The ‘wororu’

A.R. Brown (1912)

In some tribes farther to the north I found a more interesting and better organized system of beliefs. In the Kariera, Namal, and Injibandi tribes the conception of a child is believed to be due to the agency of a particular man, who is not the father. This man is the wororu of the child when it is born. There were three different accounts of how the wororu produces conception, each of them given to me on several different occasions. According to the first, the man gives some food, either animal or vegetable, to the woman, and she eats this and becomes pregnant. According to the second, the man when he is out hunting kills an animal, preferably a kangaroo or an emu, and as it is dying he tells its spirit or ghost to go to a particular woman. The spirit of the dead animal goes into the woman and is born as a child. The third account is very similar to the last. A hunter, when he has killed a kangaroo or an emu, takes a portion of the fat of the dead animal which he places on one side. This fat turns into what we may speak of as a spirit-baby, and follows the man to his camp. When the man is asleep at night the spirit-baby comes to him and he directs it to enter a certain woman who thus becomes pregnant. When the child is born the man acknowledges that he sent it, and becomes its wororu. In practically every case that I examined, some forty in all, the wororu of a man or woman was a person standing to him or her in the relation of father’s brother, own or tribal. In one case a man had a wororu who was his father’s sister.

BROWN A.R. (1912): Beliefs Concerning Childbirth in Some Australian Tribes. Man, 12, 181
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2787775