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Updated: June 5, 2025
Fish is wunnarl for about four years after his Boorah to a boy, and about four months after she is wirreebeeun, or young woman, to a girl. When the wunnarl was taken off a particular kind of meat, a wizard poured some of the melted fat and inside blood of that animal or bird, as the case might be, over the boy, and rubbed it into him.
No boy who had not been to a Boorah would dare to try to make fire. The implements for fire-making are a little log about as thick as a man's arm, of Nummaybirah wood a rather soft white wood and a split flat piece about a foot long and three inches wide. The little log was split open at one end, a wedge put in it, and the opening filled up with dry grass broken up.
Their skins were scratched with stone knives and mussel shells. Hideously painted, fiendish-looking creatures suddenly rushed upon them. Should they show fear and quail at the Little Boorah they would be returned to their mothers as cowards unfit for initiation, and sooner or later sympathetic magic would do its work, a poison-stick or bone would end them.
There was a Boorah ring, but instead of earth grass was heaped all round it. No young women were visible, only the old women, who sang and corroboreed towards the boys. Slowly they came forward, peered at their shoulders, and seeing there the marks, embraced them, shrieking out cries of joy that their boys had borne the tests.
He had said that as long as the blacks kept his sacred laws, so long should he stay in his crystal seat, and the blacks live on earth; but if they failed to keep up the Boorah rites as he had taught them, then he would move and their end would come, and only Wundah, or white devils, be in their country.
Of the Gayandi, the Boorah spirit, sometimes called Wallahgooroonboooan, there was no figure, because he was always present at Boorahs, though invisible. His voice only gave evidence of his presence.
Sometimes there is a huge imitation of an alligator made of logs plastered over with earth and painted in stripes of different colours, a piece of wood cut open stuck in at one end as a gaping mouth. This alligator corroboree is generally indicative of a Boorah, or initiation ceremony, being near at hand. Sometimes the stage effects are high painted poles merely.
Soon a great whirring is heard, telling that Gayandi, the Boorah spirit, is near. Yudtha Dulleebah, one of the oldest black men in the district, said at this stage once two boys did look up. The wirreenuns saw them, though the boys did not know it and went on looking.
After the fifth Boorah the mystery of the Gayandi was revealed and the bull roarers shown oval pieces of wood pointed at both ends, fastened to a string and swung round; but though this was shown, the wirreenuns told them that the spirit's voice was really in this wood animating it.
The old women began to sing a Boorah song. To deaden the sound of the dreaded voice, opossum rugs were thrown over the children, none of whom must hear, unless they are boys old enough to be initiated; the sound reveals the fact to such that the hour of their initiation is at hand.
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