Finally, Mr. Tylor candidly adduces a case in which Mr. Dawson, taking
great and acknowledged trouble to collect evidence, learned from the
blacks that they had believed in a benevolent being, Pirnmeheal,
'whose voice is the thunder,' 'before they knew of the existence of
Europeans,' who 'have given them a dread of Pirnmeheal.'[28] We add Mr.
Howitt's testimony to a supreme being ruling 'from Omeo to Shoalhaven
River, from the coast to Yass Gundagai,' concerning whom 'old men
strenuously maintained that it was so before the white men came,' they
themselves, now aged, having only learned the secret when they were
initiated 'and made men' at about the age of fourteen.[29] In the
same essay of 1885[30] Mr. Howitt tells of a native whose grandfather
initiated him as to an all-seeing personality, Bunjil, 'up there,' who
would mark his conduct. 'This was said before the white men came to
Melbourne' (1835). Bunjil, said William Beiruk, a black, was called
'our father' 'before white men came to Melbourne.'
I might give other evidence in favour of the unborrowed character of
Australian belief in some such being as Baiame. Thus Mrs. Langloh
Parker, the careful collector of 'Australian Legendary Tales,'[31] was
herself interested in the question. She approached the subject as a
disciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who allows hardly a germ of religion
to the Australians. On hearing what she did hear, as to Baiame, from
the tribesmen, she asked one of them whether the idea was not borrowed
from Europeans. The old warrior answered that if it were so the young
men would know most about Baiame. But they know nothing, apparently
because the old rites of initiation have fallen into disuse. Nor are
they much more familiar with Christian doctrine. This black man had
logic in him. Mrs. Langloh Parker came, contrary to her prepossessions,
to the same opinion as our best authority, Mr. Howitt, that the
Australian belief is unborrowed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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