Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/505

VIII The legend recounts their adventures, and gives the reasons for the names they gave to the places at which they halted or camped. It traces them to a place on the east side of Lake Eyre round its southern end, and to some place on the north-east side apparently in the Wonkanguru country.

A second legend gives the wanderings of the young women to a place where they met a similar party of Wonka-mala girls, who therefore must have come southwards, from about two hundred miles north of Lake Eyre.

The two parties having joined, they wandered still farther to the north, until they reached a vast sheet of water, with high waves. Following its shore, they came to a steep hill, at which some of them turned back. These came upon a number of men engaged on a Wodampa ceremony, who being enraged that the girls should have seen what was not lawful for them to see, strangled them all. Meanwhile the others, being stopped by the steep hill, which they could not pass, the eldest one struck it with her Wona, or staff, and as it opened, they danced through the opening, and came to a place where Ankuritcha, an ancient man, was sitting on the ground, twisting cord, in front of his camp. They seated themselves near him, and as he listened to them, with his ear turned to the sky, Arawotya, who lives there, let down a long hair cord, and drew them up to himself.

The Mankara-waka are the Pleiades, and Orion's Belt is the group of the Mankara-pirna. All that is known of Arawotya is that he once wandered over the earth, and that he made the deep springs of water which rise here and there in otherwise waterless districts of north-western Queensland.

As in the legend of the Mura-mura Makatakaba, it is not easy to say what the great sheet of water can be, unless it is the Gulf of Carpentaria, which is nearer to the Wonka-mala country than that of the Wonkanguru. Northern tribes-people who came to the Minkani ceremonies would meet Dieri, and thus made known to them facts as to the geography of parts still farther to the north. At any rate, there is no sheet of water which would strike the Lake Eyre tribes as remarkable between their country and the sea.

Besides these legends, there are others which relate to