The death wail is a keening, mourning lament, generally performed in ritual fashion soon after the death of a member of a family or tribe. Examples of death wails have been found in numerous societies, including among the Celts of Europe; and various indigenous peoples of Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Australia. Australia Early accounts Some early accounts of the death wail describe its employment in the aftermath of fighting and disputes. One such discussion can be found in the second volume of Edward Eyre's Journal of Expeditions of Discovery Into Central Australia (1845). Eyre describes what appears to have been a parlay between the members of two rival tribes — Ernest Giles, who traversed Australia in the 1870s and 1880s, left an account of a skirmish that took place between his survey party and members of a local tribe in the Everard Ranges of mountains in 1882. "Our foes did not again appear," he recorded. "At the first dawn of light, over at some rocky hills south-westward, where, during the night, we saw their camp fires, a direful moaning chant arose. It was wafted on the hot morning air across the valley, echoed again by the rocks and hills above us, and was the most dreadful sound I think I ever heard; it was no doubt a death-wail. From their camp up in the rocks, the chanters descended to the lower ground, and seemed to be performing a funereal march all round the central mass, as the last tones we heard were from behind the hills, where it first arose." A wax cylinder recording of the death wail of a Torres Strait Islander, made in 1898, exists in the Ethnographic Wax Cylinder collection maintained by the British Library. Modern accounts A more modern account of the death wail has been given by Roy Barker, a descendant of the Murawari tribe, some fifty miles north of the present town of Brewarrina. Barker was born on the old Aboriginal mission in the late 1920s and left there in the early 1940s. "You hear the crying and the death wail at night," he recalled, "it's a real eerie, frightening sound to hear. Sad sound... to hear them all crying. And then after the funeral, everything would go back to normal. And they'd smoke the houses out, you know, the old Aboriginal way." Asia China Ritual wailing occurred as part of funerary rites