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The first age ends not with a death but with a withdrawal, and the withdrawal leaves the same two marks: (1) the world is visibly poorer · Hesiod's hidden 'means of life,' the Euahlayi's vanished flowers and honey; and (2) the withdrawn presence still watches from concealment · golden-age spirits 'clothed in mist' keeping watch, Byamee's three branded trees standing as an untouchable claim on the emptied earth. In both, the gap is not an absence of the first age but its deliberate concealment, with sentinels left behind.
'After Byamee left the earth, having gone to dwell in Bullimah, the far-away land of rest... all the flowers... withered and died.' With the flowers the honey ceased: 'In vain the women took their wirrees out to fill with honey; they always returned without it.' Only three trees still held bees · marked with Byamee's mah (brand), 'claiming them thus as his own for ever,' forbidden to touch. Later the wirreenuns climb Oobi Oobi and are handed 'fadeless flowers' out of the sky-camp so the earth is never wholly bare again.
set against Hesiod, Works and Days 42, 109–126
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