The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSIN-021 - museum specimen

Kimberley District

Kimberley - Western Australia

Restricted

Spencer's plate of six Northern Territory sacred bull-roarers, shown here to illustrate the general form; the Kimberley instrument collected by...
Representative image. Spencer's plate of six Northern Territory sacred bull-roarers, shown here to illustrate the general form; the Kimberley instrument collected by C. H. Ord, incised with a rectangular pattern on one face and a serpentine line on the other, is not pictured. Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory (Macmillan, 1914), Plate II Public domain Image source

mero-mero English

Source term: bull-roarer

mero-mero: the Kimberley District name recorded by Hardman for the sacred whirling-stick (bullroarer); West Kimberley peoples also called the bullroarer tjurunga, identifying it with the creator-being Djamar.

This wooden bullroarer reached the British Museum in 1899 from Craven Harry Ord, the police sub-inspector at Derby who had directed the operations against the Bunuba resistance leader Jandamarra, and who shipped it as one of a quantity of native weapons taken from camps. In the Kimberley it was no weapon. The district's first ethnographer, E. T. Hardman, recorded these whirling-sticks, the mero-mero, as sacred objects sounded at the circumcision ground and forbidden to women on pain of death. Two generations later Ernst Worms found the West Kimberley bullroarer woven into the myth of the creator Djamar, who whirled it until it scarred the hills and the bark of the trees, and who planted it in the bed of a creek where the old men still led the initiates to see where it had lain. The Kimberley District is named as its origin, but no exact place was recorded.

The whirling-sticks, mero-mero, used to drown the shrieks of the victim, as well as the flint or shell-knives used in the operation, are considered sacred, and are not to be looked upon by women under pain of death.

E. T. Hardman, "Notes on some Habits and Customs of the Natives of the Kimberley District" (1888), p. 73, quoted in A. C. Haddon, The Study of Man (1898), pp. 316-317
Object
Wood bullroarer with an incised rectangular pattern on one face and a serpentine line on the other; collected by C. H. Ord in the Kimberley District.
Function
Kimberley object anchor in British Museum collection
Map confidence
medium_high - Broad Kimberley District centroid-like anchor
Source location
BM object record Oc1899-.477 (object); Hardman, "Habits and Customs," Proc. Roy. Irish Acad. 3rd ser. vol. 1, p. 73 (function), reproduced verbatim in Haddon, The Study of Man (1898), pp. 316-317; Worms, Anthropos 45 (1950): 641-658 (West Kimberley corroboration)

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