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By that time the other tribes began to arrive. First came from each tribe the boys to be initiated and the Munthdeeguns, or men in charge of them. The men were painted, and had leafy twigs tied round their wrists and ankles, as had the boys also, and all carried in their hands small branches of green. Those especially in charge of boys held, too, a painted spear with a waywah on top of it.
The principal article of the man's dress was called waywah. It was a belt, about six inches wide, made of twisted sinews and hair, with four tufts about eighteen inches long hanging back and front and at each side from it, made of narrow strips of kangaroo or paddy melon skins. For warmth in winter they would wrap themselves in their opossum-skin rugs.
The old women keep on singing, and one man with a spear painted red with a waywah fastened on top, walks up and down in the middle of the crowd of men, holding the spear, with its emblematic belt of manhood, aloft; as he does so, calling out the names of the bends of the creek, beginning with the one nearest to which they are camped.
He said nothing, but the young fellows noticed that for two or three days in succession he went to the waterhole in the creek and placed in it a willgoo willgoo a long stick, ornamented at the top with white cockatoo feathers and beside the stick he placed two big gubberah, that is, two big, clear pebbles which at other times he always secreted about him, in the folds of his waywah, or in the band or net on his head.
I have often met these Boorah boys in the bush, and on sighting me they have fled as if I were a devil in petticoats. In about another moon's time, the boys were painted principally white, a waywah put on them, a yunbean a piece of beefwood gum with two kangaroo teeth stuck in it, and a hole through it was tied to their front lock of hair.
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