Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/527

VIII is the source, with virtues, failings, and passions, such as the aborigines regard them.

Such, I think, they picture the All-father to be, and it is most difficult for one of us to divest himself of the tendency to endow such a supernatural being with a nature quasi-divine, if not altogether so—divine nature and character.

The earliest instance of this tendency which I have met with is in an interesting paper by Mr. James Manning, in which he reproduces notes written in the years 1844-1845, and mainly taken from the most intelligent of those natives who frequented his home in the bush at that time. He says that he afterwards met with fresh confirmation of the beliefs of the blacks in "a supreme being or Deity," in all parts of New South Wales, in Victoria as far as the Grampians, and in Queensland as far as Rockhampton.

To show what, according to his statements, these beliefs were, I now quote such parts of his account, which, allowing for the medium of transmission, coincide with those which I know to be held by the aborigines in most of the area indicated by him. It is well also to preface this by what he says as to possible missionary preachings, on which Mr. E. M. Curr has laid much stress in speaking of these beliefs. Mr. Manning says, "For the first four or five years or more, of that earliest time" (that is of ten years before he made the notes), "there was no church south of the little one at Bong-bong at Mittagong. The cities and towns of Goulburn, Yass, Albury, and Melbourne did not exist. It was a common parlance among the settlers, when travelling south, before Goulburn and Yass townships were formed, to say that 'there was no Sunday after crossing Myrtle Creek.' No missionaries ever came to the southern districts at any time, and it was not until many years later that the missionaries landed at Sydney on their way to Moreton Bay."

His statements, when condensed, are that "they believe in a supreme Being called Boyma who dwells in the north-