ABSTRACT
The film Waiting for Harry (McKenzie et al 1980) records some of the events, ritual performances and conversations that took place at an Aboriginal mortuary ceremony in North Central Arnhem Land in July and August 1978. At one point Harry ‘Diama’ (Cockle) Mulumbuk, the oldest living man whose mother belonged to the clan of the deceased, began to outline a sand sculpture of an ancestral Hollow Tree. 1 The Tree, a Stringybark, was a totemic being with special affinities with the dead man’s clan. Harry drew the audience’s attention to the powerful conjunction of artistic media in which the totem was being celebrated: as he worked to produce the sand sculpture, two singers in the shade behind him sang about Hollow Tree and Wild Honey from the clan song series Djambidj(Clunies Ross & Wild 1982, especially pp. 40–5).
