Nggwal: The Cult That Crossed Sahul

The names multiply

Two names anchor the trail: Nggwal in Papua New Guinea and Djanggawul in Australia. Around each stands a local family of sacred names. Between them, more names attach to ancestors, initiation, serpents, women, and the bullroarer itself.

The Sepik family needs no reconstruction: every form is on record. Manggawila and Djanggawul make the strongest Australian comparison. Djanggawul begins with djang; Nggiw, piangwul, and dunggul preserve shorter pieces of the same sound inside the same ritual world.

Nggwal among the ancestors

Iatmul nggwail names a grandfather or grandchild and also a clan ancestor. Among the Nyaura, ngwal means ancestors. Abelam nggwalndu are the great clan beings; their public name is nggwal. The modern Abulës spelling Gwaal preserves the same name.

At Ilahita, Donald Tuzin found Nggwal ruling the men’s cult as its highest grade. It was not an Arapesh word. Abelam and Kwanga used the same name for their highest grade, and Ilahita remembered it as a later power brought from the Middle Sepik. Wam men also had a Tambaran grade called ngwal.

Anthony Forge recorded how ceremonies crossed this small country. Abelam communities sold or leased ritual rights, sacred objects, spells, instructions, performances, and entire complexes. Clan beings shared a small stock of names from village to village. The system allowed “virtually perfect transmission of ritual innovations.”

A second ring of sacred vocabulary surrounds Nggwal. The Plains Arapesh have walihas; the Mountain Arapesh have walin; Abelam and Yangoru Boiken have wala. Ambulas has waalé for a spirit and wulké for a bullroarer. Together they make a dense neighbouring field in which spirit names built on w and l, ancestral beings, and the bullroarer continually meet.

Manggawila and Djanggawul

At Port Keats in northern Australia, Manggawila names a senior bullroarer initiation. Farther east in Arnhem Land, the Djanggawul are sea-crossing ancestors who create wells, country, law, language, ceremony, and clan life. The centres of the names are almost the same: nggawil and nggawul.

The Australian names also grow into local families. Kunwinjku djang is an ancestral being, its story, and the place where its power remains. At Milingimbi, an island off central Arnhem Land, Djanggawul became the elder sister’s personal name; her younger sister was Ganjudingu, and together they were Maijilwara. Farther west, the Burarra-speaking Anbarra remade the Dhuwa complex as Djowunga, led by Old Woman Modj.

Port Keats adds Wangguwala, the principal song of Kukpi, a black-snake woman who travels by sea, makes water, and brings law. The song was said to be in a foreign language and to concern her sea journey. In neighbouring Jaminjung and Ngarinyman speech, wangguwarla or wangguwala means saltwater or sea.

Women made the voice

At Ilahita, the bullroarer was walop, and its drone was the voice of Lefin, a red-bearded dwarf spirit. Nggwal was the highest power behind it. Deep inside the cult stood Mimi’unemb, the woman who made the first bullroarer. She tied wood to a cord and terrified the country with its sound. A man stayed behind to learn the secret. A voice so immense, he decided, should not belong to a woman. He killed her.

The cult called the roar a male spirit’s voice but kept Mimi’unemb alive inside its origin. Men had taken a woman’s invention and made it the sound of male law.

The Djanggawul sisters carry digging sticks, feather ornaments, sacred objects, baskets, and mats from Burralku across the sea. They open wells, shape the coast, name beings and places, give birth to clans and languages, and perform the first ceremony. Where they come ashore at Port Bradshaw stands “a jirijiri bullroarer tree,” so sacred that “only those who are very old may look upon it.” Their brother circumcises the first boys and makes the rite “a big dreaming.” By Berndt’s day the instrument itself sounded in the Kunapipi and circumcision belonged to the Wawilak rites, but the tree still marks the Djanggawul landing. Men later steal their sacred bags. The sisters answer that the men may keep the objects: the women still possess the knowledge and the power to give life. Berndt preserved their answer in one question: “Haven’t we still our uteri?”

The same structure fills the bullroarer world shown by the ink dots on the map. At the Rai Coast, a deity places the instrument in an old woman’s net-bag. At the Huon Gulf, a woman discovers it and men kill her. In the Middle Fly it speaks as “the voice of the old woman.” In the Trans-Fly it grows inside a woman’s body. Among the Kiwai, a woman discovers it and it becomes the mother and father of yams. K. A. Gourlay counted fourteen New Guinea origin myths: in all but two, the bullroarer first appears with women, and even in one of those two he read it as a child born from a woman.

In Arnhem Land, the Wawilak sisters teach men the rites, and the bullroarer becomes the great snake’s body and voice. In Kunapipi, its roar becomes the cry of a murdered Old Woman. At Port Keats, hidden bullroarers sound as “the voice of the Mother.” Across both sides of Sahul, ancestral voice, women’s generative power, serpents, fertility, and male initiation keep returning together.

Rites and names travel together

Nggwal crossed from a Middle Sepik language into Ilahita with a new ritual grade. At Port Keats, the Murinbata once swung a spear-thrower on a cord. Their Djamindjung neighbours taught them to use a bullroarer instead. The Murinbata built a new initiation around it, gave it the name Manggawila, and made it their senior initiation. Stanner never learned where the word came from, and he admitted that in tracing these rites “the absence of a time-datum is a real embarrassment”: the old men could say a rite was new to them, not how old its words were. Sacred names also travelled on their own: R. M. Berndt found the name of the Kunapipi known from Arnhem Land westward “towards Port Keats.”

Sosom provides a third example in southern New Guinea. Among the Marind, Sosom is the giant of the bullroarer cult, and the instrument is his voice. At Setavi, the instrument is sosa. Paul Wirz recorded that the Marind ceremony and its bullroarer came from the east, after which Marind country became another centre of transmission.

Australia keeps the best-dated case. In western Queensland, in north-eastern Australia, Walter Roth followed a ceremony called the Molonga from people to people, year by year. It reached Carandotta, where it “made its appearance for the first time in 1893,” then Boulia in 1895 and the Diamantina in 1896, its songs sung “in a language of which the singers of both localities are entirely ignorant.” The words outran their meaning. At Roxburgh, Roth found, “all traces of the meanings of the words had been lost.”

These local transfers establish the mechanism: communities carried whole ceremonies across language boundaries, kept powerful names recognizable, and made the borrowed rites their own.

Sahul before the sea

Today the Arafura Sea separates New Guinea from Australia. At the end of the Ice Age it lay inside one continent. Rivers crossed the exposed plain, and Lake Carpentaria filled part of what is now the Gulf. On the map above, stippling marks the Ice Age extent of Sahul; the country now under water formed its middle.

Alan Williams and his colleagues reconstructed the loss of 2.12 million square kilometres from the Australian part of Sahul. Nearly ninety per cent of that inundation came between about 14,600 and 8,000 years ago. On the northwestern shelf, newer mapping reveals an inland sea, a freshwater lake, gorges, and rich country capable of supporting large populations. Lake Carpentaria and its surrounding savannah occupied another great part of the drowned interior.

The bullroarer complex was already embedded too deeply and too widely to be the wake of a recent voyage. In 1898 R. H. Mathews called its use at Australian initiation ceremonies universal “throughout the continent.” In the Papuan Gulf, F. E. Williams wrote that sacred bullroarers were believed to date from “the very foundation of things.” Bullroarer records crowd both New Guinea and Australia, rooted in local languages, clan systems, serpent traditions, crop rites, and laws about women and men.

The drowned plains supply the scale of the world in which this complex spread: a peopled continent whose surviving traditions now stand on opposite sides of the Arafura Sea. Torres Strait became a sea passage through what had once been Sahul’s middle.

What diffusion preserved

A travelling cult keeps a structure, not a fixed cast of gods. Across Sahul, five things hold together:

• Shared ancestry: one cult binds many clans, each with its own beings, names, objects, and stories.
• Portable law: names, songs, objects, and ritual rights can be handed over, stolen, sold, or inherited.
• Women first: women create, own, birth, or embody the power before men take control of it.
• Fertility: human birth, yams, water, pigs, land, and clan life flow from the same sacred power.
• The hidden voice: an ancestor’s overwhelming cry is revealed as a bullroarer swung by men.

Local change is part of the pattern. Ilahita made Nggwal the summit of a men’s cult but kept the murdered woman inside its secret origin. Port Keats took the Djamindjung bullroarer and refused the subincision that came with it — “That aspect of the rite appalled the Murinbata, who would have none of it” — then shaped Manggawila to the form of its own old senior rite; when a red, incised style called Punj arrived, Manggawila was renamed Djaban and “forced on—small boys.” Kukpi’s story took on a Djamindjung ending of its own, in which her son gives a wise man two stone bullroarers. Arnhem Land multiplied the Djanggawul into distinct clan traditions, ceremonies, sisters, serpents, and ancestral places. The complex survived because each community made it local.

Nggwal across Sahul

The names form two dense local constellations. In the Sepik, nggwail, ngwal, Nggwal, Gwaal, and nggwalndu gather around ancestors, clan spirits, and initiation. In northern Australia, the cognates Manggawila, Djanggawul, and Djowunga gather around a transferred bullroarer rite and ancestral law; djang echoes the opening of Djanggawul.

Both families live inside the same unusual sacred machinery. Women create or possess the first power. Men take the object and turn its voice into initiation. The bullroarer becomes an ancestor, a serpent, a mother, a source of fertility, and the sound of ceremonial law. Related names, related meanings, and related rites converge in the same former continent.

Nggwal, Sosom, and the Molonga prove that names could travel with ceremonies and remain recognizable while the cult changed around them. The dense field of bullroarer traditions on the map supplies the continental body; the names reveal one of its old internal connections.

Nggwal in New Guinea and Djanggawul in Australia belong to the same historically diffused Sahul bullroarer complex.