The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSIN-026 - secondary catalog

Mount Margaret

Goldfields - Mount Margaret - Western Australia

Restricted

Hambly's plate of the Field Museum's Mount Margaret bull-roarer, catalogued 173154 — a wooden oval carved with a grid of crosses and dots.
Hambly's plate of the Field Museum's Mount Margaret bull-roarer, catalogued 173154 — a wooden oval carved with a grid of crosses and dots. W. D. Hambly, Primitive Hunters of Australia (Field Museum of Natural History, 1936), plate I, fig. 11 Public domain Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

In Plate I of his 1936 Field Museum leaflet Primitive Hunters of Australia, Wilfrid Hambly figured a bull-roarer marked with painted white circles, collected at Mount Margaret in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia and catalogued as No. 173154. Hambly grouped such objects with the churinga, the flat sacred boards, and gave their use: the noise made when the board was whirled rapidly round the head warned women and uninitiated boys to keep away from the site where sacred ceremonies were being held, and before their initiation boys were taught that the same sound was the voice of a being more than human. That use is Hambly's general note on these Goldfields boards, not a single documented rite, and the catalog locality places the object on Wongatha country.

Before their initiation, boys are taught that the noise made by a bull-roarer, or buzzer, is the voice of a being who is more than human.

Hambly 1936, Primitive Hunters of Australia (Field Museum Anthropology Leaflet 32):25
Object
Hambly catalog/plate lead for bullroarer from Mount Margaret
Function
Western Australian (Goldfields) bull-roarer whirled to warn women and uninitiated boys away from sacred ceremonies, and taught at male initiation as the voice of a being more than human.
Map confidence
medium - Mount Margaret regional anchor
Source location
Hambly 1936, p. 4: Fig. 11 Bull-roarer with painted white circles, Mount Margaret, Cat. No. 173154

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