Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/424

 404 of South-east Australia, which my father, Mr. A. W. Howitt, is now preparing for publication. Mr. Siebert is a missionary to the aborigines at Killalpanina, on the Cooper River, in Central Australia, and is a very zealous student of their laws and customs.

To any one familiar with the legends of other parts of Australia, with their half-animal, half-human actors, fabled ancestors of the modern race, these legends of the Dieri and kindred tribes will present some novel features, chiefly through the appearance of the Mura-muras.

These were beings of distinctly human form and actions, but always endowed with greater magical powers, and seemingly capable of more astounding feats, than the people of the present day. The perfecting of human beings out of shapeless creatures, the naming of the totems, and the institution of the sacred ceremonies are ascribed to them and duly recorded in certain of the legends.

The constant wandering of the Mura-muras is remarkable. They seem to have been possessed with the spirit of travel, and to have bestowed the present names on all natural objects, rocks, rivers, &c., that they came across. They are now not infrequently pointed out by the blacks as solitary rocks or petrified tree trunks, whose shape they took when their work was done—perpetual witnesses to the aboriginal mind of the absolute truth of the legends. This wandering spirit is so constant in the Mura-mura legends that one is tempted to believe it to be a faint crystallised recollection of the first great spreading of the native race over the continent.

The interesting legend of the dark and light-coloured children is illustrated, as Mr. Siebert says, by the present differences in colour between the tribes in that part of Australia. He tells us that in spite of the fusion of the tribes caused of late by the settlement of the country by the whites, the Wonkanguru and Wonkamala, northern neighbours of the Dieri, have a bluish-black tint of skin; while the Dieri themselves are reddish-brown, and the Tangara, who live on the western side of Lake Eyre, towards the West Australian boundary, are said by those of the Dieri who know them to be as light coloured as half-castes, and to be spoken of as Kana maralye or "light-coloured men."

In the legends of Warugatti, and of Woma and Kapiri, we are told of the origin of the emu, carpet-snake, and lizard, and their respective totems, while the legend of Pirinti is typical of the