Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/558

532 we started by Umbara. He said that it was like a white man saying "I sell you"; my messenger Jenbin said it was like a white man saying "gammon." The use of the word will be seen by illustration farther on.

The intention of all that is done at this ceremony is to make a momentous change in the boy's life; the past is to be cut off from him by a gulf which he can never re-pass. His connection with his mother as her child is broken off, and he becomes henceforth attached to the men. All the sports and games of his boyhood are to be abandoned with the severance of the old domestic ties between himself and his mother and sisters. He is now to be a man, instructed in and sensible of the duties which devolve upon him as a member of the Murring community. To do all this is partly the object of the ceremonies, and the process by which this is reached is a singular one. The ceremonies are intended to impress and terrify the boy in such a manner that the lesson may be indelible, and may govern the whole of his future life. But the intention is also to amuse in the intervals of the serious rites.

The ceremonies, therefore, are marked by what may be called major and minor stages, and the intervals are filled in by magic dances, by amusing interludes and buffoonery, in which all the men take part, excepting the Kabos, whose duty is to unceasingly explain and admonish during the whole ceremony; to point the moral and adorn the tale. The pieces of buffoonery are perhaps some of the most remarkable features of the proceeding. If one were to imagine all sorts of childish mischief mixed up with the cardinal sins represented in burlesque, and ironically recommended to the boys on their return to the camp and afterwards, it would give a not unapt representation of what takes place. But there is the remarkable feature that at the end of almost every sentence, indeed of every indecent, immoral, or lewd suggestion, the speaker adds "Yah!" which negatives all that has been said and done. Indeed the use of the word "Yah" runs through the whole conversation carried on during the ceremonies, as when a man in the rear of the procession calls to some one in the front,