K. Langloh Parker

“ Comets are a spirit of evil supposed to drink up the rain-clouds, so causing a drought; their tails being huge families all thirsty, so thirsty that they draw the river up into the clouds.
Every natural feature in any way pronounced has a mythical reason for its existence, every peculiarity in bird life, every peculiarity in the trees and stones. ”

“ But you can't describe a corroboree, it wants the scenic effects of the grim bush: tapering, dark Belahs, Coolabahs contorted into quaint shapes and excrescences by extremes of flood and drought, and their grotesqueness lit up by the flickering fires, until the trees themselves look like demons of the night, and the painted black fellows their attendant spirits stealing into the firelight from what seems a vast, dark, unknown Beyond. ”

“ A person who went to a Boodther without a goolay full of presents would be thought a very poor thing indeed.
Of course every meeting has a corroboree as part of it.
Every totem even has its own special corroboree and time for having it, as the Beewees, or iguanas, when the pine pollen is failing and the red dust-storms come. And if you abused these dust-storms to a Beewee black, you would insult him: it is not dust, it is the pollen off the pines, and so a multiplex totem to him! ”

“ Perhaps the white stone that the blacks talk about, which shows a light at night, and has, they say, a devil in it, is a diamond. Ruskin rather thought there was a devil in diamonds, making women do all sorts of evil to possess them. The blacks told me that a Queensland tribe had a marvellous stone which at great gatherings they show. Taking those who are privileged to see it into the dark, there they suddenly produce it, and it glows like a star, though when looked closely at in daylight seems only like a large drop of rain solidified. ”

“ The whole scene impressed us as picturesque—the painted figures of the men and boys, with the peculiarly native stealthy tread, threading their way through the grey Coolabah trees; the decorated women throwing their leafy missiles with accurate aim into the ranks of the boys, who did not dare to look at their assailants. A Boorah boy must give no evidence of curiosity; the NIL ADMIRARI attitude then begun clings to a black man through life. The women of the tribe express voluble surprise, but a black man never except by the dilation of his eyes. ”

“ They were told that the oldest wirreenuns could see in their sacred crystals pictures of the past, pictures of what was happening at a distance in the present, and pictures of the future; some of which last filled their minds with dread, for they said as time went on the colours of the blacks, as seen in these magical stones, seemed to grow paler and paler, until at last only the white faces of the Wundah, or spirits of the dead, and white devils were seen, as if it should mean that some day no more blacks should be on this earth. ”

“ Should an uninitiate have a wife, which of course is improper, the Kumbuy decline to recognise her; and should she presume to answer their spirit back, they make in token of displeasure a thudding noise as if earth were being violently banged with a yam stick. She has encroached on the Kumbuy preserves, for prior to his initiation a man should only have a spirit wife, never an incarnate one. ”

“ When a baby clutches hold of anything as if to give it to some one, the bargie—grandmother—or some elderly woman takes what the baby offers, and makes a muffled clicking sort of noise with her tongue rolled over against the roof of her mouth, then croons the charm which is to make the child a free giver: so is generosity inculcated in extreme youth. ”

“ How the old legend repeats itself, and now as then, how often the artist is woman—slain that she by the caterer may live. Surely in the interests of intellect was the prayer made: 'Give us our daily bread.'
Perhaps the old legend of Goolahwilleel was originally told with a moral, and that may be: why black artists are so well treated now.
A maker of new songs or corroborees is always kept well supplied with the luxuries of life; it may be that such an one is a little feared as being supposed to have direct communication with the spirits who teach him his art. ”

“ The three deadly sins were unprovoked murder, lying to the elders of the tribe, or stealing a woman within the forbidden degrees—that is, of the same hereditary totem, i.e. of the same blood, or of the prohibited family name clan.
But by a curious train of reasoning two wrongs make a right. Should by any chance a man succeed in getting a wife he had no right to, having lived with her, he could keep her, if he came unhurt from the trial he had to stand; he only having a shield to defend himself with, the men of the stolen woman's kin threw weapons at him. ”

“ White people were an immense joke to Nimmaylee. She conformed to their rules as one playing a new game. She has a little brother as black as herself. She has a substantial pair of legs, but his are so thin and his little body so round that he looks like a little black spider.
Nimmaylee is quite an authority on corroborees, knowing ever so many different steps, from the serpentile trail of the codfish to the mimic fight. The songs she knows too. She used, when she lived in the camp, to marshal in a little crowd of camp children, and put them through a varied performance for my benefit. ”

“ But in spite of their sadness the bush nights are lovely, when the landscapes are glorified by the magic of the moon. Even the gum leaves are transmuted into silver as the moonlight laves them, making the blacks say the leaves laugh, and the shimmer is like a smile. ”

“ The Milky Way is a warrambool, or water overflow; the stars are the fires, and the dusky haze the smoke from them, which spirits of the dead have lit on their journey across the sky. In their fires they are cooking the mussels they gather where they camp.
There is one old man up there who was once a great rainmaker, and when you see that he has turned round as the position of the Milky Way is altered, you may expect rain; he never moves except to make it. ”

“ This spirit, known variously as Gayandi, or Darramulun, went to the Boorah, but when he was to knock out the front tooth, he began to eat the boys' faces. He was too strong; he would not do to preside over, Boorahs. Byamee transformed him into a large piggiebillah-like animal, though instead of being covered with spines, thick hair grew over him; he has since been known as Nahgul. He went away into the bush, where he has been a dreaded devil ever since; for if he touches a man's shadow even, that man will itch all over and nothing can cure him of it. He haunts Boorah grounds. ”

“ Not recognising the tyranny of custom, though themselves victims to it, they ignore, as a rule, the religion into which the black is born, and by which he lived, in much closer obedience to its laws than we of this latter-day Christendom. It seems to me, if we cannot respect the religion of others we deny our own. If we are powerless to see the theism behind the overlying animism, we argue a strange ignorance of what crept over other faiths, in the way of legends and superstitions quite foreign to the simplicity of the beginnings. ”

“ When the blacks see a halo round the moon they say,
'Hullo! Going to be rain. Bahloo building a house to keep himself dry.'
All sorts of scraps of folk-lore used to crop out from the little girls I took from the camp into the house to domesticate. When storms were threatening, some of the clouds have a netted sort of look, something like a mackerel sky, only with a dusky green tinge, they would say: 'See the old man with the net on his back; he's going to drop some hailstones.'
Meteors always mean death; should a trail follow them, the dead person has left a large family. ”

“ Should men camp there at night, these women spirits silently steal into the camp. The men, thinking they are women from some tribe they do not know, speak to them; but silently there they sit, making no answer, and vanish again before the dawn of day, to renew their search night after night. ”

“ The Euloowayi, or long-nailed devils, are spirits which live where the sun sets. Just as the afterglow dies in the sky, they come out victim-hunting. These Euloowayi demand a tribute of young black men from the camp, to recoup their own ranks.
When this tribute has to be paid, the old men get some ten or so young ones, and march them off to a Minggah at about ten or fifteen miles from the camp. There they make them climb into the Ming-ah, to sit there all day. They must not move, not even so much as wink an eyelid. ”

“ Each Arunta child, by that philosophy, has been in being since the Alcheringa: his mother of the moment only reproduces him, after 'preparation.' He is not a new thing; he is as old as the development of organic forms. This is the Arunta belief, and I must reckon it as not more primitive than the peculiar philosophy of reincarnation of ancestral spirits. Certainly such an elaborate philosophy manifestly cannot be primitive. It is, however, the philosophy of the tribes from the Urabunna, on Lake Eyre (with female descent of the totem) , to the most northerly tribes, with male descent. ”

“ If a man drinks the draught, unless he is made Marahgoo, he dies.
Each totem is warned by its bird sub-totems of the coming of Marahgoo, and after such a warning tribes take care, if wise, to stay in camp; or should a man go out, he will smear his face with black, and put rings of black round his wrists and ankles, and probably have a little charm song sung over him.
Birrahmulgerhyerh are blacks with devils in them, who, armed with bags full of poison-sticks, or bones—called gooweera—are invisible to all but wirreenuns or wizards. ”

“ Whoever had chopped the nest out would take home the waxy stick they had used to help get the honey out; they would throw the stick in the fire, then all the dead bees would go to a paradise in the skies, whence next season they would send Yarragerh Mayrah, the Spring Wind, to blow the flowers open, and then down they would come to earth again. One year the manna just streamed down the Coolabah and Bibbil trees; it ran down like liquid honey, crystallising where it dropped.
The old blacks said, 'It is a drought now, but it will be worse. ”

“ It is like drinking dirt, and makes the drinker dream dreams and see visions, in which he is taken down to the underground spirit-world of the Marahgoo, where anything he wishes for appears at once. The entrance to this world is said to be near a never-drying waterhole, in a huge scrub, near Pilliga. ”

“ Some say it is Yhi, the sun, the wanton woman, who has overtaken at last her enemy the moon, who scorned her love, and whom now she tries to kill, but the spirits intervene, dreading a return to a dark world. Some say the enemies have managed to get evil spirits into each other which are destroying them. The wirreenuns chant incantations to oust these spirits of evil, and when the eclipse is over claim a triumph of their magic. ”

“ In hearing the old blacks tell their legends you notice a great difference between them as raconteurs—some tell the bare plot or feature of the legend, others give descriptive touches all through. If they are strangers to their audience, they get it over as quickly as possible in a half-contemptuous way, as if saying, 'What do you want to know such rubbish for?' But if they know you well, and know you really are interested, then they tell you the stories as they would tell them to one another, giving them a new life and adding considerably to their poetical expression. ”

“ These tribes, like the Arunta and Kaitish, believe that conception is caused by the entrance into a woman of a spirit who has lived in its disembodied state, along with other spirits of the same totem, at any one of a number of totem centres scattered over the country; but, unlike the Arunta and Kaitish, they almost always assign the father's totem to the child, even though the infant may have given the first sign of life at a place haunted by spirits of a different totem. For example, the wife of a snake man may first feel her womb quickened at a tree haunted by spirits of goshawk people ”

“ Every time a stranger comes to the camp the widow has to make a smoke and smoke the camp again. The nearest of kin to her husband has a right to claim her as wife when her mourning is over.
Should a woman be left a widow two or three times there are sinister whisperings about her. She is spoken of as having a 'white heart'; and no man can live long, they say, with a woman having a 'white heart.'
The graves in some parts of Australia are marked by carved trees; only a few painted upright posts marked them on the Narran. ”

“ But, progressive as they are, they have not, like the more pristine tribes of the south-east, developed 'the germs of religion,' the belief in a benevolent or ruling 'All Father.' Unlike the tribes of the south-east, they have co-operative totemic magic. Each totem community does magic for its totem, as part of the food supply of the united tribe. But the tribe, though so SOLIDAIRE, and with its eight classes and hereditary magistracies so advanced, has developed no germs of religion at all. Arunta progress has thus been singularly unequal. ”

“ As the spirit is hoisted in, one of the Mooroobeaigunnil, knocks the lowest one in the ladder of spirits down; thud to the earth come the rest, making a sound like a thunderclap, which the far away tribes hear, and hearing say:
'A spirit has entered Bullimah.'
Should a big meteor fall followed by a thunderclap, it is a sign that a great man has died. Should a number of stars shoot off from a falling star, it is a sign that a man has died leaving a large family. When a star is seen falling in the day-time, it is a sign that one of the Noongahburrah tribe dies. ”

“ Each born Crow must marry an Eagle Hawk; each born Eagle Hawk must marry a Crow. The names are derived through the mothers. One obvious result is that no two persons, brother and sister maternal, can intermarry; but the rule also excludes from intermarriage great numbers of persons in no way akin to each other by blood, who merely share the common phratry name, Crow or Eagle Hawk.
In each phratry are smaller sets of persons, each set distinguished by the name of some animal or other natural object, their 'totem.' The same totem is never found in both phratries. ”