THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23083, 7 July 1938, Page 3

THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH

GIRL'S SIX MONTHS' VIGIL TRIBAL SECRETS SHARED A young woman anthropologist, Miss ; Phyllis Kabcrry, has spent six months alone in the Australian bush, and is the only white ever to have seen the secret corroborees of the bush-women, and ono of the few permitted to witness the secret rites of the bush-men. Born of English blood in tho United States, she has been brought up in Australia. As an undergraduate of Sydney, she longed to go to the distant places of the earth, to see the unseen. She spent more than 18 months in field work, living in a tent, and staying in turn with seven different tribes, each speaking a different language, "it was always believed that the bushwomen had no religion at all," she told an interviewer. "Men were supposed to represent the spiritual element, women the profane in the rites. I can explode that myth. "The men's corroborees are more elaborate than tho women's, but the women's are much more secret. They have songs tho men do not hear, and have spells the men do not know. "There are a lot of tabus, of course, and a certain amount of black magic as well as love mngie. If a man has been unfaithful, the woman he has betrayed will paint up a stone to represent him, and bury it. If in the course of time he falls ill. it is the magic. If ho does not fall sick there, has been some counter-magic at work! There is always a loophole. "The basis of the dances is totemisfic. There is a whole body of mythology behind them. They have traditions ol a time when their ancestors were half-human, half-beast; and changed into wallabies and kangaroos."