Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/746

720 said, it had "won many fights." Yet it was exchanged, and carried away on its farther travels.

There is a natural tendency for certain occupations to become hereditary. The office of medicine-man, for instance, and that of song-maker have been already mentioned, as well as that of Headman, as being in some cases hereditary. One instance remains, which is, so far, the only one which has come to my knowledge. In the Herbert River tribes the various trades, if one may use that term, are hereditary, so that there are hereditary tree-climbers, canoe, shield, spear, and boomerang makers. Fishermen, rain-makers or medicine-men, hunters, messengers or heralds. Among the women are yam-hunters, hut-makers, basket-makers, etc. The tribal rain-maker is also an hereditary shield-maker.

When the Dieri expected visitors who might not know the position of their camp, they informed them of it by smoke signals. These were also made use of to attract the attention of distant parties with whom the smoke-makers desired to communicate. When out in the Yandairunga country in the year 1859, to the south-west of Lake Eyre, I saw almost daily as I travelled columns of smoke rising from the flat-topped hills of the Desert sandstone. These signals were evidently to call the attention of other parties of Yandairunga to the strangers travelling in their country, but I never succeeded in getting into touch with the signalling parties.

The Willuri and Hilleri tribes between Eucla and Port Lincoln make signals by smoke and marks in the sand to show friends the direction taken by the tribe, such as very short overlapping steps.

If one party of the Ngarigo were in search of another, and knew that they were in some particular locality, they would go up on to a hill and fill a sheet of bark, rolled up into a pipe, with dry grass. By setting fire to this a column of smoke would be caused to ascend into the air,