and doing so, they thought, would bring on stormy weather. Tankowillin, a man whom I have mentioned elsewhere, said when I spoke to him about this belief, "I know that I should not kill and eat crow, but I have often eaten his children without his doing me any harm." Crows have a habit of following people in the bush, flying from tree to tree, and peering down at the person followed while doing so; the Kurnai say that a crow understands their language, and answers their questions by its caw, which is their affirmative ngaa.
Each Kurnai received the name of some marsupial, bird, reptile, or fish, from his father, when he was about ten years old, or at initiation. A man would say, pointing to the creature in question, "That is your thundung; do not hurt it." In two cases I know of, he said, "It will be yours when I am dead." The term thundung means "elder brother," and, while the individual was the protector of his thundung, it also protected its "younger brother," the man, by warning him in dreams of approaching danger, or, by coming towards him in its bodily shape, it assisted him, as in the case of the man Bunjil-bataluk mentioned elsewhere, or was appealed to by song charms to relieve sickness.
The thundung of the Kurnai known to me are as follows:—
| Narut | wombat |
| Jirha | kangaroo |
| Barlajan | platypus |
| Gliun | water-hen |
| Blit-buring | a small bird |
| Gwanamurrung | eagle-hawk |
| Thurung | tiger-snake |
| Bibing | sea-salmon |
| Burra small | conger-eel |
| Noy yang | large conger-eel |
The thundung are clearly the equivalents of the totems of other tribes, and form a vestigiary survival of a class system, but I have no means of saying to which of the moieties of the tribe they once belonged, assuming those moieties to have been distinguished as Bunjil and Ngarugal.
On the Queensland border there was another coast tribe, the Chepara, who stand much in the same position as the
