The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSIN-001 - museum specimen

Burdekin River near Townsville

Australia - North Queensland

Function not recorded

A Central Australian tjurunga board, its surface deeply incised with concentric circles and wavy parallel lines — shown for the general...
Representative image. A Central Australian tjurunga board, its surface deeply incised with concentric circles and wavy parallel lines — shown for the general Aboriginal Australian type, not the fibre-and-pigment bull-roarer collected near the Burdekin River that this page documents. Etnografiska museet, Stockholm (via Wikimedia Commons) CC0 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

A wooden bullroarer from the Burdekin River near Townsville, in North Queensland: carved on both faces, coloured with red pigment, and pierced at one end where a length of twisted hair string was threaded through to swing it. It reached the British Museum through Collingwood Ingram, who collected it in 1902, when he was barely past twenty. Ingram, who went on to a long career as an ornithologist, knew the lower Burdekin: he later published on the birds of Inkerman Station, on the river's delta, while his father, Sir William Ingram, employed the naturalist Wilfred Stalker to collect bird skins across the same country. The museum's locality is the district, not the spot where the instrument was made or last sounded.

On the Birds of Inkerman Station, North Queensland

Ingram, Ibis (1908): article title
Object
Wood bullroarer with fibre and pigment in British Museum collection
Function
Material object from Burdekin River or Townsville locality; use as north Queensland object anchor
Map confidence
medium_high - Townsville city anchor for Burdekin River near Townsville locality
Source location
British Museum object record Oc1977-03-1

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