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Updated: May 26, 2025
They effectually prevented the cattle, however, from straying in their direction. The natives were keeping what is called a Corroboree, and I do not know that it is a much more barbarous amusement than many of more civilised people. We were off by daybreak, and in three hours reached our settlement. All had gone well, and I need scarcely say that we were heartily welcomed.
If they had gone on their way it is possible that they would have slipped past the Blacks without danger. But although the Kangaroo is as timid an animal as any in the bush, it is also very curious, and Dot's Kangaroo wished to peep at the corroboree.
But you can't describe a corroboree, it wants the scenic effects of the grim bush: tapering, dark Belahs, Coolabahs contorted into quaint shapes and excrescences by extremes of flood and drought, and their grotesqueness lit up by the flickering fires, until the trees themselves look like demons of the night, and the painted black fellows their attendant spirits stealing into the firelight from what seems a vast, dark, unknown Beyond.
A person who went to a Boodther without a goolay full of presents would be thought a very poor thing indeed. Of course every meeting has a corroboree as part of it. Every totem even has its own special corroboree and time for having it, as the Beewees, or iguanas, when the pine pollen is failing and the red dust-storms come.
What strange orgies our dances are! To the critical mind what a strange contradiction to our sheepish passion-hiding conventions! A survival of the corroboree, of the immolation of the tribal virgins, a ritual handed down from darkest antiquity like the cult of the Christmas Tree and the Easter Egg; only their significance is lost, while that of the dance is transparently evident.
First, two figures ghastly with white paint came bounding like Jacks-in-the-box out of the gloom into the red light, and danced gracefully then one more popped out then another, at set intervals of time then another, all painted differently and swelled the dance by degrees; and still, as the dance grew in numbers, the musicians sang and drummed louder and faster by well-planned gradations, and the motion rose in intensity, till they all warmed into the terrible savage corroboree jump, legs striding wide, head turned over one shoulder, the eyes glaring with fiendish intensity in one direction, the arms both raised and grasping waddies and boomerangs till at last they worked up to such a gallop of fierce, buck-like leaps that there was a jump for each beat of the music.
She would reply that long ago Pund-jel, the first man, made two images of human beings in clay, and stuck on curly bark for hair. He then danced a corroboree round them, and sang a song. They rose up, and appeared as full-grown men. To this statement, hallowed by immemorial belief, Why- Why only answered by asking who made Pund-jel.
The steamer was made for the corroboree, I mean of logs with mud layered over them, painted up, a hollow log for a funnel in the middle. There was a little opening in the far side of the steamer in which a fire was made, the smoke issuing through the hollow log in the most realistic fashion.
A monster corroboree was held alongside the Prince of Wales's statue, but, unfortunately, he went to pieces in a day or two, when the fierce sun beat down upon the clay, and cracked it. This gradual disintegration of the great ruler's deputy vastly amused the blacks, and I eventually had to hasten the Prince's end, lest their mirth should compromise my dignity.
I must admit that this energetic and systematic "puffing" did a great deal of good, and wherever we went I was looked upon as a sort of wizard, entitled to very great respect, and the best of everything that was going. The big corroboree lasted all night, and at length, before we separated on the second day, the great man gave way with exceedingly bad grace.
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