Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/779

XII it, unless it were some one of the old medicine-men. The medicine-man who skinned the body cut off pieces of the flesh, which he threw to the several parties sitting round, who cooked and ate it. The principal medicine-men rubbed the fat over their own bodies. The reason given is that they eat him because they knew him and were fond of him, and they now knew where he was, and his flesh would not stink. His mother carried the skin and bones for months with her, and when one tribal group met another, the old woman would lift the opossum rug off the skin, which was placed in a "humpy" (hut). The friends of the deceased mourned and cut themselves with tomahawks, while the others restrained them from injuring themselves.

When a man is killed in one of the ceremonial fights in the tribes about Maryborough (Queensland), his friends skin him and eat him. He is skinned by one of the old men (his father, if alive), or his father's brother, or some other relative. The body is first of all prepared by passing a burning fire-stick all over it, after which the outer skin peels off, leaving the corpse nearly as white as a white man. This appearance seems to have caused the blacks to think the first white men they saw were their friends returned to life.

The skin is then taken off, with the nails and hair left on. The body is distributed among the male friends of the deceased and the old women as far as it will go, who roast and eat the flesh. The meat looks like horseflesh, and smells, when being cooked on the fires, like beefsteak. The little fat there is on the kidneys is rubbed on the points of the spears of his relations, and the kidneys are stuck on the points of two spears. It is thought that this will make the spears extremely deadly when thrown, and the deceased is eaten in order that his virtues as a warrior may go into those who partake of him.

These people never eat any part of their enemies whom they kill. Blackboys belonging to my correspondent, who had been killed by them, were chopped up into little bits and left lying on logs.

Mr. Andrew Lang in his work The Making of Religion