One Sahul

Nggwal crossed the water

In the East Sepik hills of Papua New Guinea, the highest power of the men’s cult is Nggwal. Among the Abelam the great clan spirits are nggwalndu. On the Middle Sepik, Iatmul nggwail means a grandparent and a clan ancestor. At Ilahita, an Arapesh village, Donald Tuzin found Nggwal ruling the cult’s top grade, and the name was not Arapesh at all. Ilahita remembered it as a power brought in from the Middle Sepik, rite and name together.

Across the Arafura Sea, in northern Australia, the same sound returns. At Port Keats the Murinbata call their senior bullroarer initiation Manggawila. They did not always have it. Their Djamindjung neighbours taught them to swing a bullroarer in place of a spear-thrower on a cord, and the Murinbata built a new rite around it. In north-east Arnhem Land the Yolngu tell of the Djanggawul, ancestors who crossed the sea and made the country, its law and its clans. Set the names side by side: Manggawila, Djanggawul, Nggwal. The heart of the word barely changes.

The names did not drift on their own. On both shores, rites are on record moving from people to people with their names still on them. Among the Abelam, Anthony Forge watched ceremonies being sold and leased between villages, objects, spells, songs and all.

“In these ways virtually perfect transmission of ritual innovations can take place.”Anthony Forge, “The Power of Culture and the Culture of Power,” p. 145

In southern New Guinea the Marind said their own bullroarer cult and its giant Sosom had come to them from the east. Three times over, a rite crosses a language boundary and keeps its name. Run it for long enough across a single continent and Nggwal and Djanggawul are what you would expect to find.

Details no one would invent twice

Any two peoples who swing a bullroarer at initiation will share a few things. The instrument is loud, it is easy to hide, and its roar is easy to call a spirit. What follows is different. These are arbitrary choices, the kind of thing a story could have done a hundred other ways, and the two shores made them the same way.

The woman made it, and the men took it

At Ilahita a woman is cutting firewood when a chip of it hums. She ties it to a string and whirls it. The men learn the trick, and they kill her; from then on the instrument belongs to them. Among the Mungarai of the Roper River in northern Australia, an ancestral woman carries her Kunapippi blades in a net bag and swings one as she walks. At Kunjerri the man Kumkum spies on the women’s ceremony, digs up the blades they have hidden, and takes them. Between the two shores, on Boigu Island in Torres Strait, a woman named Méte hears her firewood call out its own name, bigu, and is the first to swing it. Murder in one telling, theft in another, a forced silence in the third: in every one the men own an instrument whose story begins in a woman’s hands. See it on the map.

The woman stays in the sound. At Port Keats, when the hidden bullroarers roar, the elders cry that the Old Woman is calling. Among the Boazi of the Middle Fly in Papua New Guinea, the roar in the night is atu gisagaru, the voice of the old woman.

The being swallows the boys

At Port Keats the boys are warned about Karwadi, the Old Woman whose voice the bullroarer is:

“The youths have been told that they will be swallowed alive by Karwadi and then vomited up.”

W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion, p. 5

On the south coast of New Guinea the Marind give the roar to Sosom, a giant who devours the novices and disgorges them, and the bullroarer itself is called sosom. In the mountains behind the Huon Gulf, on the north-east coast of Papua New Guinea, the Kai call their devouring being Ngosa, “grandfather,” and give the same name to the blades they swing. A pig ransoms each boy, a man mimes retching, and the novice is given back. The beings differ, an Old Woman, a giant, a grandfather. The plot does not: the hidden roar is a monster, it eats the boy, and it returns a man. See it on the map.

The snake in the voice

In the Gunabibi ceremony of the Yolngu, a bullroarer is painted with a snake, and the men say plainly that the instrument is the snake. When messengers swing it outside other camps, the roar is the snake’s voice, and the women answer as the ancestral Wawilak sisters. In southern New Guinea the serpent lives inside Sosom’s own story, where a piece of the giant becomes a watersnake. On Cape York, where Australia reaches toward New Guinea, the Guugu Yimidhirr word for the initiation bullroarer, dunggul, also means snake. See it on the map.

Husband and wife

The most arbitrary detail of all is a marriage between two pieces of wood. The Kurnai of Gippsland, in south-eastern Australia, swing a larger bullroarer, Tundun, “the man,” and a smaller one, Rukut-Tundun, “the woman, or wife of Tundun.” On Cape York the Wiknatara join their two blades in a single word, moipaka, a male and a female married to each other. On the upper Bian River in southern New Guinea, the Marind pair an ezam with an uzum. Ezam is the ordinary word for husband. The uzum is his wife, and because she is narrower, her voice is lighter. On both shores the deep blade is the husband and the shrill one the wife. See it on the map.

One continent, one cult

A single shared trait could be chance. Two peoples might each decide that the roar is a spirit, or that women must not see the blade. But the traits on the map do not arrive alone. They come bundled, and the bundle is the same on both shores: the woman who had it first, the being who eats the boys, the snake in the voice, the married blades, the kin name, the white clay, the spent blade thrown away or kept. On the map, six of the eight Australian peoples who share two or more traits live across the north, facing New Guinea; the Murinbata of Port Keats carry five, and across the water the Marind and the Kai carry four each. Independent invention would have to make the same arbitrary choices, one after another, around one small piece of wood.

Nothing stood in the way of contact. For most of human time in this region, Australia and New Guinea were one continent, Sahul, joined by a wide plain where the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait now lie. Most of the drowned shelf went under between about 14,600 and 8,000 years ago. Even then the water was no wall. The islands of Torres Strait held the two shores together: a Kiwai storyteller in Papua New Guinea told of Méte on Boigu, and on Mabuiag, a Torres Strait island now part of Australia, the deep bullroarer was still bigu.

Peoples who sold, borrowed and carried their rites across language boundaries, on one continent and then across a strait full of islands, were never going to keep their cults apart. The bullroarer cults of Australia and New Guinea are one cult, carried across Sahul, and each people made it its own.