Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/300

274 meaning of the term so used, she would reply "Yiirung; what does the Yiirung eat?" He in reply says, "He eats so and so," mentioning kangaroo, opossum, or some other game. This constitutes an offer and its acceptance, and the couple then on a favourable occasion elope.

The second instance to be given is that of the Bunjil-yenjin, a medicine-man, whose specialty was the arrangement of marriages by elopement spells. Bunjil is a praenomen applied to men who have some special qualification; in this case the marriage spells were called Yenjin, as Gunyeru is the term for those songs which accompany dancing, usually called by us corrobborees. Probably the office of Bunjil-yenjin has been vacant since, if not before, 1855. Before that time there was at least one in each division of the tribe. Some men were more celebrated than others, and of them Bunjil-gworan, before mentioned, had a great name. The following account is derived from the statements of the Kurnai, and from those of old residents of Gippsland, who as boys in the early days were much with the blacks in their camps, and thus conserved and remembered many practices which are now obsolete.

It seems from these statements that almost the last time when the Bunjil-yenjin exercised their office on a large scale was at the holding of a Jeraeil on the south side of Lake Wellington, about the year 1855. At it ten or a dozen young couples ran off under the influence of love and the songs of the Bunjil-yenjin. Some of the people who were there were well known to me, and from them, and especially from a woman who was a girl at that time, and who then ran off with her future husband, I have received very full accounts of what was done.

The substance of those statements is as follows. It was the business of the Bunjil-yenjin to aid the elopement of young couples. For instance, when a young man wanted a wife, and had fixed his mind on some girl, whom he could not obtain from her parents, he must either go without her, persuade her to run off with him, or call in the aid of the Bunjil-yenjin. In the latter case his services were retained