Dances.
The natives of Australia have various dances—and in the performance of these exhibit a skill and dexterity that can be the result only of long practice. The young—both male and female—are encouraged to engage in these exercises; they are taught by the elders of the tribes, and they are required to observe the rules which have been in force amongst their forefathers with scrupulous care.
Little is known of their mystic dances, which some regard as connected with a form of religion, but the Ngargee, or Yain-yang (corrobboree), is familiar to all who have lived in the bush.
They have their war-dances, before and after fights; dances appropriate to the occasion of "making young men;" dances in which the women only take part; dances in which the movements of the kangaroo, the emu, the frog, the butterfly, &c., are imitated; and a canoe-dance.
The performers on all such occasions, whether during the day or in the night, are naked or nearly naked; grotesquely painted with white clay; and they carry clubs or spears, or other weapons suitable to the character of the dance. They decorate themselves, too, with boughs of trees and feathers. The women generally are the musicians, and the arrangements of the performance are governed by a leader (usually an aged man), who beats time with the corrobboree-sticks. At night a large fire is kept burning, near which the musicians sit. The dancers retire to rude bush miams to array themselves, and never appear until their decorations are completed to their satisfaction.
The late Mr. Thomas makes mention of the sacred dances, when the natives set up effigies or painted figures, but gives no description of them. Mr. Parker says he has witnessed ceremonies having resemblance to an act of worship, when the blacks have assembled to propitiate Mindi, an evil spirit, whose sole business it was to destroy.[1] They dwelt on this—the idea of a powerful and destructive spirit—with awe and dread. Mindi, they believed, caused death; and they used certain prescribed ceremonies in order to appease his anger and to avert death and other calamities from themselves, and to excite him to exercise his power for the injury or destruction of their enemies. "Rude images," writes Mr. Parker, "consisting of one large and two small figures, cut in bark and painted, were set up in a secluded spot; the place was strictly tabooed; the men, and afterwards the women, dressed in boughs, and having each a small wand, with a tuft of feathers tied on it, were made to dance in single file, and in a very sinuous course, towards the spot, and after going round it several times, to approach the main figure, and touch it reverentially with the wand. I believe this to be a relic of the ophilatria or serpent worship of India."[2]
- ↑ The Aborigines of Australia, by Edward Stone Parker, 1854.
- ↑ Eyre witnessed a remarkable dance at Moorunde, in March 1844. The dancers were painted and decorated as usual, and they had tufts of feathers on their heads like cockades. Some carried in their hands such tufts tied to the ends of sticks, and others bunches of green boughs. After exercising themselves for some time, they retired, and when they re-appeared they were seen carrying a curious rude-looking figure raised up in the air. This singular object consisted of a large bundle of grass and reeds bound together, enveloped in a kangaroo skin with the flesh side outwards, and
