Page:Australian race - vol 1.djvu/392

Rh relatives. Now and then, however, there is a mauvais sujet of a ghost who will persist in rollicking about the camp and frightening its inmates in all sorts of ways. Deaths, happen how they may, are always set down as the work of some conjuror of a hostile tribe, who has managed to introduce, whilst yet alive, a Bolya, or evil spirit, into the body of the deceased, and as a consequence it often happens that the deaths of men are avenged with the spear.

In their corroborees these tribes present no noteworthy characteristics. Fire, when not otherwise obtainable, is made as usual by the friction of wood. In keeping maimed limbs and deformities out of sight much ingenuity is displayed.

In making shields, wommeras, and other things of wood, fire was a good deal used; thus a man would slightly burn some portion of the shield he was busy about, and then scrape off with his mussel shell or flint what he had partly charred. Their huts are nicely made by forcing pliant sticks into the ground, bending them to the required position, tying them there and covering them with the bark of the paper-tree. They are averse to camping long in one place, as the ground gets dirty about them.

In their quarrels the women break each other’s heads with the root-digging sticks, which they invariably carry, just as I have seen them do on the banks of the Murray, in Victoria. When men of the tribe fight amongst themselves, all look on until one is wounded. Immediately the man who threw the spear is seized and held by his friends, and one of the friends of the wounded man walks up and quietly thrusts a spear through his thigh or some other fleshy part, and the affray is at an end. However, all these customs are now dying out.

Mr. Knight remarks that they often carry water in bags made of the bark of the paper-tree; also that he has frequently seen a woman go to a pool some little distance off, fill her mouth with water, and, returning to the camp, squirt