Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/398

372 that he had been at some place shortly before he died—if, for instance, a Moruya man had been to Bodalla—then his father, or brothers, and a Gommera would sneak down to that place and look out for blacks. It would not matter whom they caught, any man from that place would do. I remember hearing from one of the Yuin that in a case of this kind some blacks from Tumut or Goulburn came and killed about twenty-five Braidwood people—men, women, and children. They put some Gubburra (evil magic) in their grog, and as they were having a drunken spree, all sucking out of one bottle, they all died.

A very intelligent Jupagalk man gave me the following account of what he saw, as a boy of about ten years of age, of the fat-taking practice by the medicine-men of his tribe. He spoke as follows:—

"When I was a boy, I went out one day with some of the men to hunt. We were all walking in a line, when one of them hit the man in front of him on the back of the neck and knocked him down. Two or three of the men held me tight so that I could not run away, for I was very frightened. Then the man cut open the one he had knocked down, by a little hole in his side below his ribs, and took out his fat. After that he bit the two edges of the cut together, and sang to make them join, but he could not succeed. He then said he could not do this because some one had already taken this man's fat before, as he could see by the marks on the liver, and that whenever a man had been opened and closed up, no one could do it again. As they could not wake the man up, they buried him. They smoked the fat over a fire and took it away wrapped up tightly in a cloth. They wanted it to carry with them to make them lucky in hunting."

The Kurnai called this practice Bret-bung, or "with the hand." The men who practised it were called Burra-burrak, or "flying," and also Bret-bung mungar worugi, or "with the hand from a long distance." They were believed to throw their victims into a magic trance by pointing at him with the Yertung, which is a bone instrument, made of the fibula