Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/389

VII pricking an enemy when asleep, and thus inoculating him with the virus of death.

Such are the beliefs as to poisons from widely separated places. I have no means of testing their truth, but my informants fully believed in their effects, and there is no special improbability in their use by the medicine-men.

Returning again to the practice of roasting things for the purpose of harming the owners of them, I mention another form of it by the Wotjobaluk. In this they used a small spindle-shaped piece of wood called Gulhiwil, in the same manner as other tribes used the spear-thrower or yam-stick. The name Guliwil was not used for these pieces of wood, usually of the Bull-oak (Casuarina glauca) alone, but also for the whole implement, which consisted of three or four of the pieces of wood, and was tied up with some article belonging to the intended victim and human fat. Each Guliwil has on it some marks, such as a rude effigy of the victim, and of some of the poisonous snakes. The bundle was roasted for a long time, or for several times at intervals.

I am told that after the whites settled on the Wimmera River the Wotjobaluk employed on the stations found the great chimneys of the huts, especially of those which were used as kitchens, unrivalled places in which to hang their Guliwils so as to expose them to a prolonged heat.

The following is an account, by one of the Wotjobaluk old men, of the effects produced by such a Guliwil or the belief in it, which amounts to the same thing. "Sometimes a man dreams that some one has got some of his hair, or a piece of his food, or of his 'possum rug, or indeed anything that he has used. If he dreams this several times, he feels sure that it is so, and he calls his friends together and tells them he is dreaming too much about 'that man,' who must have something belonging to him. He says, 'I feel in the middle of the fire; go and ask him if he has anything of