onsiderable beauty and pathos, but who is (in some theories) identified
with kaggen, the mantis insect, a creative grasshopper, and the chief
figure in Bushman mythology.(1) Bun-jel or Pund-jel also figures in
Australian belief, neither as the creator nor as the eagle-hawk, but
"as an old man who lives at the sources of the Yarra river, where he
possesses great multitudes of cattle".(2) The term Bun-jel is also
used, much like our "Mr.," to denote the older men of the Kurnai and
Briakolung, some of whom have magical powers. One of them, Krawra, or
"West Wind," can cause the wind to blow so violently as to prevent the
natives from climbing trees; this man has semi-divine attributes. From
these facts it appears that this Australian creator, in myth, partakes
of the character of the totem or worshipful beast, and of that of the
wizard or medicine-man. He carried a large knife, and, when he made
the earth, he went up and down slicing it into creeks and valleys. The
aborigines of the northern parts of Victoria seem to believe in Pund-jel
in what may perhaps be his most primitive mythical shape, that of an
eagle.(3) This eagle and a crow created everything, and separated the
Murray blacks into their two main divisions, which derive their names
from the crow and the eagle. The Melbourne blacks seem to make Pund-jel
more anthropomorphic. Men are his (Greek text omitted) figures kneaded
of clay, as Aristophanes says in the Birds. Pund-jel made two clay
images of men, and danced round them. "He made their hair--one had
straight, one curly hair--of bark. He danced round them. He lay on them,
and breathed his breath into their mouths, noses and navels, and danced
round them. Then they arose full-grown young men." Some blacks seeing a
brickmaker at work on a bridge over the Yarra exclaimed, "Like 'em that
Pund-jel make 'em Koolin". But other blacks prefer to believe that, as
Pindar puts the Phrygian legend, the sun saw men growing like trees.

(1) Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Mythology, p. 6; Cape Monthly
Magazine, July, 1874, pp. 1-13; Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 210, 324.

(2) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 210.

(3) Brough Smyth, Natives of Victoria, vol. i. p. 423.

The first man was formed out of the gum of a wattle-tree, and came out
of the knot of a wattle-tree. He then entered into a young woman (though
he was the first man) and was born.(1) The Encounter Bay people have
another myth, which might have been attributed by Dea