Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/437

VII out of him on its wanderings. I have fully gone into this matter in the chapter on "Beliefs," and need now only say that his view of the reality of dreams enables him to reach, by a natural stage of reasoning, the conception of the individual apart from the body. The second belief is that a man's fat and his strength and vitality are connected. Health, strength, and vitality run together, and therefore the wasting of the body, and disease, are the result of the absence of fat, perhaps followed by death. This belief that a man's vitality and his fat have some connection seems to be shown by the widespread practice of eating the fat of the dead and of those slain. By eating a man's fat, and thus making it part of himself, the blackfellow thinks that he also acquires the strength of the deceased. So also they think that human fat brings success in hunting, causes spears, which are anointed with it, to fly true, or the club to strike irresistible blows.

It is a common belief that when two things are associated together, any magical power possessed by the one will be communicated to the other.

The possession of human fat is therefore much desired by these aborigines, especially those who feel age or disease, or who wish to be successful in magical arts. But it is not only the human fat which is thus utilised. The desire to use those portions of the human body in which they believe the vital strength resides leads them to use not only fat, but also another source of strength, which may be inferred when it is stated that it is practised by tribes who subincise. The tribes to which I refer are the Kurnandaburi, and, as described to me by the late Mr. C. M. King, formerly the Police Magistrate at Milperinka, in New South Wales, in the Wilya tribe.

The most difficult matter with which I have had to deal in this inquiry has been to determine how far the medicine-men believe in their own power?. All explanations concerning them must be given either by themselves or by their tribes-people; and when they are given by the former, one has to distinguish between those explanations which are truthful and those which are not, and which have been