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[Page 170]
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INSTITUTIONS AND LAWS.
the extreme for a mother in-law and son-in-law to speak together. So far does this notion prevail, that even when an infant is betrothed, by the promise of her parents, the man to whom she is betrothed, from that hour, strictly avoids the sight of his future mother-in-law.
IV. – CIRCUMCISION.
Another part of the Mosaic Law-circumcision-is observed by some of the tribes Dr. Leichhardt and other travellers have recorded this fact. The practice, however, is not in vogue over the whole of Australia. It is, as far as my information goes, in some of the northern parts only that it has been observed.
V. – MEDICINE AND SORCERY.
The medical properties of various herbs are known to the blacks. One common medicine is "boiyoi" (pennyroyal), a tonic. The people are strongly endowed with the self-restoring force, and recover from the ghastly wounds often inflicted in their fights with wonderful rapidity. Their usual surgical treatment of a wound is to rub earth into it. But the chief business of the medicine-man (krodgee or kūradyi) is to disenchant the afflicted. All kinds of pain and disease are ascribed to the magic of enemies; and the usual way in which that magic is supposed to be exercised is by injecting stones into the body of the sufferer. Accordingly the kūradyi is provided with a number of stones, secreted in his belt; and on visiting a patient sucks the part where the pain is felt until he has convinced the sufferer that the cure is in a fair way of being effected, and then produces stones, which he declares that he has extracted from the seat of pain. The kuradyis exercise a strong spell over the minds of their people, and are believed to have power to inflict plagues as well as to cure patients.
VI. – PROPERTY.
In regard to individual property, they appear to have no other law than that one should use for his own sustenance and enjoyment what he has in his own hands. Between the members of the same camp or tribe something like communism prevails. At all events, presents given to one of a tribe are speedily divided as far as possible among the rest; but on tribal territorial property their rules are exact. Each tribe has its "taorai" or district marked off with minute accuracy, by watercourses, rocks, trees, and other natural land-marks; and one cannot go upon the territory of another tribe without risk of losing his life. In some cases when individual blackfellows have gone in the company of white men into the "toarai" of another tribe, they have been waylaid and speared for the intrusion.