Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/392

366 since the settlement of Australia by the whites. The Wurunjerri dreaded a practice attributed to the native tribes about Echuca whom they called Meymet. This was the pounded flesh of a dead man with cut-up tobacco. This, given to the unsuspecting victim, caused him, when he smoked it, to fall under a deadly spell, which no Wirrarap could cure. The result was the internal swelling of the smoker till he died. Another instance of evil magic peculiar to the Wudthaurung tribe, the western neighbours of the Wurunjerri, was to put the rough cones of the She-oak (Casuarina quadrivalvis) into a man's fire, so that the smoke might blow into his eyes and blind him. The idea seems to have been that the eidolon of the rough seed cones would magically produce injury, as the object itself might do. This belief points to an attempted explanation of ophthalmia.

Besides these applications of evil magic, there was another form of this practice, namely, by placing sharp fragments of quartz, glass, bone, or charcoal in a person's footprints, or in the impression of his body where he has lain down. Rheumatic affections are often attributed to this cause. Once, seeing a Tatungalung man very lame, I asked him what was the matter. He replied, "Some fellow put bottle into my foot." I found out that he had acute rheumatism, and he believed that some enemy had found his footprint and buried in it a fragment of a broken bottle, the magic of which had entered into his foot.

One of the practices of the Wiimbaio Mekigar (medicine-man) was to step among the crowd at a corrobboree, and pick up something off the ground, saying that it was a piece of nukalo (quartz) which some Mekigar at a distance had thrown at them.

When following down Cooper's Creek in search of Burke's party, we were followed by a number of wild blacks, who appeared much interested in examining and measuring the footprints of the horses and camels. My blackboy, from the Darling River, rode up to me with the utmost alarm exhibited in his face and said, "Look at those wild black-fellows!" I said, "Well, they are all right." Then he