Page:Aboriginesofvictoria01.djvu/36

xxviii the warriors must travel to find the sorcerer, and they go at once, and kill one or more, in expiation of the crime which has caused the death of their friend. It is curious to note the general similarity in the modes adopted by the cunning men to cause injury to neighbouring tribes when a death occurs, and also the differences in the modes. For instance, the Western Port tribe in Victoria, and the tribes near Perth in Western Australia, watch the movements of a living insect that may accidentally be turned up in digging the earth; the Melbourne tribe look for the track of a worm or the like; the Yarra blacks watch the direction which a lizard takes; at Cooper's Creek the corpse is questioned; the tribes at the mouth of the Murray and at Encounter Bay rely on the dreams of a wise man who sleeps with his head on the corpse; and on one part of the Murray they watch the drying of the damp clay that covers the grave, and see in the line of the principal fissure where they are to look for the wicked sorcerer who has done to death, by his charms, their late companion.

The natives believe that the spirits or ghosts of the dead remain for at least a little time near the, spots that they loved when living, and it is to satisfy and appease the shades and ghosts that, when a warrior dies, they murder some of the people of a neighbouring tribe. If blood were not shed, the ghost of the departed would haunt them, and perhaps injure them. They believe that the ghosts depart and find rest in regions either towards the setting sun, or in the east, where he rises. Stanbridge says that the heaven of the Murray people is towards the setting sun; Wilhelmi says that the head of the corpse was placed at the west end of the grave, because the people of Port Lincoln believe that the departed spirits reside in an island situated eastward; Oxley found on the Darling a body laid with the head to the eastward; and Grey says that the face in West Australia is turned towards the east. The Goulburn blacks placed a fighting-stick at the east end of the grave. Buckley states that in his first wanderings he found a spear sticking in the centre of a mound of earth. It was the grave of one recently interred. He carried away the spear, and when the natives found him and saw the spear of their dead friend, they called him Murran-gurk—which was the name of the dead man. They believed that he had come to life again, and that he had taken the form of Buckley.

All the methods employed by the Australian savages in disposing of their dead are curious and full of interest. Though they have no such monuments as that erected by Artemisia in Caria, they have advanced beyond the state in which it is lawful for a sister to marry a brother; and they have sought to express by many ingenious devices their respect and affection for their deceased relatives and friends. On the swampy reed beds of the Aire River, in the Cape Otway district, are found even now the remains of the rude platforms on which the natives placed their dead; in the mirrn-yong heaps of the western plains are found interred the bones of departed warriors; and under the umbrageous pines of the north-west are seen here and there the mounds which they had raised over the relics that perhaps had been carried with them, and mourned over for many a day. These are respected by the old people, and they grow sorrowful as they approach them. Though the natives generally buried the body very near the spot where the death occurred, they had in some parts