Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/129

 monies by which they formally received the young as members of the body politic.

The origin of the practice of "knocking out the tooth' could not be explained by the performers. They did it because their fathers did it. It was one of those remnants of a religious cult of which the form was preserved when the spirit had waned from remembrance.

From the ceremony of initiation Europeans were carefully excluded in Australia, except in those rare instances in which they had won the confidence of a tribe; and the fact that Phillip's officers were permitted to see the ceremony described by Collins, proves the tact of the governor.

The rite of admission to the Australian tribe did not confer privilege to eat all kinds of food. Stage by stage as he grew older the man acquired new rights. Women also were prevented from eating certain animals, so that the objects reserved became the exclusive spoil of men in matured strength in a position of authority. In mere infancy the child might partake of any food given to it. Disabilities took effect after about nine or ten years. The food was always cooked, by broiling, or by baking in hot ashes, or in an excavated oven lined with stones. No vessels were used for boiling water, and the art of pottery was unknown.

Among the objects never shown to women or to children was a magic stone—a transparent crystal of quartz like, but smaller than, the mysterious stone which Dr. Dee traded with in England and Europe in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Carefully wrapped in a ball of twine of opossum fur, a notable crystal was deemed a talisman, and sometimes sent from tribe to tribe to work its marvels. The missionary Threlkeld records that he was mysteriously shown one (there called murramai) which was sent to Brisbane Water (a short distance north of Sydney) from Moreton Bay. In South-Western Australia the same veneration was felt for it, but the name was there teyl. Death was the sentence on any one who showed the murramai to a native woman, and a grim comment on the "conflict of laws" was furnished in the Hunter River district, when a white man, having, in spite of remonstrance, broken the native law, was killed by a native delegated by the tribe to do the deed, and the slayer