Roebuck Bay whistling-stick bullroarer

kalligooroo

Source term: whistling-stick

whistling-stick: Peggs's English name for the Roebuck Bay bullroarer. kalligooroo: Daisy Bates's spelling of the Broome initiation roarer's name, the Dampier Land galiguru; mirruroo-kalligooroo, the old 'magic bull-roarer' revealed to the boy.

At Roebuck Bay, the whistling-stick belonged to both desire and initiation. A man sounded it to call a woman to him, and the same humming voice entered the ceremonies that made boys into men. In those ceremonies, Daisy Bates learned among the Broome tribes, the roarer was kalligooroo, a name never spoken where women, children or the uninitiated could hear. To them its booming was the voice of Nalja, an old, old man with white hair, whose voice came from the hair beneath his arm-pits and whom to look upon was death; if the whirling blade struck a tree, the trembling boy was told, 'Nalja is throwing his boomerang!' Then a guardian lifted an old roarer from the earth at the boy's feet — 'Your kalligooroo!' — and the secret was his, on pain of death. Peggs's crowded 1903 plate preserves the blade among the district's masks, shields, weapons, ornaments, and tools.

[William] has made and given me a whistling-stick, in shape very like a laurie [talking-stick], with a hole in one end by which it is swung, when it makes a humming noise. [...] William soon cut the rough shape out, but the other part, the smoothing it down, was a long process, and was done with a broken piece of glass; then came the markings.

Peggs 1903:349-350

Particulars

Object

Wooden whistling-stick with one terminal hole and cord, photographed as Plate XV figure 23.

Function

Called a woman to a man, and sounded in the initiation of boys, where its voice was said to be the spirit Nalja's.