The Mimi Spirits Who Taught the First Humans to Dance

They are thin as shadows.

The Mimi are the spirits of the Arnhem Land sandstone country — so elongated that a strong wind can injure them, so fragile that they retreat into cracks in the cliff face at the first sound of approaching humans. Their forms are depicted in the rock art of the escarpment country, and those images are among the oldest in Australia: stick-figure beings in active postures, hunting, dancing, playing music, their attenuated limbs expressing a kind of energy that the solid-form images of later rock art periods do not convey.

They live in the cliff faces, inside the rock, in a world that is adjacent to the human world but not part of it. They are not dangerous to humans who approach respectfully. They are dangerous to humans who approach suddenly, carelessly — not because they attack, but because their world is so different from the human world that contact without proper acknowledgment can disturb something that should not be disturbed.

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In the beginning, the Mimi taught the people everything.

This is the account given in the Arnhem Land traditions: when the first humans arrived in this country, they did not know how to live in it. The knowledge of how to hunt the kangaroo and the wallaby, how to prepare the specific plants of this escarpment country for food, how to cook in the earth ovens, how to make fire — all of this came from the Mimi, who had been living in the cliff country long before humans arrived and who knew its systems completely.

The teaching was not a formal transmission. It was more like the Mimi lived their lives in close enough proximity to the humans that the humans could observe and learn. They would watch a Mimi dance ceremony from a respectful distance. They would find, in the morning, ochre on the rocks where the Mimi had been painting, and learn from the paintings what the Mimi had made the night before.

Some encounters were direct. A Mimi would show a person where the yam was hidden under the dry-season grass, would demonstrate the digging method, and would vanish into the cliff face before the person fully processed what had happened. The person would carry the knowledge back to the community and the knowledge would become part of the community’s practice.

The dances they taught are still danced.

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The paintings they made are still on the cliff walls.

This is the remarkable continuity: the Mimi-style rock art of western Arnhem Land, with its elongated spirit-figures in dynamic action poses, has been dated to between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand years before the present. The people who stand before these paintings now stand before a record of their own distant ancestors’ encounters with beings who no longer appear openly in the world.

The Mimi, by the accounts of current Arnhem Land elders, are still in the cliffs. They no longer teach openly the way they did in the early time — the world’s layers have hardened somewhat, the veil between the human world and the spirit world is more defined than it was in the Dreaming. But they can still be heard occasionally: a sound from the cliff face that is not wind, a feeling of presence in a cave that has no visible source, the sense of being watched from the rock.

Approaching the cliff country requires the correct acknowledgment: you call out before you arrive, you announce yourself and your reason for being there, you do not startle the Mimi who are living their lives in the crevices. Correct behavior is not about placating spirits who might harm you — it is about maintaining the quality of relationship between the human community and the spirit-teachers who gave the community its culture.

If the Mimi retreat permanently into the rock because humans have stopped acknowledging them, the teaching relationship ends.

The ceremonies learned from the Mimi must be maintained to maintain the connection.

The elongated figures on the cliff wall dance in the afternoon light, the red ochre still bright, the teaching still visible for those who know how to read it.