Page:The Native Tribes of South Australia (1879).djvu/281

 CORROBERIES. 203 dances (or corroberies as they are called by the whites). At sunset a fire is made, to give light. The women sit apart, with skins rolled up and held between the knees, upon which they beat time. The young men are ornamented, after their fashion, with a tuft of emu feathers in the hair; and those who are not painted red, ornament themselves with chalk, by making circles round the eyes, a stroke along the nose, and dots upon the forehead and cheeks, while the rest of the body is covered with fanciful figures. One commences singing, and if all cannot join (for the songs are frequently in a different language, taken from some distant tribe), he commences another song. If the song is known to all, the women scream or yell out at the top of their voices, and the men commence a grotesque kind of dance, which to us appears sufficiently ridiculous and amusing. It is upon an occasion like this that they represent their ancestors to have been assembled at Mootabarringar. Having no fire, this dance was held in the daytime, and the weather being very hot, the perspiration flowed copiously from them and formed the large ponds; and the beating of their feet upon the ground produced the irregularities of surface in the form of the hills and valleys. They sent messengers, Kuratje and Kanmari, towards the east, to Kondole, to invite him to the feast, as they knew that he possessed fire. Kondole, who was a large powerful man, came, but hid his fire, on account of which alone he had been invited. The men, displeased at this, determined to obtain the fire by force; but no one ventured to approach him. At length one named Rilballe determined to wound him with a spear, and then take the fire from him. He threw the spear and wounded him in the neck. This caused a great laughing and shouting, and nearly all were transformed into different animals: Kondole ran to the sea, and became a whale, and ever after blew the water out of the wound which he had received in his neck. Kuratje and Kanmari became small fish. The latter was dressed in a good kangaroo skin, and the former only a mat made of seaweed, which is the reason, they say, that the kanmari contains a great deal of oil under the skin, while the kuratje is dry and without fat. Others