Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/416

390 for some time, after which his tribes-people called him Brewin.

A Birraark might not eat any part of a kangaroo that had blood on it, nor carry home a kangaroo that he had killed. Others did this for him, and gave him some part of it free from blood. Nor might he kill any man. If he did any of these things, the Mrarts would never again take him up aloft.

Having been thus introduced to the land of ghosts, he could return there at will, calling on the Mrarts to carry him on the Marrangrang, or as I have heard it said, to take him along the Wau-unga-nurt, the path or track to the sky, along which the Yambo (spirit) travels after death.

One of the best remembered of the Birraarks was a man of the Brabralung clan named Mundauin. It is related of him that he became a Birraark by dreaming three times that he was a kangaroo, and as such participating in a kangaroo Gunyeru, or dancing corrobboree. He said that after dreaming of the kangaroos, he began to hear the Mrarts drumming and singing up aloft, and that finally one night they came and carried him away. A man who was in the camp on the occasion of one of his manifestations said as follows:—

"In the night his wife shouted out, 'He is gone up.' Then we heard him whistling up in the air, first on one side of us and then on the other, and afterwards sounds as of people jumping down on the ground. After a time all was quiet. In the morning we found him lying on the ground, near the camp where the Mrarts had left him. There was a big log lying across his back, and when we woke him and took the log off, he began to sing about the Mrarts and all he had seen up there."

In another account of a séance by Mundauin, the same account was given of his departure in the night. Then his voice was heard shouting to them, and then noises of people in the tree-tops, and then of them jumping down on to the ground. The Mrarts answered questions put to them, as to the movements of the Brajerak and the Lohan (white men), and whether the former were pursuing them. Finally,