Page:The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina.djvu/52

47 Another of their games at which they spend considerable time is Wotchwie; that being both the name of the game and the toy with which it is played.

The toy is made of an elongated oval piece of wood; its extreme length being five inches, and its greatest diameter an inch and a half to one of the long points. A slender wand two feet and a half long, made tough by means of fire, is firmly attached by gum and twine, and the toy is complete.

The game can be played by any number above one. Both sexes, from eight years of age and upwards, join in it. When they start from their camps to commence the game, they select a stretch of three or four hundred yards of flat smooth ground, at one end of which a mark is made by way of a start point. Then the game begins after this fashion:—One takes a short run up to the starting mark, throws his Wotchwie from him, so that it strikes the ground in a particular manner (an awkward cast is certain to result in a broken toy), when the tiny thing bounds away very quickly, the long tail-like wand being visible all the time that the momentum continues, twirling and twining above the grass like the tail of a kangaroo mouse when running away in a hurry. These toys sometimes go as much as four hundred yards in their eccentric running bounds. The game merely consists in each striving to make his Wotchwie pass that of his fellows. As the breakages during the progress of a game are numerous, each player supplies himself with several of the toys before the game commences.

No doubt but what this Wotchwie racing seems a simple enough kind of pastime when thus described on paper, still