United States or Suriname ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And what Byamee said has come to pass, as the Narran Lake shows, with its large sheet of water, spreading for miles, the home of thousands of wild fowl. Gooloo was a very old woman, and a very wicked old woman too, as this story will tell. During all the past season, when the grass was thick with seed, she had gathered much doonburr, which she crushed into meal as she wanted it for food.
Kindliness towards the old and sick is strictly inculcated as a command of Byamee, to whom all breaches of his laws are reported by the all-seeing spirit at a man's death, and he is judged accordingly. Sir Thomas Mitchell, writing in 1837 his experiences of the blacks during his explorations, notices as very striking their care and affection for the aged of their race.
These they plastered over with mud and painted in different colours and designs. On the right of the Bunbul they made an earthen figure of Byamee this figure was reclining holding in each hand a Boondee. On the other side was the huge figure of a woman this represented Birrahgnooloo, the favourite wife of Byamee; she held two spears.
So alone in a thick scrub, on one of the Noondoo ridges, lives this old man, Byamee, the mightiest of Wirreenun. The Bunnyyarl and Wurrunnunnah were relations, and lived in one camp. The Wurrunnunnah were very hardworking, always trying to gather food in a time of plenty, to lay in a store for a time of famine.
Old Byamee, who was a great Wirreenun, said he would take his two sons, Ghindahindahmoee and Boomahoomahnowee, to the gathering of the tribes, for the time had come when they should be made young men, that they might be free to marry wives, eat emu flesh, and learn to be warriors.
Parker, by whom the information is given us, is put up at funerals, presumably to Byamee by the community or its representative. Mrs. Parker adds: "Though we say that actually these people have but two attempts at prayers, one at the grave and one at the inner Boorah ring, I think perhaps we are wrong.
But in point of fact we find amongst them both prayers to Byamee and formulæ which, though now unintelligible even to the natives, may originally have been prayers. And generally speaking the presumption is that races, who distinctly admit the existence of spirits, pray to those spirits, even though their prayers be concealed from the white man's observation.
The verb baia or biai, to make or shape, whence Mr. Ridley derived Baiame, is not known to me in Euahlayi. Wir djuri has BAI, a footmark, and Byamee left footmarks on the rocks, but that is probably a chance coincidence. My informant said that he was instructed as to Byamee in his first Boorah, or initiation.
The primitive mind is notoriously capable of entertaining, simultaneously, the most contradictory notions. Thus, in the Australian "Legend of Eerin," the mourners implore Byamee to accept the soul of the faithful Eerin into his Paradise, Bullimah. No doubt Byamee heard, yet Eerin is now a little owl of plaintive voice, which ratters warning cries in time of peril.
Byamee, it is said, first sent them the manna because their children were crying for honey, of which there was none except in the trees that Byamee, when on earth, had marked for his own.
Word Of The Day