Kutji (Gason's 'Kootchie', Howitt's 'Kutchi'; modern Diyari kutyi, glossed 'devil') is the malevolent power of Diyari religion. The police trooper Samuel Gason, in the first ethnography of the Diyari (1874), described Kootchie as the evil being opposed to the good spirit Mooramoora: certain ceremonies were performed within a circle traced in the sand, within which the good spirit was present and from which Kutji was shut out. Kutji brings sickness, death and misfortune; the dust whirlwinds that sweep the Cooper plains were ascribed to this spirit, and one passing through a camp caused great consternation as the forewarning of calamity. The Diyari medicine-men, the kunki, were held to have direct communication with Kutji as well as with the muramura, receiving from the spirit the revelations by which they interpreted dreams, named the authors of deaths, and cured the very ills the spirit caused. Later ethnography noted that Gason's picture of a single 'devil' simplifies Diyari belief, in which kutji could denote malignant spirit presence more generally; the figure nonetheless remains the standard dark counterpart of the good spirit Mura in accounts of Diyari religion.