The Bullroarer Atlas

No. AUSIN-028

Derby district bullroarer SLWA Bates 95-5

West Kimberley · Western Australia

Restricted

Kimberley whirler in Hambly’s plate drawing: a rounded blade with nested squares and elongated rounded rectangles among fine parallel lines.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Hambly's plate of a Kimberley whirler carved with two square spirals. Public domain · Image source
Australian wooden bullroarer densely incised with fine herringbone lines, with a visible hole near each rounded end.
Plate II. Representative — not this record’s object. Australian bullroarer carved with fine herringbone patterning. Image source

mudamud

Source term: bullroarer

mudamud: Nyulnyul / Dampier Land (West Kimberley) name for the bullroarer; McGregor 2011 records "a large bullroarer (mudamud) from Derby way" obtained in trade.

A plate in Daisy Bates' photograph albums at the State Library of Western Australia is captioned simply "Bullroarer from Derby district," set among shields, boomerangs, and the carved boards she labelled "Larras worn at initiation of Broome and Derby natives." The object itself was never described, but its place in West Kimberley life is well attested. On the Dampier Land peninsula bordering Derby, the bullroarer (called mudamud, one prized example traded "from Derby way") was a secret-sacred instrument of the men's cult, counted among the objects "not to be seen by women or uninitiated males" and bound up with the staged rites of male initiation.

I have obtained information regarding initiation, the bull-roarer and certain culture-heroes and the songs associated with such, all of which is tabu to the women and uninitiated.

A. P. Elkin, Beagle Bay / Dampier Land fieldnotes (Elkin 1933:441), quoted in William B. McGregor, The Nyulnyul Language of Dampier Land, Vol. 1: Grammar (Pacific Linguistics 632, ANU, 2011), p. 23

Particulars

Object
Bullroarer from the Derby district, known from a plate in Daisy Bates' photograph albums.
Function
A men's initiation instrument, kept from the sight of women and uninitiated boys.

Sources

  1. William B. McGregor, The Nyulnyul Language of Dampier Land, Western Australia, vol. 1: Grammar, Pacific Linguistics 632 (Canberra: ANU, 2011), pp. 14, 16, 23; quoting A. P. Elkin (1933), p. 441, and citing Worms (1986) View · archived
  2. State Library of Western Australia, Daisy Bates papers, Acc. 6193A, Photographs of Carvings, Paintings, Implements and Weapons, plate “Bullroarer from Derby district”

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.