imes
there is a huge imitation of an alligator made of logs plastered over
with earth and painted in stripes of different colours, a piece of wood
cut open stuck in at one end as a gaping mouth. This alligator
corroboree is generally indicative of a Boorah, or initiation ceremony,
being near at hand. Sometimes the stage effects are high painted poles
merely.

At the back of the goomboo, or stage, are large fires; in the front, in
a semicircle, sit the women as orchestra, and the audience; a fire at
each end of the semicircle, as a sort of footlights. The music of the
orchestra is made by some beating time on rolled-up opossum rugs, and
some clicking two boomerangs together. The time is faultless. The tunes
are monotonous, but rhythmical and musical, curiously well suited to
the stage and layers. These last have a very weird look as they steal
Pout of the thick scrub, out of the darkness, quickly one after
another, dancing round the goomboo in time to the music, their
grotesquely painted figures and feather-decorated heads lit up by the
flickering lights of the fires around.

As the dancing gets faster the singing gets louder, every muscle of the
dancers seems strained, and the wonder is the voices do not crack. Just
as you think they must, the dancing slows again; the voices die away,
to swell out once more with renewed vigour when the fires are built up
again and again; the same dance is gone through, time after time--one
night one dance, or, for that matter, many nights one dance.

The dancers sometimes make dumb-show of hunts, fights, slaughters, the
women sometimes translating the actions in the songs; sometimes the
words seem to have nothing to do with them, and the dances only a
series of steps illustrating nothing.

Corroborees seem to fit in with the indescribable mystery of the bush.
That the spirit of the bush is mystery makes it so difficult to
describe beyond bald realism, otherwise it seems an effort to seize the
intangible. Poor Barcroft Boake got something of the mystery into
words.

If an Australian Wagner could be born we might hope for a musical
adaptation of corroborees. Wagner was essentially the exponent of
folk-lore music, wherein must be expressed the fundamentals of human
passion unrefined.

The most celebrated weapon is probably the boomerang the most
celebrated kind to whites, though not most useful to blacks, is the
Bubberab, or returning boomerang. These are made chiefly of Gidya and