round her head once, taking care to fix the knot in the centre of her forehead; the remainder of the line was taken by another girl, who sat at a small distance from her, and with the end of it fretted her lips until they bled very copiously; Booroong imagining all the time that the blood came from her own head, and passed along the line until it ran into the girl's mouth. This operation they term Be-anny, and it is the peculiar province of the women."
The Geawe-gal believed in the mysterious power of the Koradji, but it is hard to say what special means of using it they ascribed to him as exercising it in his own tribe. If one of them wasted away, his ailment was almost always imputed to the evil influence of some Koradji of another tribe. Their own Koradji would, after resort to seclusion or mystery, pronounce from what quarter the malign influence had come, and then the whole tribe was committed to feud or revenge. The Koradji was supposed in some undefined way to have preternatural knowledge of, or power of communication with, supernatural influence.[1]
In the tribe about Dungog the Koradji were supposed to be possessed of supernatural powers, and also to be capable of curing people of all ills, and of causing disasters to others. Sickness they believed to be caused by the incantations and magic of the Koradjis of some hostile tribe.[2]
At Port Stephens the Koradji treated a sick person by winding round him a cord of opossum fur, and then round the body of some female relative or friend, who held the end of it in her hands, and passed the cord to and fro between her lips, until the blood dropped into a bowl, over which she held her head. It was believed that the evil magic which caused the disease passed up the cord into the body of the operator, and thence with the blood into the bowl.[3]
The tribes which extended inland from Port Stephens believed in the curative powers of the Koradjis, or Gradjis, as they were also called, to suck out evil magic projected into others by the medicine-men of other tribes, in the form of pieces of stone or charcoal. In one case a man was under the belief that when passing a grave, the ghost of a man
