ABSTRACT
W. E. Roth is responsible for the account of the procreative beliefs of the native tribes of North Queensland which follows here.!
Origin of Man. The first Aboriginals.-In the beginning Anjir was lying in the shadow of a thickly-leaved tree. He was a blackfellow with very large buttocks, but peculiar in that there was no sign of any orifice. Yalpan happened to be passing by at the time, and, noticing this anomaly, made a cut in the usual place by means of a piece of quartz-crystal, with the result that the evacuations were expelled and spread over the surface of the ground. All blacks were thus originally born from ArUir's dung. 2 Yalpan went southwards, and has never been heard of since. ArUir was buried underground after he had 'breeded'-the interpreter's expression-all he wanted to.3 (The Koko-warra of Princess Charlotte Bay.)
It was out of the local river whence men and women originally sprung, but on their first appearance there was no specialization or differentiation of sex: the stiff spear-grass gave the males their distinctive attribute while the two labia majors remind the girls of their early peregrinations along the two river banks. (Tully River.)
The moon (kakara) made the first man and woman, the former out of the same stone used for manufacturing tomahawks, the latter out of box-tree. The man was completed by rubbing him all over with white and black ashes, and placing in his inside a stick of pandanus-root, which, when required can be brought into prominence. The woman was rendered subtle and soft by rubbing her with yams and mud: a ripe pandanus fruit was enclosed in her belly to produce her courses; to finish her distinctive features she was slit up with a sharp edge of a flat marigrove-root. (Proserpine River.)4
Sexual History. Conception not necessarily due to copulation.-Although sexual connection as a cause of conception is not recognized among the Tully River blacks so far as they are themselves concerned, it is admitted as true for all animals :-indeed this idea confirms them in their belief of superiority over the brute creation. A woman begets children because (a) she has been sitting over the fire on which she has roasted a particular species of black bream, which must have been given to her by the prospective father, (b) she has purposely gone a-hunting and caught a certain kind of bull-frog, (c) some man may have told her to be in an interesting condition, or (d) she may dream of having had a child put inside her.
