Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/611

IX boughs, headed by their principal man, running from the council-place to each of the separate camps and gathering the women and children together. The men then shout out the name of each place from which a contingent has come, and the women, as they are collected, sing one of the songs belonging to the Burbung. At the main ceremonies the boys are seated on the mound, each with his guardians (Muriwung) behind him. They are in front of a structure made of green boughs, and behind this the women crouch together, closely covered with boughs and blankets.

Meanwhile the younger initiated men who have been hidden in the scrub about a quarter of a mile off run up shouting, headed by the medicine-man (Ngoura-turai or Wulla-mulla), who sounds the bull-roarer, to which he is believed to have imparted great power by means of magical quartz crystals (Ngalun) brought up from his inside. In order to increase the din, and thus to frighten the women the more, each man carries a long strip of bark in his hand, with which he strikes resounding blows on the ground as he runs.

The boys are now seized by their guardians and hurried off to the forest, followed by the men, one man remaining to see that the women do not look after, or follow them. Each boy is now rubbed over with red ochre, and clothed with a rug or blanket, which conceals the whole of him except his face, over which the upper part hangs like a hood.

The ceremonies are marked off into various stages by particular representations. For instance, the men strip off from a tree near the Gumbu a spiral piece of bark round the bole, from the limbs to the ground, which represents the path from the sky to the earth, and they cut on the ground the figure of Daramulun, who is not the Supernatural Being of the Yuin beliefs, but the "boy," or son, of Baiame. He is always represented as having only one leg, the other terminating in a sharp point of bone. There is also figured on the ground the tomahawk which Daramulun let fall as he slipped down from the tree before mentioned to the ground; then two footprints of an emu a little distance from each other, made when trying to escape from Daramulun.