cking the action of a man who drives fish before him
with a branch in a pool, just as the natives do to catch the fish.
Meantime an orchestra of four men squatted beside him singing and
beating time with a stick on the ground.[150]

[Sidenote: Ceremony of a plum-tree totem.]

Again, another Arunta ceremony of the plum-tree totem was performed by
four actors, who simply pretended to knock down and eat imaginary plums
from an imaginary plum-tree.[151] An interesting point in this very
simple drama is that in it the men of the plum-tree totem are
represented eating freely of their totem, which is quite contrary to the
practice of the present day, but taken along with many similar
ceremonies it goes far to prove that in the ancient days, to which all
these dramatic ceremonies refer, it was the regular practice for men and
women of a totem to eat their totemic animals or plants. As another
example of a drama in which the performers are represented eating their
totem we may take a ceremony of the ant totem in the Warramunga tribe.
The legendary personages who figure in it are two women of the ant
totem, ancestresses of the ant clan, who are said to have devoted all
their time to catching and eating ants, except when they were engaged in
the performance of ceremonies. The two men who personated these women in
the drama (for no woman is allowed to witness, much less to act in,
these sacred dramas) had the whole of the upper parts of their bodies,
including their faces and the cylindrical helmets which they wore on
their heads, covered with a dense mass of little specks of red down.
These specks stood for the ants, alive or dead, and also for the stones
and trees on the spots where the two women encamped. In the drama the
two actors thus arrayed walked about the ground as if they were
searching for ants to eat. Each of them carried a wooden trough and
stooping down from time to time he turned over the ground and picked up
small stones which he placed in the trough till it was full. The stones
represented the masses of ants which the women gathered for food. After
carrying on this pantomime for a time the two actors pretended to
discover each other with surprise and to embrace with joy, much to the
amusement of the spectators.[152]

[Sidenote: In these ceremonies the action is appropriate to the totem.
Ceremony of the witchetty grub totem.]

In all these ceremonies you will observe that the action of the drama is
strictly app