Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/471

VIII account of taking aim and discharging a firearm, and of making rude bridges, by the early explorers.

Among the Wolgal the white man was called Mamugan; by the Ngarigo Mugan. The Yuin called both the dead man and the white man Mumu-gang. The Kamilaroi called a white man Wunda, that is, ghost, and believed him to be a black come to life again. The late Mr. Naseby, who lived fifty years in the Kamilaroi country, had the marks of cupping on his back, and they could not be persuaded that he was not a Murri come back, the marks on his back being his Mombari, or family marks. As far back as 1795, when a man-of-war on its voyage to Port Jackson was anchored at Port Stephens, four men were found who had run away from Parramatta, and reached that place in a boat. The natives had received them as "the ancestors of some of them who had fallen in battle, and had returned from the sea to visit them again; and one native appeared to firmly believe that his father had come back as one or other of the white men, and he took them to the place where the body had been burned." The Kaiabara also thought that the white men were blacks returned after death. The old men of the tribes about Maryborough said when they first saw white men, "That is all right, they are the Muthara (ghosts) come back from the island"; and they recognised such men as their relatives, gave them names and a family, and were quite ready to do anything for them. About Moreton Bay Makoron and Mudhere signify ghost, and each of these words is applied to white men. In the tribes about Mackay in Queensland a man's spirit is called Meeglo, and the whites when first seen were supposed to be the spirits of their forefathers embodied. So the Namoi and Barwan blacks also call the white man Wunda.

As a final instance of the recognition of a white man as one of a tribe returned to it, I may give my own case. When on the Cooper's Creek waters in 1862, searching for