osed
to reside. Before they approached the spot, the natives had been talking
and laughing freely, but when they drew near the water their voices were
hushed and their demeanour became solemn. When all stood silent on the
brink of the deep still pool, enclosed by a sandy margin on one side and
by a line of red rocks on the other, two old men, the leaders of the
totemic group of the Wollunqua, went down to the edge of the water and,
with bowed heads, addressed the Wollunqua in whispers, asking him to
remain quiet and do them no harm, for they were mates of his, and had
brought two great white men to see where he lived and to tell them all
about him. "We could plainly see," add Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, "that
it was all very real to them, and that they implicitly believed that the
Wollunqua was indeed alive beneath the water, watching them, though they
could not see him."[136]

[Sidenote: Religious character of the belief in the Wollunqua.]

I need hardly point out what a near approach all this is to religion in
the proper sense of the word. Here we have a firm belief in a purely
imaginary being who is necessarily visible to the eye of faith alone,
since I think we may safely assume that a water-snake, supposed to be
many miles long and capable of reaching up to the sky, has no real
existence either on the earth or in the waters under the earth. Yet to
these savages this invisible being is just as real as the actually
existing animals and men whom they perceive with their bodily senses;
they not only pray to him but they propitiate him with a solemn ritual;
and no doubt they would spurn with scorn the feeble attempts of shallow
sceptics to question the reality of his existence or the literal truth
of the myths they tell about him. Certainly these savages are far on the
road to religion, if they have not already passed the Rubicon which
divides it from the common workaday world. If an unhesitating faith in
the unseen is part of religion, the Warramunga people of the Wollunqua
totem are unquestionably religious.

[Footnote 108: On the zoological peculiarities of Australia regarded as
effects of its geographical isolation, see Alfred Newton, _Dictionary of
Birds_ (London, 1893-96), pp. 317-319. He observes (p. 318) that "the
isolation of Australia is probably the next oldest in the world to that
of New Zealand, having possibly existed since the time when no mammals
higher than marsupials had appeared on the face of the e