Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/463

VIII same belief, and said, when they dreamed such a thing, they had been to some other country and a person had told them.

Tulaba, whom I have elsewhere mentioned, said that his "other father," Bruthen-munji came to him during sleep and taught him songs (charms) against sickness and other evils. One charm which he thus learned, and which I have heard him sing to cure pains in the chest, is as follows:—

The belief is that Brewin has filled the sufferer's chest with the frayed fibres of the stringy-bark tree, called Tundung, by means of the hooked end of his spear-thrower. This hooked end is called the eye, Mri.

The wife of Tulaba believed before her death that she had gone up to the Nurt (sky) in sleep, but returned because she could not get through. At death the Yambo leaves the body and follows the Wauung, that is the path to the sky. I have heard this spoken of as the Marrangrang, along which the Mrarts (the ghosts) lead or carry the medicine-men to the sky. The Yambo is believed to be able to communicate with people when asleep, and, as a Mrart, to initiate men into its secret rites in sky-land. Mrarts are therefore not merely incorporeal ghosts, for they can be heard jumping down with the Birraarks from trees on to the ground. They are also able to carry off people in bags.

The Theddora believed in another land beyond the sky, and that there were other blackfellows therein. Their neighbours the Ngarigo also thought that the spirit of a dead person (Bulabong) went up to the sky, where it was met by Daramulun, who, as one of the old Ngarigo men said, takes care of it. The Chepara belief is that a male ancestor visits a sleeper, and imparts to him charms to avert evil magic. An old man of this tribe said with much feeling, that he saw distinctly in sleep his little daughter, who had died a short time before, standing near him, on the night after her death, and he said that once when sick he felt that she was near him, and that then he slept well and recovered.