Theddora (Dhudhuroa)

madjigani / yirragaminanga

madjigani: bullroarer; the small bullroarer is yirragaminanga (Dhudhuroa/Theddora, north-east Victoria). Recorded by R. H. Mathews from Neddy Wheeler; B. J. Blake & J. Reid, Aboriginal History 26 (2002), p. 198.

The Theddora of Omeo, in the high country where the Mitta Mitta and Kiewa rivers fall toward the Upper Murray, belonged to the southeastern world Howitt described in which the whirled slat was the voice of Daramulun. They went to the Kuringal of their Ngarigo neighbours, where, as a visiting party came within hearing of the camp, the women and children were sent off a little way so the sound of the bull-roarers reached the initiated men but was masked from them. Of their own rite Howitt learned at first hand only one memory, from an old woman who had outlived all her people: the story told to the uninitiated, that Mallur came down from the sky to knock out the boy's tooth when he was made a man. Richard Helms recorded the second making. At eighteen or twenty, when his beard had come, a youth who had already lost a front tooth was made Wahu: with the women sent away, "all the hair of his head was singed off gradually." Then the men ran up and waved green boughs over his head, and ran out and back, swishing the boughs toward each district in turn and calling its name, so that he learned where he could go as a friend and where his people's hereditary feuds lay. He came out of it a warrior.

The bull-roarer of this tribe was about four inches in length, and with notched edges, being fastened by a string to a short stick. Such a one was shown to one of my correspondents, secretly, by a Theddora medicine-man in the very early days before Gippsland was settled. He was told that the women and children might not see it.

Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), pp. 565–566

Particulars

Object

Whirled slat used in initiation ceremonies of the Kuringal/Jeraeil sphere.

Function

Initiation voice and women-taboo signal.