Page:Tom Petrie's reminiscences of early Queensland.djvu/36

 and other island blacks, and so on from tribe to tribe all over the country, for the different tribes were generally connected by marriage, and the relatives thus invited each other. Those near at hand would all turn up, old and young, but the tribes from afar would leave the aged and the sick behind.

My father was present at one of these feasts when a boy for over a fortnight. He is the only free white man who has ever been present at a bon-yi feast. Two or three convicts in the old days, who escaped and lived afterwards with the blacks— James Davis ("Duramboi"), Bracefield ("Wandi"), and Fahey ("Gilbury"), of course, knew all about it, but they are dead now. Father met the two former after their return to civilization, and he has often had a yarn with the old blacks who belonged to the tribes they had lived with.

In those early days the Blackall Range was spoken of as the Bon-yi Mountains, and it was there that Duramboi and Bracefield joined in the feasts, and there also that Father saw it all. He was only fourteen or fifteen years old at the time, and travelled from Brisbane with a party of about one hundred, counting the women and children. They camped the first night at Bu-yu—ba (shin of leg), the native name for the creek crossing at what is now known as Enoggera.

After the camp fires were made and breakwinds of bushes put up as a protection from the night, the party all had something to eat, then gathered comfortably round the fires, and settled themselves ready for some good old yams, till sleep would claim them for his own. Tales were told of what forefathers did, how wonderful some of them were in hunting and killing game, also in fighting. The blacks have lively imaginations of what happened years ago, and some of the incidents they remembered of their big fights, etc., were truly marvellous! They are also born mimics, and my father has often felt sore with laughing at the way they would take off people, and strut about, and imitate all sorts of animals.

When aborigines are collected anywhere together, each morning at daylight a great cry arises, breaking through the silence: this is the "cry for the dead." Imagine it, falling