Page:The Euahlayi Tribe.djvu/169

 corroborees, also swansdown fluffed in puff balls over the heads.

The Gooumoorh, or corroboree, is a sort of black fellow's opera; as to the musical part, rather, as some one found an oratorio, a thing of high notes and vain repetition.

The stage effects of corroborees are sometimes huge sheets of bark fastened on to poles; these sheets of bark are painted in different designs and colours, something like Moorish embroideries. Sometimes 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 players. These last have a very weird look as they steal out 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