they practise tree-burial first and earth-burial afterwards.270 For example, in the Unmatjera and Kaitish tribes, when a man dies, his body is carried by his relations to a tree distant a mile or two from the camp. There it is laid on a platform by itself for some months. When the flesh has disappeared from the bones, a kinsman of the deceased, in strictness a younger brother (itia), climbs up into the tree, dislocates the bones, places them in a wooden vessel, and hands them down to a female relative. Then the bones are laid in the grave with the head facing in the direction in which his mother's brother is supposed to have camped in days of old. After the bones have been thus interred, the spirit of the dead man is believed to go away and to remain in his old alcheringa home until such time as he once more undergoes reincarnation.271 But in these tribes, as we saw, very old men and women receive only one burial, being at once laid in an earthy grave and never set up on a platform in a tree; and we have seen reason to think that this difference in the treatment of the aged springs from the indifference or contempt in which their ghosts are held by comparison with the ghosts of the young and vigorous. In the Warramunga tribe, who regularly deposit their dead in trees first and in the earth afterwards, so long as the corpse remains in the tree and the flesh has not completely disappeared from the bones, the mother of the deceased and the women who stand to him or her in the relation of tribal motherhood are obliged from time to time to go to the tree, and sitting under the platform to allow its putrid juices to drip down on their bodies, into which they rub them as a token of sorrow. This, no doubt, is intended to please the jealous ghost; for we are told that he is believed to haunt the tree and even to visit the camp, in order, if he was a man, to see for himself that his widows are mourning properly. The time during which the mouldering remains are left in the tree is at least a year and may be more.272 The final ceremony which brings the period of mourning to an end is curious and entirely different from the one observed by the Arunta on the same occasion. When the bones have been taken down from the tree, an arm-bone is put carefully apart from the rest. Then the skull is smashed, and the fragments together with all the rest of the bones except the arm-bone, are buried in a hollow ant-hill near the tree. Afterwards the arm-bone is wrapt up in paper-bark and wound round with fur-string, so as to make a torpedo-shaped parcel, which is kept by a tribal mother of the deceased in her rude hovel of branches, till, after the lapse of some days or weeks, the time comes for the last ceremony of all. On that day a design emblematic of the totem of the deceased is drawn on the ground, and beside it a shallow trench is dug about a foot deep and fifteen feet long. Over this trench a number of men, elaborately decorated with down of various colours, stand straddle-legged, while a line of women, decorated with red and yellow ochre, crawl along the trench under the long bridge made by the straddling legs of the men. The last woman carries the arm-bone of the dead in its parcel, and as soon as she emerges from the trench, the bone is snatched from her by a kinsman of the deceased, who carries it to a man standing ready with an uplifted axe beside the totemic drawing. On receiving the bone, the man at once smashes it, hastily buries it in a small pit beside the totemic emblem of the departed, and closes the opening with a large flat stone, signifying thereby that the season of mourning is over and that the dead man or woman has been gathered to his or her totem. The totemic design, beside which the arm-bone is buried, represents the spot at which the totemic ancestor of the deceased finally went down into the earth. When once the arm-bone has thus been broken and laid in its last resting-place, the soul of the dead person, which they describe as being of about the size of a grain of sand, is supposed to go back to the place where it camped long ago in a previous incarnation, there to remain with the souls of other men and women of the same totem until the time comes for it to be born again.273
General conclusion as to the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the Australian aborigines.
This must conclude what I have to say as to the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the aborigines of Australia. The evidence I have adduced is sufficient to prove that these savages firmly believe both in the existence of the human soul after death and in the power which it can exert for good or evil over the survivors. On the whole the dominant motive in their treatment of the dead appears to be fear rather than affection. Yet the attention which many tribes pay to the comfort of the departed by providing them with huts, food, water, fire, clothing, implements and weapons, may not be dictated by purely selfish motives; in any case they are clearly intended to please and propitiate the ghosts, and therefore contain the germs of a regular worship of the dead.
Footnote 216: (return)
E. J. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia (London, 1845), ii. 349.
Footnote 217: (return)
A. Oldfield, "The Aborigines of Victoria," Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, N.S. iii. (1865) p. 245.
Footnote 218: (return)
P. Beveridge, in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, xvii. (1883) pp. 29 sq. Compare R. Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 100 note.
Footnote 219: (return)
(Sir) G. Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery, ii. 332 sq.
Footnote 220: (return)
Rev. J. Roscoe, The Baganda (London, 1911), pp. 109 sqq.
Footnote 221: (return)
E. M. Curr, The Australian Race (Melbourne and London, 1886–1887), i. 87.
Footnote 222: (return)
A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 463.
Footnote 223: (return)
A. W. Howitt, op. cit. p. 461.
Footnote 224: (return)
A. W. Howitt, op. cit. p. 473.
Footnote 225: (return)
A. W. Howitt, op. cit. p. 474.
Footnote 226: (return)
F. C. Urquhart, "Legends of the Australian Aborigines," Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xiv. (1885) p. 88.
Footnote 227: (return)
E. M. Curr, The Australian Race, i. 87.
Footnote 228: (return)
