“On one side of this dell, and nearest to the spring at the foot of it, lies a young woman, about seventeen years of age, sobbing and partly supported by her mother, in the midst of wailing, weeping, women; she has been twice speared in the right breast with a jagged hand-spear by her brother, and is supposed to be dying.”

CHARMING A WOMAN BY MAGIC

Besides the three ways already mentioned of securing a wife—­elopement, which is rare; capture, which is rarer still, and Tuelcha mura, in which a girl is assigned to a man before she is born, and while her prospective mother is still a girl herself—­by far the commonest arrangement—­there is a fourth, charming by magic.  Of this, too, Spencer and Gillen have given the best description (541-44).  When a man, they tell us, wants to charm a woman belonging to a distant tribe he takes a churinga, or sacred stick, and goes with some friends into the bush, where

“all night long the men keep up a low singing of Quabara songs, together with the chanting of amorous phrases of invitation addressed to the woman.  At daylight the man stands up alone and swings the churinga, causing it first to strike the ground as he whirls it round and round and makes it hum.  His friends remain silent, and the sound of the humming is carried to the ears of the far-distant woman, and has the power of compelling affection and of causing her sooner or later to comply with the summons.  Not long ago, at Alice Springs, a man called some of his friends together and performed the ceremony, and in a very short time the desired woman, who was on this occasion a widow, came in from Glen Helen, about fifty miles to the west of Alice Springs, and the two are now man and wife.”

The woman in this case need not be a widow, however.  Another man’s wife will do just as well, and if her owner comes armed to stop proceedings, the friends of the charmer stand by him.

Another method of obtaining a wife by magic is by means of a charmed chilara, or head-band of opossum fur.  The man charms it in secret by singing over it.  Then he places it on his head and wears it about the camp so that the woman can see it.  Her attention is drawn to it, and she becomes violently attached to the man, or, as the natives say, “her internal organs shake with eagerness.”  Here, again, it makes no difference whether the woman be married or not.

Still another way of charming a woman is by means of a certain shell ornament, which a man ties to his waist-belt at a corrobboree after having charmed it.[175]

“While he is dancing the woman whom he wishes to attract alone sees the lightning flashes on the Lonka-lonka, and all at once her internal organs shake with emotion.  If possible she will creep into his camp that night or take the earliest opportunity to run away with him.”

Here, at last, we have come across a method which