The Bullroarer Atlas

Atlas Essay — 2026-09-03

The Bullroarer in the Coalsack

Bardi country · Broome · East Kimberley · Weld Range · Eucla

Beside the Southern Cross hangs a black shape made out of missing light. European sailors called it the Coalsack. Across Western Australia it is a bullroarer. On Bardi country the creator Djamar swings his galaguru until the hair-string breaks and the blade flies up into that darkness. In the East Kimberley the bird Banaga throws his stick after a runaway bullroarer; the stick becomes Orion’s Belt and the blade stays in the Coalsack. At Broome the dark patch is Kalleegooroo, a large carved sacred board. At the Weld Range it is the sacred board again, and at Eucla it is the shadow of the yinma. One hole in the Milky Way, the same instrument inside it, from the Kimberley coast to the Great Australian Bight.

The bright band of the southern Milky Way crossed by the black Coalsack nebula beside the stars of the Southern Cross.
The Coalsack is the black interruption at the left of Crux, the Southern Cross. It is visible without a telescope because it blocks the bright star fields behind it. ESO/S. Brunier, CC BY 4.0.

From the Kimberley to Eucla, close to two thousand kilometres, the dark patch beside the Southern Cross is a bullroarer — one sky-placement shared by peoples who shared no language, carried there with the object and the rite.

In brief

  • From the Kimberley to Eucla, close to two thousand kilometres, the dark patch beside the Southern Cross is a bullroarer — one sky-placement shared by peoples who shared no language, carried there with the object and the rite.
  • On Bardi country at the tip of the Dampier Peninsula, Ernst Worms recorded Djamar’s galaguru breaking its hair-string at Burumar and flying into the Coalsack, the place called “with the fleshless,” where Djamar himself went afterwards.
  • In the East Kimberley, Phyllis Kaberry’s Lunga speakers gave Orion’s Belt as the stick the bird Banaga threw after his bullroarer; the bullroarer stayed in the Coalsack, and women were not supposed to know it existed.
  • At Broome, Daisy Bates wrote the dark patch down as Kalleegooroo, a “sacred & secret large carved totem board”; the same speaker called the Pleiades “our sisters.”
  • At the Weld Range the dark patch is eendeeree, yeemerree, yeenma, the sacred board; at Eucla it is the shadow of the yinma, the long board a man named Karnduing said carried the eaglehawk’s heart and belly.
  • Ngadadjara and Karadjeri tellings send the board on down the Milky Way’s long dark lanes by the same broken cord.
Map of Australia highlighting Western Australia, with numbered circles at Bardi country, Broome, Lunga and Kija country, the Weld Range and Eucla, and numbered diamonds in Ngadadjara and Karadjeri country for the longer dark lanes of the Milky Way.
Circles: the five places where the dark patch beside the Cross is a bullroarer or a sacred board — Bardi country, Broome, Lunga and Kija country, the Weld Range, Eucla. Diamonds: the Ngadadjara and Karadjeri tellings that run the board down the Milky Way’s longer dark lanes. Each point marks a district rather than an exact place of telling. Map by The Bullroarer Atlas; coastline from Natural Earth public-domain data.

A black shape beside the Southern Cross

Dust inside the Coalsack blocks the bright band of the southern Milky Way behind it, and that is why the patch looks solid to the unaided eye. It is the most prominent dark nebula in the sky, it lies about six hundred light-years away, and it sits against Crux, the Southern Cross, the easiest group of stars in the southern sky to find. There is one dark spot in the Milky Way that a person standing on the ground can point to, and it is that one, beside the Cross. When Bates’s speakers said “dark spot in Milky Way” they were pointing at the Coalsack, and it is the Coalsack in all five of the places below.

Across the centre and the south-east of Australia that same darkness is the head of the emu, whose neck and body run down the dark lanes of the Milky Way. In the west it is a bullroarer. The one dark landmark in the southern sky was claimed by the two things that matter most in ceremony.

The Milky Way arching over a sandstone platform at night, its dark dust lanes forming the long shape of an emu above an emu figure engraved into the rock below.
The emu is made of darkness rather than of stars: the black lane running down the bright band is its neck and body, and the Coalsack is its head. Barnaby Norris photographed it standing over the emu engraved into the rock at the Elvina site in Ku-ring-gai Chase, north of Sydney — the same bird on the ground and in the sky. West of the desert that head-patch is a board instead. Barnaby Norris, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The instrument is as exact as the star field. A bullroarer is a blade swung on a cord until it spins and roars. In Western Australia that sounding blade sits among longer carved boards shown at initiation, and the English of the old vocabularies moves between “bullroarer,” “magic board,” and “sacred totem board” from page to page. The sky keeps taking the same object however the page names it.

Djamar’s cord breaks at Burumar

Djamar is the creator of the Bād, the Bardi people of the Dampier Peninsula, and he travels with a bullroarer. Ernst Worms, who recorded the myth in the west Kimberley and published it in 1950, describes him sounding the galaguru as he goes, the instrument bound to his presence and his law. At Burumar, while he swings it, the hair-string breaks. The galaguru flies up into baug-ara-njara — “with the fleshless” — the region beside the Southern Cross that Worms identifies as the Coalsack. Djamar goes there himself later on and stays.

The ground half of that story was still being shown to initiates. Djamar rose out of the sea swinging a bullroarer and drove his sacred galaguru boards into a creek bed, and Bardi and Jawi men took young initiates to see the holes he left in the stone. Bullroarers from the same waters, three painted blades collected in the Sunday Islands in 1912, are banded in red, yellow and grey, and one of them is marked in the museum register as secret and sacred; Gerhardt Laves, working on Bardi in the 1930s, compiled a whole classification list of Bardi bullroarers with their native names.

Lithographed drawings of two long pointed Kimberley bullroarers, one carved with five concentric-circle roundels, the other with three nested rectangles, each with its thin edge-on profile ruled beneath it.
Two Kimberley mero-mero, drawn for E. T. Hardman, the district’s first ethnographer, who recorded them as sacred objects sounded at the circumcision ground and forbidden to women. Each blade’s thin edge-on profile is ruled beneath it: this is a board built to spin. Worms found the same instrument in the same country carrying Djamar’s law. E. T. Hardman / W. F. Wakeman, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 3rd ser., vol. 1 (1888), Plate II, figs. 4–5. Public domain.

Banaga throws his stick

Some five hundred kilometres east, in the East Kimberley country around Kija, Phyllis Kaberry took down the same broken cord during fieldwork in 1934 and 1935–36. Her Lunga informants gave her a bird, a thrown stick, and a runaway blade in two sentences.

Orion’s belt … is the stick that Banaga, a bird, threw after his bullroarer when it broke off the string and went into the sky. The bullroarer is in the dark spot in the Milky Way called the coalsack—and women are not supposed to know of its existence. — Phyllis M. Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman: Sacred and Profane, 1939, p. 12

Crop of Kaberry's 1939 page naming Orion's Belt as Banaga's thrown stick and the bullroarer as the dark spot called the Coalsack.
Kaberry’s printed page moves in one paragraph from the Pleiades pursuit to Banaga’s thrown stick in Orion’s Belt and the bullroarer in the Coalsack. Phyllis M. Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman: Sacred and Profane (1939), p. 12; low-resolution crop from the Internet Archive scan for non-commercial research and documentary use.

Banaga is the protagonist of a very small catastrophe with permanent consequences. He is whirling the bullroarer; the cord parts; the blade goes up; he throws his stick after it and the stick goes up too. Orion’s Belt and the Coalsack lie in different quarters of the sky, and the throw is what yokes them: three bright stars in flight, and the instrument they were chasing lodged for good in the black patch by the Cross.

Wide-field photograph of Orion's Belt: three bright blue stars strung in a diagonal line across a field of red and blue nebulosity, with the tufted Flame Nebula at the left-hand end.
Orion’s Belt: three bright stars in a line, running from the upper right of this frame down to the left, where the tufted Flame Nebula stands beside the last of them. Kaberry’s Lunga speakers read that line as a stick still in flight — thrown after a bullroarer and never coming down. Kees Scherer, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The last clause of Kaberry’s sentence sharpens the placement rather than softening it. The most restricted object in the ceremonial life of the East Kimberley — the one women were not supposed to know existed — had been put where anyone at all can see it. Miriwoong women, downriver at Wyndham, had a word for the boards they were not to look at: gugbu, forbidden. The blade is on open display every clear night; the knowledge of what it is stays inside the ceremony.

Two long, narrow wooden bullroarers with incised geometric designs and cord holes, collected at Wyndham in the East Kimberley.
Two bullroarers collected at Wyndham, in Miriwoong country on the lower Ord, pierced at both ends and cut with carved bands. These are the boards the women there called gugbu, and at initiation the men stood round whirling them. Science Museum Group, A140596, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Broome: Leeberr made the dark spot

Billingee, a Joogan or Ngoombal speaker whose country lay around Willie Creek and Broome, gave Daisy Bates an object-rich sky. One of her notebook lines sets the two terms side by side, English on the right and the sacred object on the left:

Kalleegooroo (sacred & secret large carved totem board)  |  Dark spot in Milky Way

— Daisy Bates, Billingee of Broome, bates.org.au 52/052
Typed Broome vocabulary row reading Kalleegooroo, sacred and secret large carved totem board, opposite Dark spot in Milky Way.
The Broome vocabulary page sets the sacred object and the sky-place on one line: Kalleegooroo, annotated as a large carved sacred board, opposite “Dark spot in Milky Way.” Digital Daisy Bates / National Library of Australia, MS 365, folio 52/053; crop from the source scan, CC BY-NC 4.0.

On a longer vocabulary sheet Billingee tells how it got there. Leeberr, an eebala of Yamminga time, lived at Winninberree, his booroo in Broome: he made the kalleegooroo dark spot in the Milky Way, and he showed the womba how to go up there. The same sheet has the Southern Cross as Warragunna, the eaglehawk, and one more identification a few lines away: “The beering pleiades are our sisters.” So the road from Broome to the sacred board in the dark is a road a being once opened, and the sisters are already in the sky above the man describing it.

The Pleiades: a close knot of brilliant blue-white stars wrapped in wisps of blue reflection nebulosity against a dark field.
The Pleiades, the cluster Billingee named beering and glossed “our sisters.” Bates heard the same group given as women the whole way down her western run: at Eucla they are Yaggaingurra, “a lot of women, mothers.” NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory. Public domain.

Weld Range: the same board, far inland

Bates worked the Murchison too, and her vocabulary for the Wanmala speakers around Mindoola and the Weld Range repeats the placement twice on one sheet. The star list gives it as a plain equation, and a marginal note says it again in words:

Milky Way (dark spot in)  |  Eendeeree, yeemerree, yeenma

The dark spot in the Milky way. (Sacred board) also eendeeree  |  Yeemeree

— Daisy Bates, Wanmala vocabulary, Mindoola and the Weld Range, bates.org.au 54/073
A sheet of Daisy Bates's handwriting headed Marginal Notes, Karreedee and Bindaweeree, Weld Range area, listing among other entries a small bullroarer board, a large sacred board, and the dark spot in the Milky Way.
Bates’s own hand, on the marginal notes she took from Karreedee and Bindaweeree in the Weld Range area. Third entry down: Nyanēr’se, “small ‘bullroarer’ board”; then Eemarree, “large sacred board”; and at the foot of the block, Yeemerree, “also eendeeree — the dark spot in the Milky Way (Sacred board).” The small sounding blade and the large board are separated, and it is the large one that goes into the dark. Digital Daisy Bates / National Library of Australia, MS 365, folio 54/101; crop from the source scan, CC BY-NC 4.0.

The same page separates a small Bullroarer board, Nyanēr’se, from the large sacred board, Eemarree. That distinction runs right through Bates’s western sheets, and the two words trade places from district to district. In the goldfields around Southern Cross, where Beedee, Bailberin and Gweea gave her the local terms, yinma is the bullroarer and Goondain or Yeenma the long sacred totem board. At Peak Hill meerudi is the magic board or bullroarer and yeenma the long board carved with totem markings. On the Murchison mirroodee names the sounding blade and yeenma the board shown at initiation. Whichever word carries the sounding blade in a given district, the board in the dark patch keeps the yeenma name.

A long Western Australian wooden bullroarer incised with nested rectangles and hexagonal forms.
A Western Australian bullroarer acquired at Kalgoorlie in 1924, on the goldfields south-east of the Weld Range. Its long face is cut with concentric rectangles and hexagons: one blade doing the work of the sounding instrument and of the carved board at once. © The Trustees of the British Museum, Oc1953,15.1, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Eucla: the shadow of the board

On the Bight, at the far southern end of the run, Bates’s Eucla star notes make the visual logic explicit in one parenthesis:

Yinma (sacred long board — shadow of board only, Dark Spot in Milky Way) — Eucla area.

— Daisy Bates, Eucla star notes, bates.org.au 39/256a
Typescript page headed STARS, etc., listing Eucla star names and ending with two lines: Kallaia the emu as the dark spot in the Milky Way for Central Australia, and Yinma, sacred long board, shadow of board only, for the Eucla area.
The Eucla star list entire. Mammaingurra, the fathers, is Orion; Yaggaingurra, “a lot of women, mothers,” is the Pleiades; boys are forbidden to look at Scorpio. Then the last two lines give the dark spot twice over: Kallaia, the emu, for Central Australia, and Yinma, “sacred long board — shadow of board only,” for Eucla. The emu and the board are set down one under the other, each claiming the same darkness. Digital Daisy Bates / National Library of Australia, MS 365, folio 39/261; crop from the source scan, CC BY-NC 4.0.

The thing in the sky is not a bright copy of a board. It is the board’s shadow, thrown on the Milky Way. The rest of that sheet fills the sky around it: Orion is Mammaingurra, the fathers; the Pleiades are Yaggaingurra, a lot of women, mothers; the Southern Cross is Walja jina, the eagle’s foot. Kinship, birds and restricted knowledge each have a station up there, and the yinma has the dark one.

A man named Karnduing told Bates what was on the board itself. The markings of the yinma, he said, are kurdudu and mugula — the heart and the belly of the eaglehawk. West of Eucla, near Twilight Cove, the Willilambi account she published in 1924 shows the same body being cut into wood: the old men make long yeenma boards and smaller boorbing bullroarers from hardwood that was moodiji, forbidden to the eaglehawk people and reserved to the hardwood totem, and onto the boards they cut the eaglehawk’s heart, ribs, stomach, entrails and tail. The eaglehawk family then rises into the Southern Cross and the Pointers. Read the two pages together and the whole tableau stands in one part of the sky: the eaglehawk in the Cross, and the board carrying the eaglehawk’s heart in the darkness beside it.

A long wooden Australian board carved in a diamond chevron pattern along its face.
A long Australian board cut in diamond chevrons, standing in here for the hardwood yeenma of Willilambi and Twilight Cove, which Bates equated with Spencer’s churinga. Wereldmuseum / NMVW, RV-1207-16; low-resolution reproduction for non-commercial research purposes.

The board takes the long dark road

Two further tellings run the image out of the single patch and along the whole dark spine of the Milky Way. In Norman Tindale’s Ngadadjara material from the Warburton Ranges, synthesised by Dianne Johnson, the long dark patches reaching from Alpha Centauri toward Alpha Cygni are a great totem board, and the Wati Kutjara made it while they were travelling with the Pleiades women. The board, the dark Milky Way and the Seven Sisters are one episode there.

Géza Róheim’s Karadjeri account from the country south of Broome uses the mechanism from Bardi and Lunga exactly. One of the Bagadjimbiri brothers swings a bullroarer, then a larger pirnmal; the cord breaks; the pirnmal goes up and stays visible as a chain of dark patches from Centaurus toward Aquila. In this telling the Coalsack itself is a speared kangaroo, so the launched board takes the road instead of the patch — the Karadjeri put their board in the dark lane by a broken cord, which is the northern story with the destination moved along one stop.

The Milky Way lying low over a dark desert ridge, its bright band split lengthwise by black dust lanes, with a road curving up the slope beneath it.
The Great Rift: the chain of dark clouds that splits the bright band lengthwise and runs for most of the visible length of the Milky Way. This is the lane the Karadjeri pirnmal takes when the cord breaks, and the one the Ngadadjara stretch their totem board along — a road above the road. ESO/M. Zamani, CC BY 4.0.

Orion’s Belt is the hinge

Read Kaberry’s Lunga sentence beside the Western Desert Seven Sisters traditions and the two bodies of material turn out to share an actor. In the Pitjantjatjara account given by Roslynn Haynes, the Kungkarangkara women take bird form and fly into the sky to escape the hunter Njiru, and he follows them into the stars of Orion’s Belt. Trevor Leaman and Duane Hamacher find the same placement in Tindale’s Western Desert notes: the Pleiades are the Kungkarungkara and “Orion (stars of the belt)” is Njiru. Around Ooldea, Bates’s Nyeeruna is Orion, hunting the seven Yugarilya sisters. The sky itself keeps the chase going: across the Australian traditions Johnson surveys, the pursuers rise after the Pleiades and follow their path.

Kaberry was writing in that same world of pursuit. Just before the Lunga passage she gives a Wolmeri account in which the Southern Cross is Eaglehawk chasing a group of Pleiades women. Then the Lunga account gives Orion’s Belt a second pursuing job: it is the stick Banaga threw after his bullroarer, and the bullroarer travels on into the Coalsack.

Schematic with the Pleiades and Orion's Belt in one sky region and the Southern Cross beside the Coalsack in another, joined by the story of a thrown stick pursuing a bullroarer.
Two sky regions, one sequence. Orion’s Belt carries the pursuer in the Pitjantjatjara and Western Desert Seven Sisters material and the thrown stick in Kaberry’s Lunga account; the bullroarer it chases ends in the Coalsack beside Crux. The path is narrative, not a claim that the constellations sit close together.

The Ngadadjara telling closes the other side of the circuit, since the board in the Milky Way’s dark patches is made on the Wati Kutjara’s journey with the Pleiades women. The bright figures and the dark ones are moved by the same actions: throwing, pursuit, breakage, flight and ascent.

One placement, carried

Bardi on the Dampier Peninsula, Joogan at Broome, Lunga in the East Kimberley, Wanmala on the Murchison, Karnduing’s people at Eucla: five peoples with five languages, spread across a state the size of western Europe, and a straight line from the first to the last runs close to two thousand kilometres. They give the darkness beside the Cross one and the same content. Not a bird, not a fire, not a waterhole — the restricted board that roars, kept from women, shown at initiation, carved with the marks of an ancestor.

Lithograph of two enlarged sections of carved Kimberley board: one with two deep concentric-circle roundels between short cut strokes, the other with a spiral joined by a drawn line to a set of nested rectangles.
Hardman’s engraver enlarged the carving alone, without the blade around it: concentric circles between short strokes on one Kimberley board, and on the other a spiral running by a single drawn line into nested rectangles. This is what “carved with the marks of an ancestor” looks like at the scale the carver worked. E. T. Hardman / W. F. Wakeman, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 3rd ser., vol. 1 (1888), Plate III. Public domain.

Five peoples do not arrive at that by accident. The bullroarer travels: it is carried between camps, handed on with the rites that go with it, taught with the songs and the marks that belong to it. Where the object went, the story that ends in the sky went too, and the mechanism travelled unaltered from the Kimberley to the Bight — a cord under tension, a break, a flight, an arrival in the dark. The Karadjeri kept the broken cord and moved the destination along the dark lane; the Ngadadjara stretched the board out along it; every other telling put the blade in the patch. That is one placement passed from hand to hand and grafted onto each local sky, not five inventions that happened to land on the same square of blackness.

It is also, in its way, the perfect hiding place. The sound of a bullroarer arrives before its body can be found, and the Coalsack is the one thing in the sky that is visible for what it blocks. From the Kimberley to Eucla, close to two thousand kilometres, the dark patch beside the Southern Cross is a bullroarer — one sky-placement shared by peoples who shared no language, carried there with the object and the rite.

Key sources