Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/510

484 an Alcheringa being, or, in other words, one of the ancestors. Thus one of the most remarkable features in the beliefs of the Arunta is that of the existence of spirit-ancestors who become reincarnate by entering some woman, and are again born under their original totem names.

The Yerkla-mining believe in the existence of an evil-disposed being called Burga who can harm them unseen. He is white in colour, and is always lurking about with intent to do harm, and may be met anywhere at night or after sunset.

One of my correspondents, hearing that the oldest Mobungbai had, as the blacks express it in their "pidgin English," "fought the devil," went out to see the place in the Mallee scrub, on the top of the cliffs. He found a small open space where the ground was torn up, and tufts of grass torn up by the roots. The place looked as if fifty natives had been at battle, but the tracks and footprints were all evidently made by the same person. The Mobungbai who had fought was very ill and quite exhausted for some days afterwards. These men professed to learn from dreams when and where the other people arc to hunt, travel, or visit, etc. They surround their lives with as much mystery as possible.

I take the beliefs of the native tribes of Victoria as representing those of the tribes of South-east Australia.

The Wotjobaluk account of the creation of man says that long ago Ngunung-ngunnut, the bat, who was a man, lived on the earth, and there were others like him, but there was no difference between the sexes. Feeling lonely, he wished for a wife, and he altered himself and one other, so that he was the man and the other was the woman. Then he made fire by rubbing a stick on a log of wood.

According to the Wurunjerri, it was Bunjil who made men of clay and imparted life to them, while his brother, Pallina, the bat, brought women up out of the water to be their wives.

According to the Yuin, the eastern neighbours of the