In Praise of Professor Eel Spear

[ Requiem for Weerat Kuyuut ]

( From the Mortlake district of Western Victoria, comes this portrait of Weerat Kuyuut -a friend and cultural informant to James 'Jimmy' Dawson, -who used what he could get from Eel Spear to write his colonial monograph ‘ The Aborigines of Victoria’, the Scottish-Australian pioneer, James Dawson, called Weerat Kuyuut (Eel Spear) ‘a professor of languages, geography and astronomy’.)

PAINTING: Minjah in the Old Time (Weerat Kuyuut and the Mopor people, Spring Creek, Victoria) 1856 oil on canvas - 52.0 (h) x 108.5 (w) cm Held by University of Queensland, Brisbane. , Gift of Miss Marjorie Dowling 1952
Artist: Robert DOWLING: - England 1827 – England 1886 - Australia 1834-1857, 1884-1886
Weerat Kuyuut and the Mopor people includes the same participants as those in Minjah in the Old Time, with some additional figures: Wombeet Tuulawarn, husband of Yarruum Parpurr Tarneen, stands behind his wife. The site is likely to be the now drained Maramook Swamp, some six kilometres west of the Minjah homestead, and a place of cultural significance to the Mopor people. As with Minjah in the Old Time, Dowling based this work on his own detailed oil portraits of the participants. - This Artwork is now on show at The National Gallery.

In Praise of Professor Eel Spear


He dust-sits, a dark old man, cross-legged, keen, it
Is his hands talk, pink and brown scissoring-fingers
translating the south-of-knowledge stars, then soft-palate
words pick the air of cosmologies, an astrology of
the lost magi, that knows a sky as a text of geography
ofbeginnings, the making stories he is a professor of .
Unheard-of languages, lost geography and astronomy -
Of ancient lava words roll grassed volcanic plains,
Mirranatwa karabeal, willatook, noorat,
south, his Grampians word is his Gariwerd,
tjerinallum naringal woorndoo minjah.

Professor Eel Spear sits no ivory tower, no rostrum
Oak, but she-oaks. Field knowledge is his passport,
his visa across enemy borders, as hair flies to shield
his balding pate, it fences what is understood,
a knowing of mysteries that goes off the sky,
he tells what he can of this to the one interested
white fella, but even ‘Djim Dawjon’ has stone ears
for most language, most country, Kuyuut must learn
English, telling of untold skies as storied meanings
lapse, then one after the other, as countrymen do,
they fall off the earth, as a bush professor always
tumbles down ignorance, the theory, specialising,
that does not begin to wait for answering songs
sung to link earth and sky, man and destiny...

as clued rhythms of sparely read tracks in earth
take footsteps which go out between the stars.

December 1999 © Wayne David Knoll