“Now is that all clear?” asked Burradella.

The boys nodded.

“Right. Now come along and show us how you will manage it.”

As Burradella strode out into the bush the boys followed him. And now remaining in camp were only a few old men and women and several mothers with very young babies, squatting round the smouldering fires. The old men patiently toiled at the laborious though skilled tasks of repairing weapons and making cooking utensils and preparing materials for ceremonial work, while old Mullionkale the play-maker sat musing of the songs and dances and play-acting he would dream up for the next big corroboree. The deeply lined face of the old corroboree maker was broodingly peaceful as he sat there in the shadowed sunlight dreaming, a little smile now and then playing with the “fairies” dancing in his mind. Mullionkale means “flight of the eagle”, and old Mullionkale had been an eagle in his day. But long since his flights in war and chase had gone into song and the joy he put into dancing feet.

Beside him now sat his middle-aged assistant Kayari, quietly grinding differently coloured ochres and pipeclays into powders to be used as paints by the actors and dancers in the next corroboree. Kayari means “will take tomorrow”, and when Baia-me⁶ the Great Spirit, “He Who Built all Things”, should call old Mullionkale to his new home in Star Land then Kayari would take his place.

Oh, and poor Bilar sat there, too, apart from the others beside his gunyah, bent over his labours. Yes, Bilar the spear-maker, reckoned not only the best spear-maker in the Gunn-e-darr tribe but excelling all the tribes around. And now he was bent over a long slender heft of myall wood, using scraper of mussel shell and rasp of stone, with sand and water, with heat of ashes and infinite labour and patience thinning it down, straightening it, shaping it, hardening it, strengthening it, working into it perfect balance. It would be a beautiful, a prized, an envied weapon when finally finished. Bilar the spear-maker was putting all his craft into it, but not his heart. For Bilar toiled for old Kuluman from whom, at great price, he had bought his wife Gille and Kuluman was a hard taskmaster.

The old women, with a chuckle of gossip now and then, were cunningly weaving and plaiting cocoon-like mats for carrying very young babies, dilly-bags for carrying foods and belongings, fish-nets and traps, and bird-nets from cane, grass, vine and bark fibres and long thongs cut from animal skins. The young mothers, in between fondling their newborn babes, were grinding grass-seed into flour between their grinding stones. Under warm sunlight, with an eagle in the sky and a dreamy crooning from high up among the branches of the big old trees, it was a peaceful scene, a happy day.

Ah, but with a snake in the grass. The voices hushed as from a gunyah apart a wizened old man emerged, his face a maze of wrinkles, his half-closed eyelids disguising piercing eyes sinister as a snake’s. Around his skinny neck hung a necklet of yellowed human knuckle-bones and shrivelled eagle claws, and suspended by the human-hair belt at his waist the smoke-dried hand of a child.