Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/183

 Rh Australia. I have to confess to the opinion with regard to Daramulun, Mungan-ngaur, Turndiin, and Baiamai, those divinities whom the Kurnai, Murrings, Kamilaroi, and other Australian groups address severally as "Our Father," recognising in them the supernatural headmen and lawgivers of their respective tribes, that their prototype is nothing more or less than that well-known material and inanimate object, the bull-roarer. Its thunderous booming must have been eminently awe-inspiring to the first inventors, or rather discoverers, of the instrument, and would not unnaturally provoke the "animatistic" attribution of life and power to it. Then Mythology seems to have stepped in to explain why and how the bull-roarer enforces those tribal ceremonies with which its use is associated, and, after the manner of Myth, to have invented schemes and genealogies of bullroarers whose wonderful history and dreadful powers it proceeded to chronicle. Thus, for example, Baiamai kills Daraniulun for devouring some of the youths undergoing initiation, but puts his voice into the wood of the bullroarer. Or Mungan-ngaur begets Turndun, who first makes the bull-roarers in actual use amongst the Kurnai, and then becomes a porpoise. Further, Mythology is reinforced by symbolistic ritual. Figures made of logs are set up on the initiation ground to represent Baiamai and his wife; or the men throw blazing sticks at the women and children as if it were Daramulun coming to burn them. As for Animism, however, we never get anywhere near to it save perhaps when Daramulun's voice is said to inhabit the bull-roarer, or when he is spoken of as living in the sky and ruling the ghosts of the dead Kurnai. Nevertheless, despite its want of animistic colouring, a genuine Religion (if reverence shown towards supernatural powers