Definition of "waddy"

This is how it was with the old waddies, aint it?

1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar.

1968, Charles Portis, True Grit

I should have told you that many of the Amity Paint tribe, which is more numerous than the other two settlement tribes, were deficient of spears and shields, having nothing but waddies and boomerangs.

1839, William Mann, Six Years' Residence in the Australian Provinces, page 156

In the mean while women, children, and remote stock-keepers fell under the unerring spears or death-dealing waddies of an enemy, the first indication of whose appearance was consectaneous with the stroke that reft his victim of life.

1840 May—August, Robert Montgomery Martin (editor), Van Diemen's Land, The Colonial Magazine and Commercial-maritime Journal, Volume 2, page 76

And in a free fight, the waddy, like an Irishman's shillaly, figures very prominently.

1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 71

As I ran I glanced over my shoulder & saw the blackfellas beating Capois Death hard with their waddies, & they seemed to be trying to break the bones in each of his limbs.

2001, Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish, Vintage, published 2016, page 365

The kids would copy the men to make their own cricket stumps, but no-one was allowed to touch Grandfather's special wood for making waddies.

2008, Doreen Kartinyeri, Sue Anderson, Doreen Kartinyeri: My Ngarrindjeri Calling, page 20