AUSIN-022 - museum specimen
Wyndham pair pierced at both ends
East Kimberley - Western Australia
Restricted
Source term: bull-roarer
Two wooden bullroarers from Wyndham, in the East Kimberley of Western Australia, each perforated at both ends and cut with carved rectilinear designs. Collected sometime between roughly 1870 and 1925, they passed into Sir Henry Wellcome's museum and are now held by the Science Museum Group in London. The record names no maker and no rite. Phyllis Kaberry, working in this district in 1934-36, did: a Miriwoong woman told her the boards were gugbu, forbidden, and the men held them as something sacred never to be seen by women. What women knew of them Kaberry also set down — that they were of wood, that they carried markings, that they went with corroborees, that they promoted growth and gave strength. In the neighbouring Lunga country the bullroarer itself hangs in the sky: it is the dark patch in the Milky Way, the Coalsack, and Orion's belt is the stick the bird Banagu threw after it when it broke from its string.
both perforated at either ends and decorated with carved rectilinear designs. When attached to a cord and swung through the air, bull roarers emit a deep, vibrant, roaring sound and are important in rituals in Australian Aboriginal society.
Science Museum Group Collection, object A140596 (co104687), "Two wood Bull Roarers, Western Australia, c. 1870-1925"
- Object
- One of two wood bullroarers from Wyndham in Science Museum Group collection
- Function
- In the East Kimberley the boards are sacred and never to be seen by women; Miriwoong women called them gugbu, forbidden (Kaberry 1939, pp. 229-230), and at initiation men stood round whirling them (Froggatt, in Etheridge 1897, p. 5).
- Source
- Science Museum Group object A140596; collected by Joseph Beal Steere
- Source location
Page references
Science Museum Group object A140596 / co104687
- Source confidence
- high Wyndham town anchor from collection locality
Discussed in: The Bullroarer in the Coalsack
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women