ABOVE: Spot the sphynx. Photo: Alice Piddens
Who knew? Just when you think there’s nothing left to discover in this wiggy world, up pops an Aussie sphynx ancient and enigmatic enough to make that Egyptian thing slynk off to its kytty lytter tray and shudder to its sphynxter in sphynxy shame.
I’m talking about the Dulgigin Sphynx.
Its steely gaze fixed west towards the heights above Ewingar, the Sphynx keeps an enigmatic watch from the valley of Dulgigin Creek east of the Clarence Way and raises more questions than that empty Tim Tam packet under the lounge cushion.
Who created it? What’s it made of? What does it mean? Who re-discovered it? Does it nail travelers with an un-crackable riddle? Will it help me get girlfriends?
And, what’s with the half-finished one in the background?
Well, it was recently re-discovered when some crusty trail bike campers went hunting for firewood. They didn’t discover it. I did. I just heard their clacking, un-baffled exhausts in the far distance at the time.
On a little field trip looking for abandoned Nissan Cedrics, pastel-coloured bush huts and/or experimental circular cattle yards, I heard the moto-racket, shook my fist, swatted a march fly and suddenly felt I was under observation. I spun around, and there it was.
What’s it made of? Who knows? It’s not stone. Or concrete. Or gold, bronze, Lego bricks or a graphene matrix. It’s a substance unknown to Bullgoose, that’s for sure. The closest thing I can come up with is a super-hard brown play dough/peanut butter amalgam. I tried to pry off a little sample (OK, I know that was wrong) but the blade of my Leatherman tool snapped like a plastic party spoon.
Who built it, and why? Some say that because it resembles Thylacoleo carnifex, the ancient Australian marsupial lion, that it must have been created by ancestors of the Wahlabul people. That’s an attractive hypothesis. It is sited equidistant from Mt Pickapene and Ewingar near a good crossing spot on the Clarence River, but thylacoleo went extinct something like 350,000 years ago, a couple of hundred millenia before any humans came to Australia.
Some say that it was knocked up in recent times by a flash mob of ‘art practitioners’ and doof ravers en route to a Rats Eat Cabbage drugfest. Nope. The sphynx is the work of a steady hand.
Some point out that there was an Egyptian stockman, Mymum Khetswiggi, working on Yulgilbar Station in the 1860s and that he could ‘read hieroglyphics like the Sunday paper’, but these same people deny there was ever any massacre at Pagans Flat.
There are even some who, pointing to the semi-sandy texture of the material, ascribe it to visionary surfie builder, Waxy Noggins. We really must avoid this knee jerk of crediting anything unusual to Waxy Noggins. Some say he wrote the Oxygen is vital graffiti on the rock wall at Old Koreelah, that he scrawled There is no air on the blackboard at the Bonalbo servo. Some say this he is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Christ’s estranged cousin. Others say he was the brains behind Beef Week.
Give me a break.
According to the latest explanations, creation myths started as memory aids to navigation. What? We know that memory experts who can memorise phone books, every PIN in China plus the names of all the Three Stooges will put each item into a crazy narrative, and the crazier the better.
For thousands and thousands of years, navigation on land (and sea) meant the difference between life and death. Landmarks and celestial indicators just had to be memorised. Someone realised that the most memorable stories were the craziest madass ones, so people started putting landmarks and constellations into completely bizarre stories. That’s where creation myths came from. Think about it. That’s why Greek myths are just so mental, why the Egyptians came up with a Sun God. Somewhere along the way it all jumped the track and became religion, which became Scientology, which became Donald Trump, which…aaargh!
I welcome your input of possible explanations for the Dulgigin Sphynx. The answer is out there somewhere. Sphynxy is on private land, but you can see him/her/they from the road. Look on the left near where powerlines cross the Clarence Way.
A lesson to us all.
Bullgoose
