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Customs at the inauguration of a Warrara

On the thirteenth of October Palyanna, a boy of about fourteen years, was ordained Warrara*, a name denoting the highest degree in the knowledge of secret observations. I was not present at the beginning of the ceremony, but I was told that someone had led the boy out of the camp with his eyes covered and shouting kerri or erri*. I found him covered with a kangaroo skin, and the men and young people who had already reached the level of Warrara sitting around him. After a while two men broke a heap of green branches and hid themselves in them, about 20 paces from the spot where the boy lay. Then one of the men opened a vein, raised the boy up, but with his eyes covered, and let the blood run onto his head, shoulders, face and a few drops into his mouth. Several Kadlaabidls* had previously been made, a kind of whips which have a stick about 18 inches long and a two-foot-long cord, at the end of which hangs a chip about 8 inches long and 1/2 [inch] wide. If you twist the cord until it becomes quite turgid and strike the whip quickly through the air, a peculiar noise is produced that cannot be compared with anything else. While some men, biting their beards and others adopting grim gestures, handled these whips, and at the same time an old man sang a monotonous song, slowly beating time with his hand on the ground.

[It appears that this is not a complete description. CWS may have planned to write more about this, but he didn't elaborate further.

[Ted Schürman mentions on page 232 of his book [#4] that this ceremony is described in Chapter 5 Part (iii) of "The Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln."]

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