Page:Notes on the Aborigines of New South Wales.djvu/37

Rh Another song sung by the boys' mothers, with the accompanying music, is as follows:—



These are the first songs of the aborigines of this part of New South Wales which have ever been set to music. It may be mentioned that the words of these chants possess no meaning to the present natives, having been handed down from one generation to another. They were probably in the language of conquering tribes in the past. They are considered sacred, and are never used except at the initiation ceremonies, of which they constitute an important essential. The words and the music of the foregoing six chants were taken down, after repeated trials, from the mouths of the native singers.

The following are a few of the primitive beliefs which have a very wide distribution among the aborigines of this continent.

In every part of Australia which I have visited, the bat and the night-jar hold a peculiar place in the superstitions of the people, and figure largely in their stories. The former is the friend of all the men, and the latter of all the women. In some tribes the woodpecker (tree-creeper) is substituted for the small night-jar. The Rev. L. E. Threlkeld was the first to discover and report these specific totems of the two sexes. In his grammar and vocabulary published in 1834, upwards of seventy years ago, he states: "Tilmun, a small bird the size of a thrush, is supposed by the women to be the first maker of women, or to be a woman transformed after death into that bird: it runs up trees like a woodpecker. These birds are held in veneration by the women only. The bat, Kolung-kolung, is held in veneration on the same ground by the men, who suppose the animal (bat) a mere transformation." Rev. C. W. Schürmann, writing upon the Parnkalla tribe of Port Lincoln, South Australia, in 1845, relates the following superstition:—"A small kind of lizard, the male of which is ibirri and the female waka, is said to have divided the sexes in the human species, an event which would not appear to be much approved of by the natives, since either sex has a mortal hatred against the opposite sex of these little animals—the men always destroying the waka, and the women the ibirri'. "The Native Tribes of South Australia," p.241.

Mr. James Dawson, in 1846, describing the customs and beliefs of the aborigines of the western portion of Victoria, reports as follows:—"The common bat belongs to the men, who protect it against injury, even to the half killing of their wives for its sake. The fern owl, or large goat-sucker,