Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/457

VIII According to the Wotjobaluk, the rainbow causes a person's fingers to become crooked or contracted if he points to it with a straight finger. This would prevent him from using his hand for making the markings with which the 'possum rugs are ornamented. Therefore, when pointing to a rainbow, the fingers must be turned over each other, the second over the first, the third over the second, and the little finger over the third, by which the evil is avoided.

The Bunya-Bunya people in Queensland are also very much afraid of the rainbow, which they call Thugine (large serpent). Once, they say, a camp of blacks was close to the beach, and all went out to hunt and fish, leaving only two boys in camp with strict orders not to go to the beach, or leave the camp till the elders returned. The boys played about for a time in the camp, and then getting tired of it, went down to the beach where the Thugine came out of the sea, and being always on the watch for unprotected children, caught the two boys and turned them into two rocks that now stand between Double Island Point and Inskip Point, and have deep water close up to them. "Here you see," the old men used to say, "the result of not paying attention to what you are told by your elders."

The Yuin believe that the thunder is the voice of Daramulun. The Gringai had a great dread of thunder, and believed it to be the demonstration of the anger of some supernatural being, rebuking them for some impropriety. As is shown later on, this being is Coen.

According to the Tongaranka, thunder is the song of a corrobboree held by the big old men in the sky, who are making rain; and at Frazer's Island it was the thunder that smashed up the trees.

The Dieri called the Milky Way Kadri-pariwilpa, or the River of the Sky. The same is the case with the tribes on the Herbert River in North-east Queensland. They call the Milky Way Kooling, which is the road along which the ghosts of dead blackfellows find their way to the sky.