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Updated: May 21, 2025
You've got the makings of a glorious nation over here, but you don't get up early enough!" The only national work performed by the blacks is on the Darling. They threw a dam of rocks across the river near Brewarrina, we think to make a fish trap. It's there yet. But God only knows where they got the stones from, or how they carried them, for there isn't a pebble within forty miles.
When the Brewarrina people observe a more than ordinary number of bottles floating down the river, they guess that Walgett is on the spree; when the Louth chaps see an unbroken procession of dead marines for three or four days they know that Bourke's drunk.
From Girrahween, on the dayoorls went to Dirangibirrah, and after them the Dummerh. Dirangibirrah is between Brewarrina and Widda Murtee, and there the dayoorls piled themselves up into a mountain, and there for the future had the blacks to go when they wanted good dayoorls. And the Dummerh were changed into pigeons, with a cry like the spirits of "Oom, oom, oom."
Byamee is the originator of things less archaic and important than totemism. There is a large stone fish-trap at Brewarrina, on the Barwan River. It is said to have been made by Byamee and his gigantic sons, just as later Greece attributed the walls of Tiryns to the Cyclops, or as Glasgow Cathedral has been explained in legend as the work of the Picts.
It will be asked, 'How far have the Euahlayi been brought under the influence of missionaries, and of European ideas in general? The nearest missionary settlement was founded after we settled among the Euahlayi, and was distant about one hundred miles, at Brewarrina. None of my native informants had been at any time, to my knowledge, under the influence of missionaries.
This stone, they said, has to be well guarded, as it has the power of self-movement, or rather, the devil in it can move it. The greatest of local landmarks is at Brewarrina; this is the work of Byamee and his giant sons, the stone fisheries made in the bed of the Barwon. At Boogira, on the Narran Lake, is an imprint in stone of Byamee's hand and foot, which shows that in those days were giants.
Their own land is down Brewarrina way, but there they make no punitive expeditions, travelling up the Narran and elsewhere for that purpose. The Euloowayi, or long-nailed devils, are spirits which live where the sun sets. Just as the afterglow dies in the sky, they come out victim-hunting. These Euloowayi demand a tribute of young black men from the camp, to recoup their own ranks.
From beyond Forbes, Bourke, and Brewarrina they came in trucks to cross the bridge spanning the noble stream at the mountain's base, but they never went back again to the great plains where they had basked in plenty or staggered through droughts as the fickle seasons rose and fell.
To catch fish they also make small weirs and dams of stones, with narrow passages of stones leading to them. The fish are swept by the current into these yards, and there either caught by the blacks with their hands, or speared. The most celebrated of these stone fish-traps is at Brewarrina on the Barwon.
At Guddee, a spring in the Brewarrina district, every now and then come up huge bones of animals now extinct. Legends say that these bones are the remains of the victims of Mullyan, the eagle-hawk, whose camp was in the tree at the foot of which was the spring.
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