs, roaring water and a breached lake | Recent or recurring barrier breach |
| 20 | Eucla — Mirning source | A south-moving flood halted at the escarpment | Sea covers the former coast, 7,990–12,460 years ago |
| 21 | Fowler’s Bay — Bidjandjara / Great Victoria Desert source | A waterbag releases the onrushing sea | The sea forms Fowler’s Bay, 7,990–12,460 years ago |
| 22 | Bassian land bridge — palawa | Ancestors arrive over land before the sea forms | Final land route drowned about 11,960 years ago |
| 23 | Wardang / Waraldi — Narungga | The coast splits; invading water makes bay and island country | Island separation, about 8,500–7,400 years ago |
| 24 | Gathaagudu / Shark Bay — Malgana | Ancestral routes continue toward islands across submerged Country | Compared with Country drowned after the Ice Age |
| 25 | K’gari — Butchulla | People walk across the Great Sandy Strait | Drowned-pathway research in progress |
| 26 | Recherche islands — Wudjari | Cultural corridors and storylines continue beneath the ocean | Community-led drowned-Country evidence |
| 80 | Milingimbi, north-east Arnhem Land — Liyagalawumirr and other Dhuwa-moiety Yolngu | The Wagilag Sisters wake Yurlunggur; the python raises the first monsoon and floods the earth | The flood installs the wet season, the ceremonial ground and the law of kinship and marriage; no published comparison with coastal change |
| 81 | Elcho Island and north-east Arnhem Land — Gumatj source | Grief over a killed sister becomes weeks of rain; bark rafts carry survivors out to the islands | Mourning turns a mainland community into an island people; distinct from 11 |
| 82 | Lake Tyers — Lake Tyers source; Smyth gives no narrower people-name | A giant Frog holds all the world’s water until the Eel makes him laugh | A dry world becomes the watered world; no published comparison |
| 83 | Port Albert district — Kurnai / Gunai source | Bunjil Borun the Pelican ferries survivors from an island after the flood | Kurnai country, but neither serpent nor instrument appears; no published comparison |
| 84 | Bibhiringda / Mount Elliot–Cape Cleveland — Bindal-associated Morrill source | A flood drowns nearly everyone but those who reach a high mountain | Mountain-refuge deluge; Morrill’s own biblical comparison, not a date in the story |
| 85 | Pennefather River — Roth’s wording; no narrower group named | Lightning drives a boy into the ground and salt water springs from the place | The salt sea and a permanent shore begin here; no published comparison with the drowning of Cape York |
| 87 | Lower Murchison / Port Gregory — Watchandie / Watjanti source | Months of rain drive a people back; when they return the ford is an impassable sea | A crossing replaced by ocean; Oldfield makes no postglacial comparison |
| 88 | Mutawintji and Koonenberry country — Walter Newton’s 1957 telling | Kulawirru punishes the country place by place, then brings a rain that puts the whole land under water | Hannah Quayle said the Mutawintji engravings were cut while the rock was still soft from this flood; no published postglacial comparison |
| 89 | Wirangu country, far west coast of South Australia — teller not named in what is reachable | A grieving rain-maker performs the ceremony without concentrating and the rain comes too heavily | A ceremony that overshoots and drowns the camp, not a rising sea; source seen only at one remove and unverified |
| 90 | Bourke, upper Barka — Barkandji; William “Badger” Bates’s telling | Kuluwarra lets the Ngatji out of his waterbag and what comes out of the container is the Darling | A release, not a drowning: a river charter mapped for the container it shares with Eucla, Fowler’s Bay, Lake Tyers and the Pennefather |
| 92 | Munda / Lake Frome, Flinders Ranges — Adnyamathanha | Akurra the serpent drinks Munda dry and cuts the creeks and gorges behind him as he labours home | Salt lake, gorge and permanent waters belong to one journey; the Mega-Frome palaeolake is placed beside the story here, not compared with it by anyone in print |
| 93 | Torulba / Mount Giles — Arrernte; Carl Strehlow’s Teil I | Water covers the earth until an urbura ancestor strikes it with a stick and sends the sea away north | The lane’s strongest world establishment: people, fire, weapons, tjurunga and law follow the water; cosmological, not geomemory |
| 94 | Tnenjara and Ellery Creek Gorge — Arrernte; Carl Strehlow’s Teil I | A flood of every kind of fish pours down Ellery Creek, a cormorant damming it ahead and a crayfish driving it on | Fish, crayfish and cormorant become tjurunga; a local ephemeral-river flood and a fish-totem charter, with no deep-time reading available |
| 95 | Ulumbarru — Luritja; Carl Strehlow’s Teil II | Nguritjukurba rises as a cloud and drowns the bird-men, then drives his ceremonial pole into the rock until a spring bursts out | Spring and feared waterhole preserve the transformation; a local rain flood and spring charter, coordinate only moderately confident |
| New Guinea and West New Guinea | |||
| 27 | Tambunum — Eastern Iatmul | Ground torrents flood the Sepik region | Recurring river flood |
| 28 | Sissano / Aitape — Sissano | A great western wave without felt earthquake | Tsunami, likely AD 1440–1600 |
| 29 | Yomba / Kinembla — Hankow Reef, Madang coast | Inhabited land disappears beneath rough sea, earthquake or great wave | Different Bel-community tellings; some place the loss before Arop’s eruption |
| 30 | Southern New Guinea — Jair and Kombai descendant tradition | Children in bamboo survive repeated fire and flood | Ancient flood; no date known |
| 31 | Southern New Guinea — second Tefafu version | Siblings survive the submerged earth in bamboo | Ancient flood; no date known |
| 32 | River Kao — Muyu and Mandobo sources | A disturbed water source returns as a wall of water | River-origin flood |
| 33 | Arso / Tami River country | A sacred crocodile’s death releases hot water and rain | Flood after a broken rule; sacred flutes follow |
| 34 | Senggi / Lake Por | Kungu calls up a forty-day mountain-covering flood | Inland flood; no date known |
| 35 | Warikerang–Senggi source region | A broken prohibition brings ash-rain and torrents | Wider region; precise event place unknown |
| 36 | Nimboran / Nimblong | Ritual abstinence fails; water bursts from rock holes | Flood after a broken rule; no date known |
| 37 | Risei–Sayati — Waropen | Raft survivors leave country changed from sago to mangrove | Coastal-wetland transformation |
| 38 | Serui / Sange River — Yapen | A whale carries seawater upriver and floods the country | Sea water floods a river valley |
| 39 | Cenderawasih Bay / Biak | A dry plain becomes bay and island | Bay-and-island origin; undated |
| 40 | Napdori–Sombunem — Biak | A wall of sea drives survivors toward high ground | Undated tidal wave |
| 41 | Biak–Supiori | A pumpkin-floater survives and begins repopulation | Ancient flood; no date known |
| 42 | Amberbaken / Saukorem | Darkness, earthquakes and water overwhelm the coast | Earthquake and flood together |
| 43 | Amberbaken — Rumbiak source | Tidal water submerges mountains; a family and animals survive | Separate Amberbaken flood |
| 44 | Sawar / Sarmi — Manipora tradition | A raised sky is followed by rising sea and a giant canoe | Flood with a stone-canoe landmark; no date known |
| 45 | Bagaiserwar / Sarmi | A deck-garden canoe rides above flooded mountains | Tidal wave and repopulation |
| 46 | Sawar — madi tradition | A ceremonial house supplies a life-saving raft | Ritual-house flood |
| 47 | Sawar — second deluge | A mother’s revenge releases rain and flood | Flood; no date known |
| 48 | Sawar — Merne tradition | Stolen sacred regalia provoke a third flood | Flood after a broken rule |
| 49 | Mararene / Sarmi | Raft survivors endure forty days and nights of water | Possible biblical overlay |
| 50 | Lake Sentani | Released water fills the valley and makes the lake | Lake-origin flood |
| 51 | Yotefa Bay / Jayapura | Seven stories turn dry Iria into a bay | Drowned plain; no date assigned |
| 52 | Wandamen Bay / Dusner | Flood carries a men’s house and its institution | Ritual-house migration |
| 53 | Manyalibit Bay — Rumbiak source | A tidal flood carries brothers from Supiori and makes a bay | Island separation and migration |
| 54 | Sororogwi / Kanganaman — Iatmul source | Hot lake water floods a village; Naua saves people in a vessel | Sepik flood tradition |
| 55 | Ali Island — Aitape coast | Flood survivors drift to a reef that becomes their island home | Island-settlement tradition |
| 56 | Gaikarobi — Sawos source | Primeval water retreats into the sea as New Guinea grows | Water-recession creation; former inland-sea comparison |
| 57 | Kutbug / Waskuk — Mongwalion clan source | A crocodile spirit raises a tide; survivors move through swamp country | Flood and migration Water made or erased a place |
| 58 | Sauinabit / Aurimbit — Nogusimei clan source | Rising water destroys an ancestral settlement before clan movement | Clan history; vanished place unlocated Water made or erased a place |
| 59 | Ambunti and Middle Sepik — Sawos source | The sea returns west and covers the low basin | Future or cyclic sea-return cosmology |
| 60 | Wamira / Goodenough Bay | Raudalo drives a hill-covering sea back to shore | Sea flood; no date known |
| 61 | Baining Mountains, Gazelle Peninsula — Baining | An old woman keeps the only salt water under barkcloth; her sons tear the cover, and she halts the spreading sea by planting twigs at its edge | The twigs are the shoreline, and the fuller telling runs on into gardening, canoes and the coastal people; undated |
| 62 | Gavi / Lake Wapogi | Abaia’s rising lake drowns fishers and establishes a taboo | Inland lake flood; undated |
| 63 | Lehinga / Ilahita Arapesh | A flooded river carries musicians to the place that becomes Malahun | River-flood settlement tradition |
| 64 | Mamberamo River — sacred-flute tradition | Flute ceremonies keep endless rain and world-flood at bay | Ritual flood threat; not a past event |
| 65 | Mimika coast / Tuga River — Kamoro source | A dammed river covers mountains and disperses canoe survivors | Flood-and-diaspora tradition |
| 66 | Kabadi district / Yule Island coast | A stream becomes a sea over lowland and drives people to peaks | Lowland flood and resettlement |
| 67 | Berlin Harbour / Aitape — Valman source | Eating a forbidden fish releases water from the ground | Flood after a broken food rule; biblical influence is possible |
| 68 | Mamberamo River / Mount Vanessa | A released river overwhelms land, mountain, people and animals | A released river floods the country |
| 69 | Ipisia / Kiwai Island — Kiwai source | A deluge rises above the coconut crowns; a companion tale has the sea drunk dry and released again | A deluge and a separate story of the sea withdrawing share this place |
| 70 | Gimini Island / Mawata coast | A high tide washes over a wooded island until only a sandbank remains | Island-loss tradition; Mawata anchor |
| 71 | Merewoiwo / Aibinio — Mawata source | A monstrous crab swirls away a whole island and leaves an eddy in the sea | Vanished-island and whirlpool tradition |
| 72 | Ais–Aruba / Kandrian coast — Moewehafen source | Koran Rainge cuts one island into Kangro, Pugi and Aviglo and pushes them out to sea | Three-island origin tradition |
| 73 | Lep Island / Baluan — Baluan-Pam source | Storm, earthquake and flood sink Lep Island, leaving reef | Island-sinking tradition |
| 74 | Ibonaniu / West Fergusson Island — Kukuya source | Ipapaya releases a blocked spring and the flood carries her grandfather to sea | Local spring released Water made or erased a place |
| 75 | Leonard Schultze / Walio River — Wusmion and Kwolion source | Water follows Dibkel’s canoe and becomes the Walio River | River and lake created Water made or erased a place |
| 76 | Kalok / Munkoswi / Mauwanjatop — Kubkain and Chenapian histories | The shifting Sepik drains a lake and washes away two old settlements | Shifting river and lost settlements Water made or erased a place |
| 77 | Lake Malingai / Indabu — Parembei–Malingai source | Gubat and Ginjit make a lake and dig its channel to the Sepik | Lake and channel created Water made or erased a place |
| 78 | Boigu Island — Kiwai–Boigu source | Three brothers cut a passage, make a swamp and open a freshwater well | Channel, swamp and well created Water made or erased a place |
| 79 | Madiri, Kiwai coast — Iasa source | A sawfish cuts a broad route from poisoned swamp water to the sea | Coastal route created Water made or erased a place |
| 86 | Fayu country, western New Guinea — Kloru’s telling | Fire from the sky splits the first language; weeks of rain drown all but a pair in a canoe | Their children became the Fayu; Babel and Noah parallels require caution; no physical comparison |
| 91 | Lake Kutubu, Southern Highlands — Foi and Fasu | Thirsty women follow their dog to a spring hidden under a giant fig, fell the tree, and the water bursts out | The felled tree is the shape of the country: trunk the lake, branches the bays, broken limbs the rivers; the lava-dam reading is placed beside the story here, not published |
This remains a partial view of Sahul’s water knowledge. Each card says whether its story has been compared with shoreline change after the Ice Age, a later coastal event, a river or lake flood, a tsunami or an undated deluge. Other published titles point toward still more traditions, but a title alone cannot supply their plot or place.
A human map of Sahul
A sea-level curve measures metres. These traditions measure consequences. The old coast becomes a reef people can still name. A walking route becomes a channel. Hills become islands. A forbidden sound and a collapsing shore become one remembered crisis. Ancestors arrive in lutruwita by land before the water makes them islanders. Around Biak, Sarmi, Yotefa, the Sepik, Aitape and Long Island, other floods teach the same grammar of life beside unstable water.
The map treats myth as more than a damaged geological report. Myth keeps more than depth and date. It carries blame, kinship, law, flight, invention and survival—the social facts that a sediment core cannot hold. That is why the stories can remain meaningful after the visible landscape has vanished. The event survives as a rule for living in the world the event made.
The dead centre of the continent says it most completely, in a country no Holocene sea ever touched. In the Arrernte account Carl Strehlow took down, water covered the earth in the beginning and only the high places stood above it: kangaroo men lived on Torulba — Mount Giles — and duck men sheltered in a rock near Finke Gorge and climbed into the sky to hunt. Then an urbura ancestor struck the water with a stick and ordered it away; the sea drew off to the north, and the land came up out of it. What follows the withdrawal is everything: the beings left behind on the drying ground were shaped into people, and with them came fire, weapons, tjurunga and the laws by which country and kin are ordered. The retreat of the water is not a disaster remembered. It is the moment the world takes its present form, sacred boards included — and the desert keeps that account a thousand kilometres from any coast the water could have meant.
That is what the ninety-five traditions on this map hold in common, and it is the only thing they need to hold in common. They do not remember one flood. They each hand back one world. Narungga country comes back with a gulf cut through the middle of it. Butchulla country comes back with a strait where a walk used to be. The Kurnai get a rule about who may hear the roaring board, and the sea that enforced it. The Yolngu get a wet season, a ceremonial ground and a marriage law, carried up out of the water on the back of a python whose voice they still swing on a cord. Sahul lost more inhabited country to the sea than any other continent. What the people who lost it kept was never a measurement. It was the world that came back, and the terms it came back on.
Key sources
Patrick D. Nunn & Nicholas J. Reid, “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago” (2016), pp. 11–47, especially figure 1, tables 1–2 and the twenty-one regional discussions.
Patrick D. Nunn et al., including Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Corporation, “Calibrating Holocene human–environment interactions using ancient narratives: The example of Ngurunderi in South Australia” (2025), especially pp. 566–575, for the spelling variants, narrative sources and Backstairs Passage crossing.
Lorimer Fison & A. W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880), p. 269, for the Gippsland turndun inundation; A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), p. 493, and “The Jeraeil” (1885), pp. 301–325, for Mungan-ngaua, Tundun’s making of the paired bullroarers, their disclosure to women, the sea and the Muk-kurnai.
W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (Harper, 1937), pp. 24–49, for the Wagilag Sisters, Mirarrmina, Yurlunggur and the first monsoon, from fieldwork of 1926–29; and the National Gallery of Victoria’s essay on Mathaman Marika for the Yolngu bullroarer as the snake’s body, its hair cord as his fangs and its sound as his voice. As far as we know, the flood, the serpent and the instrument have not previously been set out as one being on a single page.
R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria I (1878), pp. 429–430, for the Lake Tyers Frog who held all the world’s water; Walter E. Roth, North Queensland Ethnography Bulletin 5 (1903), §24, p. 11, for the salt water that sprang from the ground at the Pennefather River.
Ernest A. Worms, “Djamar, the Creator: A Myth of the Bād” (1950), pp. 641–658, for the Bardi/Jawi ancestral bullroarer complex; the Korrawinga Aboriginal Corporation’s Butchulla Mini Dictionary (2021), p. 7, for Bon’da’ban.
J. van Baal, “The Cult of the Bull-Roarer in Australia and Southern New Guinea” (1963), p. 209, for the distinction between Djanggawul and Kunapipi; Baldwin Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia (1914), p. 211, for the Tiwi absence report, read beside the Tiwi Land Council’s Mudangkala creation account.
Duane Hamacher et al., “The archaeology of orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions to the Late Pleistocene” (2023), pp. 3–6, 14, for Robinson’s record, the Bassian route and the 11,960 BP estimate.
Ingrid Harben et al., “Evaluating the Deep Time Archaeological Potential of the Submerged Rottnest (Wadjemup) Shelf, Southwestern Australia” (2025), for the Whadjuk Noongar tradition and the islanding chronology.
Amy Roberts, Adrian Mollenmans, Lester-Irabinna Rigney & Geoffrey Bailey, “Marine Transgression, Aboriginal Narratives and the Creation of Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda” (2019), for the Narungga Wardang/Waraldi tradition and palaeogeographic comparison.
Elizabeth A. Sinclair et al., “Healing country together” (2024), p. 1, for Malgana ancestral tracks toward the Gathaagudu islands, and the Wudjari Marine Park Joint Management Plan (2024), p. 24, for cultural corridors and storylines extending through the Recherche islands and into the ocean.
Allen Gontz, Glen Miller, Lisa Stewart & Adrian McCallum, “Walking to K’gari” (2022), for Butchulla oral histories of crossing the Great Sandy Strait and the submerged-pathway research programme.
Eric K. Silverman, “The Waters of Mendangumeli” (2016), pp. 179–185 and 193–195, for Eastern Iatmul flutes, bullroarers, the women-first charter, the flood and Sepik ecology.
Hugh L. Davies et al., “Past major tsunamis and the level of tsunami risk on the Aitape coast of Papua New Guinea” (2019), for the Sissano tradition and older lagoon tsunami deposits.
Mary R. Mennis, Voices of the Villagers, for the Bel-community Yomba/Kinembla drowned-island variants; see also the publisher record.
Freerk C. Kamma, Religious Texts of the Oral Tradition from Western New-Guinea, part B (1978), sections I–II, for map numbers 30–53.
Thomas H. Slone, One Thousand One Papua New Guinean Nights (2001), public table of contents and village/language indexes, for “Blowing the Flutes Caused a Flood” and the larger title-level lead list; the Ilahita synopsis and Slone locator give vol. 2, pp. 954–955, for the Lehinga–Malahun settlement flood; and the complete Wantok 464 translation, “Ipapaya Helped Two Boys” (16 Apr. 1983, p. 18), supplies the Ibonaniu spring-release story.
Gunnar Landtman, The Folk-Tales of the Kiwai Papuans (1917), no. 112, p. 201, for Gimini Island; no. 114, pp. 202–203, for Merewoiwo near Aibinio; no. 117, pp. 203–204, for the sawfish route at Madiri; nos. 493–494, pp. 535–537, for the Ipisia deluge and sea-withdrawal pair; and no. 495, pp. 537–538, for the Boigu channel, swamp and well.
Thomas H. Slone’s archived “A Masalai Made Three Islands” (issue 418, 22 May 1982, p. 19), his archived “The Masalai of Lep Island” (issue 429, 7 Aug. 1982, p. 44), and the Slone village/language indexes, for the Kandrian three-island and Baluan/Lep island-sinking traditions.
Laurie Bragge, A History of the Sepik Region of New Guinea, Part 1, printed pp. 87–88, 153–154, 171–172, 223, 230–233, for the Sawos sea-return, Gaikarobi water-recession, Sauinabit, Sororogwi and Lake Malingai accounts; and Part 2, pp. 361, 372–374 and 395, for the Mongwalion migration toward Kutbug, Walio River, Kalok–Munkoswi and Mauwanjatop.
Annie Ker, Papuan Fairy Tales (1910), especially “The King of the Snakes”, pp. 30–31, and “Why the Men of Gavi Will Not Eat Fish”, pp. 52–56, for the Goodenough Bay marine deluge and Lake Wapogi flood.
Karl Hesse and Theo Aerts, Baining Life and Lore (1982), in a public transcript of Manam of Tamanaokin’s Baining origin account, for the saltwater pool becoming the sea and islands.
Gottfried Oosterwal, Die Papua: Von der Kultur eines Naturvolkes (1963), p. 122, for the Mamberamo sacred flutes that maintain rain, rivers and natural order against a world-ending flood.
Petrus Drabbe, “Folk Tales from Netherlands New Guinea (Continued)”, Oceania 20.1 (1949), pp. 71–73, for the Tuga flood and Kamoro/Mimika diaspora.
James Chalmers and William Wyatt Gill, Work and Adventure in New Guinea (1885), p. 164, for Lohero’s Kabadi lowland flood and mountain refuge.
Paul Schleiermacher’s 1900 Valman account, summarised in James George Frazer’s Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, for the forbidden-fish deluge at Berlin Harbour; and Max Moszkowski, “Die Völkerstämme am Mamberamo” (1911), pp. 340–341, for the Mount Vanessa flood.
Valdis Gauss, “Compiling the Austronesian Deluge Myths” (2023), for an overview of the large Kamma–Slone–Bragge collections. The map draws on the individual narratives, not the collection totals alone.
Steven Gimbo, “Folktales are our national treasures” (2009), summarising Adam Amod’s school-text version of “The Great Flood,” for the Ali Island tradition.
Kurt Lambeck et al., “Sea level and global ice volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene” (2014), for the animated sea-level curve.
Alan N. Williams et al., “Sea-level change and demography during the last glacial termination” (2018), pp. 144–154, for the scale, speed and demographic consequences of shelf loss.
Ronald M. Berndt, Djanggawul: An Aboriginal Religious Cult of North-Eastern Arnhem Land (1952), pp. 40–41, and W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (1959–1963), pp. 142–147, 159–160, for women-first northern ritual charters discussed separately from the Kurnai flood.
Continue the series: Sundaland, East Asia, South Asia, the Mediterranean Near East, Doggerland, North America, South America, and the coasts where it is not remembered. The series hub, Twelve Drowned Worlds, maps the drowned landscapes the nine essays are standing on.