The northern Birrbay alternated between inland and coastal camps according to the seasons, heading to locations that would provide best food sources.

[citation needed] An annual reunion of the MoB is held on the northern side of the hastings river in October.

With descendants attending from far and wide, numbers for these group gatherings continue to increase annually, being held in a culturally significant location known in modern parlance as the coal wharf in contrast to assertions of near extinction claimed by John Heath in his recently released book Birrpai.

[citation needed] The Birrbay practised a form of ceremony known as Murrawin, found also among the Dunghutti and Gumbaynggirr peoples.

Unlike other rites, this did not require the presence of entire communities: two or three adjoining tribes would meet, choose initiated men from among each, and send them into the bush.

At this point, a slanging match is started as each tribe hurls invectives at another, The morning after, the whole tribal assembly shifts camp, and women and the young are separated from the men, who then file off, clicking their boomerangs, as they make their way to the ceremonial ring prepared several days earlier, where they dance.

[9] On their return, they hunt game, and harvest honey, or grub up edible roots, to bring to the women's camp in procession (ngooraykoo binbinnie), where they all supper together.

The men then return to the thoorapee, strip bark and form torches which they set alight and, swinging their firebrands, charge into the women's camp.

The boy is once more set astraddle on a man's shoulders and the men tramp to the women's site, where he is let down, while his guardian stands nearby.

[12] A dozen men standing astride a twenty-foot pole, three or four inches in diameter, which had been prepared earlier, raise it simultaneously between their legs to knee-height, as the boy sits downcast near the fire.

There is no single written account, but the diary of Henry Lewis Wilson, who oversaw convicts in the area, relates that after two convicts sent to work at Blackmans Point were killed by Indigenous men, a party of soldiers "got round the blacks and shot a great many of them, captured a lot of women and used them for a immoral purpose and then shot them.

[16] The highland areas and the Falls country around the Manning and Hastings rivers were still sufficiently wild to serve the Aboriginal outlaw Jimmy Governor as a sanctuary at the turn of the 20th century.