Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/485

VIII With the body were interred the weapons and other articles belonging to the deceased, and for a time a small fire was made at the foot of the grave.

Among the Kurnai, when a man died, his relatives rolled him up in a 'possum rug and enclosed it in a sheet of bark, cording it tightly. A hut was built over it, and in this the mourning relatives collected. The corpse was placed in the centre, and as many of the relatives as could find room lay with their heads on it. There they lay lamenting their loss, saying, for instance, "Why did you leave us?" Now and then their grief would be intensified by some one, for instance, the wife, uttering an ear-piercing wail "Penning-i-torn" (my spouse is dead), or a mother would say "Lit-i-torn" (my child is dead). All the others would then join in with the proper term of relationship, and they would cut and gash themselves with sharp stones and tomahawks until their heads and bodies streamed with blood. The bitter wailing and weeping continued all night, only the more distant relations rousing themselves to eat until the following day. After this had continued for several days the mourners unloosed the body to look at it, and thus renewed their grief If by this time the hair had become loose, it was plucked off the whole body, and preserved by the father, mother, or sisters in small bags made of opossum skin. Then the body was once more rolled up, and was not again uncovered till it had so far decomposed that the survivors could anoint themselves with oil which had exuded from it. The Kurnai say that this was to make them remember the dead person. Sometimes they opened the body and removed the intestines to make it dry more rapidly. The body in its bark cerements was carried with the family in its wanderings, and was the special charge of the wife, or of some other near relative. Finally, the body having, perhaps after several years, become merely a bag of bones, was buried or put into a hollow tree. Sometimes the father or mother carried the lower jaw as a memento.

The most remarkable custom connected with the dead was that of the "Bret" or hand. Sometimes the Kurnai cut