The Rainbow Serpent — Creator of the World

She moved across the featureless land at the beginning of time, and where her body touched the ground, rivers formed. Where she rested, waterholes appeared. Where she turned, mountain ranges rose. The Rainbow Serpent is the most widely distributed Ancestor Being in Aboriginal Australia — found in stories from every part of the continent, under different names but with the same essential nature: the great serpent whose movement shaped the land and whose return, in the form of seasonal rains, renews life each year. She is the guardian of water — the most precious resource in the driest inhabited continent on earth — and her anger is expressed in flood, in drought, and in the consequences of disrespecting the places where she sleeps.

These signs carry the serpentine river, the waterhole, the ochre arc of scales, and the creator whose body is still visible in the geography of Australia.