AUSIN-035 - museum specimen
Cairns bullroarer, 'Yedinjie (?)' (Edinburgh)
Australia - Cairns, North Queensland
Restricted
Made in Cairns in 1990, this board of wattle wood carries a fish painted in the X-ray manner — spine and innards shown through the body — in ochres over a dark ground. The museum card keeps its makers with question marks attached: carved by Yaderleye of the Yedinjie, most likely the Yidinji, whose country takes in Cairns, and 'PAINTED BY Gerry.' What it was made for went unrecorded — but at Freshwater, just up the coast, bullroarers of this country sit in the Pitt Rivers catalogued as secret-sacred: men's objects, not for public view.
- Object
- University of Edinburgh MIMEd 3112: a wattle-wood board, 210 x 90 mm, made in Cairns in 1990, painted in ochres with an X-ray-style fish, with its cord.
- Function
- Secret/sacred by locality: Pitt Rivers bullroarers collected at Freshwater near Cairns are catalogued as secret-sacred men's objects under the museum's 2012 determination; the Edinburgh card records no function for this 1990 painted piece itself.
- Map confidence
- high - Cairns, the recorded production place.
- Source location
- MIMEd 3112
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women