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Updated: June 4, 2025
In Australia, according to Howitt and Fison, the bull-roarer is regarded with religious awe. 'When, on lately meeting with two of the surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of the turndun, they first looked cautiously round them to see that no one else was looking, and then answered me in undertones. The chief peculiarity in connection with the turndun is that women may never look upon it.
He tells of “a withered crone, weighing apparently not more than 80 to 90 lb. who carried a kilio containing a stone mortar 196 lb. in weight for more than half a mile on a sandy road without any perceptible exhaustion. The proportion of the active aged is much larger than among civilised people.” Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 133, 147. Cited by Ellis, Man and Woman, p. 4.
One may surmise that it was the survival of the primitive divinely sanctioned ethics of the ancient savage ancestors of the Israelite, known to them, as to the Kurnai, before they had a pot, or a bronze knife, or seed to sow, or sheep to herd, or even a tent over their heads.
+365+. The reports of savage customs show a certain number of cases in which the benevolent and the malevolent activities of the dead are equally prominent: so, for example, among the Australian Kurnai, the New Zealanders, the Melanesian peoples, the Vezimbas of Madagascar, the Zulus, the Eẃe-speaking tribes on the west coast of Africa.
Amongst the dangerous classes he commonly ranks mourners and women in general, but especially his mother-in-law. The Shuswap Indians think that the shadow of a mourner falling upon a person would make him sick. Amongst the Kurnai of Victoria novices at initiation were cautioned not to let a woman's shadow fall across them, as this would make them thin, lazy, and stupid.
So it is in the religious Mysteries of the African Yao; a selfish man, we shall see, is spoken of as 'uninitiated. So it is with the Australian Kurnai, whose mysteries and ethical teaching are under the sanction of their Supreme Being. So much for the anthropological dogma that early theology has no ethics.
Modern minds need to become familiar with this indeterminate idea of the savage Supreme Being, which, logically, may be prior to the evolution of the notion of ghost or spirit. But how does it apply when, as by the Kurnai, the Supreme Being is reckoned an ancestor?
But the most devoted believer in borrowing will not say that, when the Australian mediator, Tundun, son of Mungun-gnaur, turns into a porpoise, the Kurnai have borrowed from our Hymn of the Dolphin Apollo. The Tundun-porpoise story seems to have arisen in gratitude to the porpoise, which drives fishes inshore, for the natives to catch.
Races do not, in fact, advance on a straight and unbroken highway of progress. You find that the Kurnai of Australia are more civilised, as regards the evolution of the modern Family, than were the Picts who built crannogs and dug canoes, and cultivated the soil, and had domesticated animals, and used iron, all of them things that the Kurnai never dreamed of doing.
Among the nontotemic Kurnai of Southeast Australia there are animal patrons of the sexes and of shamans and other individuals. In like manner the shamans of the Pacific Coast Haidas and Tlingit have their guardians, and sometimes secret societies are similarly provided; in the winter ceremonies of the Kwakiutl the youth is supposed to be possessed by the patron of the society to which he belongs.
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