The time is faultless.

The tunes are monotonous, but rhythmical and musical, curiously well suited to the stage and layers.

These last have a very weird look as they steal Pout of the thick scrub, out of the darkness, quickly one after another, dancing round the goomboo in time to the music, their grotesquely painted figures and feather-decorated heads lit up by the flickering lights of the fires around.
As the dancing gets faster the singing gets louder, every muscle of the dancers seems strained, and the wonder is the voices do not crack.

Just as you think they must, the dancing slows again; the voices die away, to swell out once more with renewed vigour when the fires are built up again and again; the same dance is gone through, time after time--one night one dance, or, for that matter, many nights one dance.
The dancers sometimes make dumb-show of hunts, fights, slaughters, the women sometimes translating the actions in the songs; sometimes the words seem to have nothing to do with them, and the dances only a series of steps illustrating nothing.
Corroborees seem to fit in with the indescribable mystery of the bush.
That the spirit of the bush is mystery makes it so difficult to describe beyond bald realism, otherwise it seems an effort to seize the intangible.

Poor Barcroft Boake got something of the mystery into words.
If an Australian Wagner could be born we might hope for a musical adaptation of corroborees.