e would have none of her, and so she
chases him across the sky, telling the spirits who stand round the sky
holding it up, that if they let him escape past them to earth, she will
throw down the spirit who sits in the sky holding the ends of the
Kurrajong ropes which they guard at the other end, and if that spirit
falls the earth will be hurled down into everlasting darkness.

So poor Bahloo, when he wants to get to earth and go on with the
creation of baby girls, has to sneak down as an emu past the spirits,
hurrying off as soon as the sun sinks down too.

Bahloo is a very important personage in legends.

When the blacks see a halo round the moon they say,

'Hullo! Going to be rain. Bahloo building a house to keep himself dry.'

All sorts of scraps of folk-lore used to crop out from the little girls
I took from the camp into the house to domesticate. When storms were
threatening, some of the clouds have a netted sort of look, something
like a mackerel sky, only with a dusky green tinge, they would say:
'See the old man with the net on his back; he's going to drop some
hailstones.'

Meteors always mean death; should a trail follow them, the dead person
has left a large family.

Comets are a spirit of evil supposed to drink up the rain-clouds, so
causing a drought; their tails being huge families all thirsty, so
thirsty that they draw the river up into the clouds.

Every natural feature in any way pronounced has a mythical reason for
its existence, every peculiarity in bird life, every peculiarity in the
trees and stones. Besides there are many mythical bogies still at
large, according to native lore, making the bush a gnome-land.

Even the winds carry a legend in their breath.

You hear people say they could have 'burst with rage,' but it is left
to a black's legend to tell of a whole tribe bursting with rage, and so
originating the winds.

There was once an invisible tribe called Mayrah. These people, men and
women, though they talked and hunted with them, could never be seen by
the other tribes, to whom were only visible their accoutrements for
hunting. They would hear a woman's voice speak to them, see perhaps a
goolay in mid-air and hear from it an invisible baby's cry; they would
know then a Mayrah woman was there. Or a man would speak to them.
Looking up they would see a belt with weapons in it, a forehead band
too, perhaps, but no waist nor forehead, a water-vessel invisibly held:
a man was there, an