A Bunya Invitation Sequence

The Bunya Festival is one of the most important traditional Aboriginal gatherings on the east coast of Australia with people travelling vast distances for weeks to attend. The festival was held about every 3 years or so and was initiated with signal fires and invitations being sent from the hosts and passed from group to group. Early colonist of Brisbane, Tom Petrie, gave an example of one of the groups these invitations passed among, in anecdotes recorded by his daughter Alice Petrie. This is a map of that invitation sequence.

"These gatherings were really like huge picnics, the aborigines belonging to the district sending messengers out to invite members from other tribes to come and have a feast. Perhaps fifteen would be asked here, and thirty there, and they were mostly young people, who were able and fit to travel. Then these tribes would ia turn ask others. For instance, the Bribie blacks (Ngunda tribe) on receiving their invitation would perchance invite the Turrbal people to join them, and the latter would then ask the Logan, or Yaggapal tribe and other island blacks, and so on from tribe to tribe all over the country, for the different tribes were generally connected by marriage, and the relatives thus invited each other. Those near at hand would all turn up, old and young, but the tribes from afar would leave the aged and the sick behind." 
Campbell, Constance Tom Petrie's reminiscences of early Queensland (dating from 1837) Brisbane: Watson Ferguson & Co.

Campbell, Constance Tom Petrie's reminiscences of early Queensland (dating from 1837) Brisbane: Watson Ferguson & Co.

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