I have adopted the term “medicine-men” as a convenient and comprehensive term for those men who are usually spoken of in Australia as “Blackfellow doctors”—men who in the native tribes profess to have supernatural powers. The term “doctor” is not strictly correct, if by it is meant only a person who uses some means of curing disease. The powers which these men claim are not merely those of healing, or causing disease, but also such as may be spoken of as magical practices relating to, or in some manner affecting, the well-being of their friends and enemies. Again, the medicine-man is not always a “doctor”; he may be a “rainmaker,” “seer,” or “spirit-medium,” or may practise some special form of magic.

I may roughly define “doctors” as men who profess to extract from the human body foreign substances which, according to aboriginal belief, have been placed in them by the evil magic of other medicine-men, or by supernatural beings, such as Brewin of the Kurnai, or the Ngarrang of the Wurunjerri. Ngarrang is described as being like a man with a big beard and hairy arms and hands, who lived in the large swellings which are to be seen at the butts of some of the gum-trees, such as the Red Gum, which grows on the river flats, in the Wurunjerri country.