Welcome to the Melbourne Community Daily Discussion Thread.
Reading His Dark Materials after watching the series and can’t stop thinking about the sort of daemons* Australian’s would have. Like how many people are wondering around with huge arse kangaroos and koalas or the random arsehole with a full-blown cassowary. Also some poor fucker ending up with a witchetty grub, or some other weird insect.
*Daemons are a physical manifestation of the human soul in animal form, they are not pets/animals and can speak and have their own thoughts and feelings, though you feel everything they do and vice versa (to an extent).
Very similar to indigenous ‘totems’. Which can be almost anything. Interesting programme on the abc a couple three years back, I think off the top of my head it was Conversations with Richard Fidler. A woman with fertility issues went to stay in NT due to husband’s job. She was bored and started talking to the local people. They took her swimming at a secret women’s business waterhole, and she felt something wriggle inside. Shortly after she discovered she was pregnant, considerably against the odds. The local women assured her that her proto-baby had a totem - which was a striped leech and that the waterhole had given it to her. Never heard about any followup, but I think maybe this sort of thing might resonate with your comment. I have no information about how true this story was, but the abc are usually pretty good at fact checking. So probably not a wish fulfilment thing.
