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."
Read more about this topic: Death Wail
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or account:
“Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity to history, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“I never could get on with representative individuals—but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)