1900. ] MATHEWS—SOUTH AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES. 631 
When one or more girls have reached the requisite age, which 
is determined by the first menstrual flux and the development of 
the breasts, a meeting of the tribe takes place and some festivities 
are indulged in. The girls are taken by some old women a short 
distance from the camp, where they are met by men who take 
charge of them and conduct them to a place where everything is 
in readiness for the purpose. ‘These men are /Voapa to the nov- 
ices—that is, they are men whom they could marry in accordance 
with the tribal laws. Here a girl is caught and placed lying face 
upward on the ground, and her hands and feet are held by the 
men present. An old man, appointed for this duty, then inserts 
two or three of his fingers, bound round with human hair, into the 
vaginal orifice for the purpose of stretching it. Sometimes a 
smooth piece of wood or stone, of the requisite thickness and 
length, is used to accomplish the same result. In either case the 
operation is continued until bleeding takes place. In other dis- 
tricts the lower part of the vaginal wall is lacerated with a sharp 
stone, the incision extending more or less into the perineum. 
Forcing a large body into the vagina in any of the ways just de- 
scribed causes a rupture of the fourchette, similar to that which 
usually takes place in the first parturition; and cutting with an 
edged stone effects the same purpose. Bleeding from the wound is 
arrested by plugging fur or birds’ down into the passage. Shortly 
afterward all the men present, one after the other, avail themselves 
of their right of prelibation, or, as it is termed by the French 
anthropologists, drat du culage. 
These mutilations, like those upon the men already referred to, 
are commonly supposed by Europeans to be done for the purpose 
of rendering the women incapable of bearing children, but I have 
gathered abundant evidence that there is no foundation whatever 
for this assumption. 
DEPILATION. 
This ceremony, the principal feature of which is plucking the 
hair from the bodies of the graduates, is practiced in the Narrin- 
yeri and Booandik nations,’ occupying the southeast corner of 
South Australia. As it is substantially the same as the Kuranda 
ceremony of some of the Barkunjee tribes, described in a paper 
contributed by me to the Royal Society of New South Wales in 
1 The American Anthropologist, Vol. xi, pp. 331-343, Plate V. 
