CHAPTER XXIII
BURIAL AND MOURNING CUSTOMS
Customs depend upon a variety of circumstances—Child burial—Cremation disavowed—Interment—Graves differently marked—Carved tomb-posts of Melville Islanders—Sepulchral sign-posts of Larrekiya—Platform burial—Mummification of corpse—Skeleton eventually buried—Identification of supposed murderer—Pathetic scenes in camp—Self-inflicted mutilations—Weird elegies—Name of deceased never mentioned—Hut of deceased destroyed—Widowhood’s tribulation—Pipe-clay masks and skull-caps—Mutilations—Second Husbands—Collecting and concealing the dead man’s bones—Treatment of skull—Final mourning ceremony.
The burial and mourning ceremonies, if any, attendant upon the death of a person, depend largely upon the tribe, the age, and the social standing or status of the individual concerned. Old people who have become “silly” (i.e. childish), and who in consequence do not take an active part in any of the tribal functions or ceremonies, are never honoured with a big funeral, but are quietly buried in the ground. The reason for this is that the natives believe that the greater share of any personal charms and talents possessed by the senile frame have already migrated to the eternal home of the spirit. As a matter of fact, the old person’s spirit has itself partly quitted the body and whiles for the most time in the great beyond. For precisely the same reason, it often happens that a tribe, when undergoing hardship and privation brought about by drought, necessitating perhaps long marches under the most trying conditions, knocks an old and decrepit person on the head, just as an act of charity in order to spare the lingering soul the tortures, which can be more readily borne by the younger members. These ideas exist all over Australia.
When infants die, they are kept or carried around by the mothers, individual or tribal, for a while in a food-carrier, and then buried without any demonstration. The extinct Adelaide tribes required of the women to carry their dead children about with them on their backs until the bodies were shrivelled up and mummified. The women alone attended to the burial of the child when eventually it was assigned to a tree or the ground.
But at the demise of a person in the prime of his or her life, and of one who has been a recognized power in life, the case is vastly different. Both before and after the “burial” of the corpus, a lengthy ceremony is performed, during which all sorts of painful mutilations are inflicted amongst the bereaved relatives, amidst the accompaniment of weird chants and horribly uncanny wails. Before proceeding with the discussion of the attendant ceremonies, however, we shall give an outline of the different methods adopted in Australia for the disposal of the dead.
Cremation is nowhere practised for the simple reason that the destruction of the bony skeleton would debar the spirit from re-entering a terrestrial existence.
The spirit is regarded as the indestructible, or really immortal, quantity of a man’s existence; and it is intimately associated with the skeleton. The natives tender, as an analogy, the big larva of the Cossus or “witchedy,” which lies buried in the bark of a gum tree. As a result of its ordinary metamorphosis, the moth appears and flies away, leaving the empty shell or, as the natives call it, the “skeleton” of the “dead” grub behind. It is a common belief on the north coast that the spirit of a dead person returns from the sky by means of a shooting star, and when it reaches the earth, it immediately looks around for its old skeleton. For this reason the relatives of a dead man carefully preserve the skeletal remains, carry them around for a while, and finally store them in a cave.
PLATE XXVI