The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSIN-005 - museum specimen

Wik-Mungkan / Archer Kendall Edward Rivers

Australia - Western Cape York - Queensland

Restricted

A wooden board carved with a line of concentric circles — a generic Aboriginal Australian piece, not the moiya (paka paka) whose myth McConnel...
Representative image. A wooden board carved with a line of concentric circles — a generic Aboriginal Australian piece, not the moiya (paka paka) whose myth McConnel recorded among the Wik-Mungkan. Wereldmuseum / NMVW (acc. RV-2087-5) CC BY-SA Image source

moiya / paka paka / moipaka English

Source term: moiya

moiya: the Wik-Mungkan word for the bullroarer, also a clan totem; with Paka Paka it forms the pair Moipaka, the "two bull-roarers" cast in myth as husband and wife.

Etymology. moiya is the Wik-Mungkan name for one of the two Wik-Mungkan bullroarers and is recorded as a patriclan totem ('moiya bullroarer'); McConnel reports that this bullroarer represents a young girl just entering puberty, but no internal morphological derivation of the word itself is given in the source. (medium confidence)

During the Wik-Mungkan first initiation a newly made man may eat no flying-fox and speak to no woman — and the moiya bullroarer's own myth warns what happens if he breaks that law. Two youths did, spearing flying-fox on the Watson River with girls who helped cook the catch; back in camp the roasting animals came alive, rose in a cloud, and hooked the young men off the ground with the claws of their wings, never seen again. The fleeing girls sank into the water at Kalabin, where one found the first moiya lying on the riverbed and swung it before she too went down. Ever after the roarer sounds only at the close of first initiation, and is forbidden to women.

The flying-fox are alive! Their wings are moving!

McConnel, Oceania 6 (1935), p. 82, quoted in Róheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream (1945), p. 175
Object
Wik-Mungkan bullroarer myth cycle (moiya, paka paka) in Ursula McConnel's records at the South Australian Museum.
Function
Clan-totem bullroarer of the Wik-Mungkan, swung by young initiates at the close of the first initiation and forbidden to women.
Map confidence
medium - Aurukun regional anchor for Wik-Mungkan material; archive spans several rivers
Source location
McConnel, Oceania 6(1), 1935, pp. 80-83 ("The Bullroarers (Moiya and Moipaka)," told by Bambeigan; free translation); short version Oceania 1(2), 1930, pp. 200-201. South Australian Museum AA191-29 phonograph record is the companion audio.

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