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Updated: June 21, 2025
The hair is taken to the Boogahroo a bag of hair and gooweeras which is kept by one or two powerful wirreenuns in a certain Minggah. The wirreenun on receiving the hair asks to whom it belongs. Should it belong to one of a tribe he is favourably disposed towards, he takes the gooweera or hair, puts it in the bag, but never sings the I death song' over it, nor does he warm it.
These Minggah and Goomarh spirit trees and stones always make me think, perhaps irrelevantly, of one of the restored sayings of the Lord, which ends 'Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood, and I am there. Blacks were early scientists in some of their ideas, being before Darwin with the evolution theory, only theirs was a kind of evolution aided by Byamee.
The whistling voice came from a third direction, though all the time I could see Bootha's lips moving. Guadgee answered all she was asked. She said Adelaide was made ill because she had offended the spirits by bathing in the creek under the shade of a Minggah, or spirit-tree, a place tabooed to all but wirreenuns, or such as hold communion with spirits.
'May your shadow never be less! The shadow of a wirreenun is, like his head, always mahgarl, or taboo; any one touching either will be made to suffer for such sacrilege. A man's Minggah is generally a tree from amongst his multiplex totems, as having greater reason to help him, being of the same family.
Of course, according to the blacks, to disturb a shadow is to hurt the original. In this Minggah, Guadgee said, were swarms of bees invisible to all but wirreenuns, and they are ready always to resent any insult to the Minggah or its shadow. These spirit-bees had entered Adelaide and secreted some wax on her liver; their bites, Guadgee said, were on her back.
The dying bequeath these stones, their most precious possessions, to the living wirreenun most nearly related to them. The wirreenun's health and power not only depend upon his crystals and yunbeai, but also on his Minggah; should an accident happen to that, unless he has another, he will die in any case, he will sicken. Many of the legends deal with the magic of these spirit-animated trees.
They are places of refuge in time of danger; no one save the wirreenun, whose spirit-tree it was, would dare to touch a refugee at a Minggah; and should the sanctuary be a Goomarh, or spirit-stone, not even a wirreenun would dare to interfere, so that it is a perfectly safe sanctuary from humanly dealt evil.
The tribe of a neighbouring creek, when we were first at the station, used to threaten to come and get it, but the men of the local tribe used to muster to protect it from desecration even at the expense of their lives. The Minggah by the garden I have told you of before. Further down the creek are others. At Weetalibah was the tree from which Byamee cut the first Gayandi.
Should a wirreenun, perhaps for enmity, perhaps for the sake of ransom, decide to capture a Doowee, he will send his Mullee Mullee out to do it, bidding the Mullee Mullee secrete the Doowee in his the wirreenun's Minggah, tree or rock.
The yunbeai is a sort of alter ego; a man's spirit is in his yunbeai, and his yunbeai's spirit in him. A Minggah, or spirit-haunted tree of an individual, usually chosen from amongst a man's multiplex totems, is another source of danger to him, as also a help. As Mr. Canton says: 'What singular threads of superstition bind the ends of the earth together!
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