{"id":"GODDARD1941-001","label":"Carnarvon string stencils","people_or_site":"Carnarvon Gorge rock shelters, with Moolyamber Junction","country_current":"Australia","historic_region":"Carnarvon Gorge, Carnarvon Range, Central Queensland","macroregion":"Australia / Queensland","local_name":"","source_term":"bullroarers with string attached","source_language":"English","object_description":"Fifteen red stencilled figures read as bullroarers with strings attached: four on a large central boulder and eleven on the shelter wall behind it, about five feet above the floor, in an enormous rock shelter on the southern side of Carnarvon Gorge. At Moolyamber Junction a stencilled platypus uses a bullroarer for its tail.","function_summary":"Not recorded.","attestation_type":"rock_art_depiction","source_key":"goddard1941_carnarvon_rock_sculpture_stencilling","source_type":"archaeological_report","source_url":"https://archive.org/details/sim_oceania_1941-06_11_4/page/n58/mode/1up","page_or_plate":"pp. 369 (fifteen stencils), 370 (shelter contents, Zamia), 371 (Moolyamber platypus); pls I–II","map_confidence":"medium","plot_status":"plot_with_caveat","coordinate_basis":"Generalised mid-Carnarvon Gorge anchor (Carnarvon National Park, Queensland), between the gorge mouth and the Cathedral Cave area; the shelter about nine miles into the gorge is not correlated to a modern named site, and no shelter coordinate is sought for a rock-art place. Not the Western Australian town of Carnarvon.","jade_complex_role":"","blurb":"Nine miles up Carnarvon Gorge, where the pale sandstone walls close in, a rock shelter 270 feet long opens in the southern cliff. Nearly every surface within reach is worked: red hands, boomerangs and axes, the scaled cones of the zamia palm whose nuts people pounded and baked, and a burial niche twelve feet up, ringed with stencilled hands. On a boulder near the centre, and on the wall behind it, fifteen red bullroarers hang with their strings still attached. Downstream at Moolyamber Junction the same shape became an animal: a spearthrower stencilled over two boomerangs, with a bullroarer for a tail, makes a platypus.","pull_quote":"These figures seem to represent bullroarers with string attached.","pull_quote_translation":"","pull_quote_cite":"R. H. Goddard, Oceania 11 (1941), p. 369","term_gloss":"womerah (woomera): spearthrower; Goddard's platypus is a woomera stencil laid over two boomerangs, with a bullroarer as the tail.","cls":"unknown","class_label":"Function not recorded","color":"#6B7884","is_candidate":false,"flags":[],"f_jade_complex":false,"f_women_taboo":false,"f_women_special":false,"f_snake":false,"f_archaeology":true,"archaeology_kind":"rock_art","date_display":"Undated","date_qualification":"Recorded in September 1940; motifs not dated.","date_basis":"undated_terminus","date_confidence":"low","date_citation":"goddard1941_carnarvon_rock_sculpture_stencilling, Goddard 1941 pp. 369, 371","sources":[{"citation":"R. H. Goddard, “Aboriginal Rock Sculpture and Stencilling in the Carnarvon Ranges,” Oceania 11(4) (1941), pp. 368–372, pls I–II","url":"https://archive.org/details/sim_oceania_1941-06_11_4/page/n58/mode/1up"}],"source_citations":"R. H. Goddard, “Aboriginal Rock Sculpture and Stencilling in the Carnarvon Ranges,” Oceania 11(4) (1941), pp. 368–372, pls I–II","source_display":"R. H. Goddard, “Aboriginal Rock Sculpture and Stencilling in the Carnarvon Ranges,” Oceania 11(4) (1941), pp. 368–372, pls I–II","date_citation_display":"Goddard 1941 pp. 369, 371","object_display":"Fifteen red stencilled figures read as bullroarers with strings attached: four on a large central boulder and eleven on the shelter wall behind it, about five feet above the floor, in an enormous rock shelter on the southern side of Carnarvon Gorge. At Moolyamber Junction a stencilled platypus uses a bullroarer for its tail.","function_display":"Not recorded.","confidence_display":"medium","attestation_label":"rock art depiction","etymology_hedge":"","people_key":"carnarvon gorge","display_name":"Carnarvon string stencils","image":{"full":"assets/objects/KTBULL2026-001.jpg","thumb":"assets/objects/KTBULL2026-001_thumb.jpg","credit":"Hiking the World, 1X3A7669_yre","license":"Copyright status not stated; rehosted for research atlas context","source_page":"https://hikingtheworld.blog/engravings/kings-tableland-bullroarer-and-stencils-shelter/","rehosted":true,"representative":true,"caption":"Bullroarers stencilled among hands at Kings Tableland, Queensland.","pool_id":"auto-KTBULL2026-001"},"slug":"goddard1941-001-carnarvon-gorge-rock-shelters-with-moolyamber-junction"}