Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing
Post-Colonial Studies Australian History Indigenous Studies Colonial History Cultural Studies Folklore & Mythology Ethnomusicology
Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing is a scarce 1981 first-edition hardcover that has become a touchstone for collectors of Australian colonial, folkloric and cultural history. In only 148 tightly-written pages, Geoffrey Bomfield documents the moment European missionaries and settlers in the Hunter Valley, NSW, persuaded—or bullied—local Awabakal and Worimi people into abandoning their traditional corroboree dances. The result is an on-the-ground, primary-source snapshot of how frontier Christianity collided with Indigenous ceremony and permanently altered Australia’s cultural landscape. Because the book was printed in the United Kingdom for a small Antipodean readership, surviving copies in the original cloth binding are now genuinely rare.
What makes this copy especially desirable is the personalised, vintage provenance: a neat period gift inscription on the front endpaper that places the book in thoughtful circulation almost immediately after publication. Combined with the honest wear of the boards and light foxing typical of British paper stocks of the era, the book carries the patina of a 40-year journey from private shelf to collector’s hand—exactly the kind of character that antiquarian hunters prize over pristine reprints. No other modern edition captures Bomfield’s out-of-print text or the original 1981 layout and maps.
For scholars, Baal Belbora is still cited in university syllabi on Australian frontier studies, post-colonial theory and ethno-musicology; for genealogists it preserves names, places and eyewitness accounts that never made it into official archives. Folklore enthusiasts value the detailed song-line transcriptions, while cultural geographers use the fold-out map to trace how mission stations disrupted traditional movement corridors. Whether you shelve it beside your collection of early Australiana, display it as an artifact of 1980s British publishing, or consult it for research, this hardcover first edition offers an irreplaceable window into the “end of the dancing” and the beginning of modern Australia’s ongoing reckoning with its colonial past.
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