Modern Account
A more modern account of the death wail has been given by Roy Barker, a descendant of the Murawari tribe, some 50 miles north of the present town of Brewarrina. Barker was born on the old Aboriginal mission in the late 1920s and left there in the early 1940s.
"You hear the crying and the death wail at night," he recalled, "it's a real eerie, frightening sound to hear. Sad sound... to hear them all crying. And then after the funeral, everything would go back to normal. And they'd smoke the houses out, you know, the old Aboriginal way."
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