eks, the time comes for the last
ceremony of all. On that day a design emblematic of the totem of the
deceased is drawn on the ground, and beside it a shallow trench is dug
about a foot deep and fifteen feet long. Over this trench a number of
men, elaborately decorated with down of various colours, stand
straddle-legged, while a line of women, decorated with red and yellow
ochre, crawl along the trench under the long bridge made by the
straddling legs of the men. The last woman carries the arm-bone of the
dead in its parcel, and as soon as she emerges from the trench, the bone
is snatched from her by a kinsman of the deceased, who carries it to a
man standing ready with an uplifted axe beside the totemic drawing. On
receiving the bone, the man at once smashes it, hastily buries it in a
small pit beside the totemic emblem of the departed, and closes the
opening with a large flat stone, signifying thereby that the season of
mourning is over and that the dead man or woman has been gathered to his
or her totem. The totemic design, beside which the arm-bone is buried,
represents the spot at which the totemic ancestor of the deceased
finally went down into the earth. When once the arm-bone has thus been
broken and laid in its last resting-place, the soul of the dead person,
which they describe as being of about the size of a grain of sand, is
supposed to go back to the place where it camped long ago in a previous
incarnation, there to remain with the souls of other men and women of
the same totem until the time comes for it to be born again.[273]

[Sidenote: General conclusion as to the belief in immortality and the
worship of the dead among the Australian aborigines.]

This must conclude what I have to say as to the belief in immortality
and the worship of the dead among the aborigines of Australia. The
evidence I have adduced is sufficient to prove that these savages firmly
believe both in the existence of the human soul after death and in the
power which it can exert for good or evil over the survivors. On the
whole the dominant motive in their treatment of the dead appears to be
fear rather than affection. Yet the attention which many tribes pay to
the comfort of the departed by providing them with huts, food, water,
fire, clothing, implements and weapons, may not be dictated by purely
selfish motives; in any case they are clearly intended to please and
propitiate the ghosts, and therefore contain the germs of a regular