Tjingilli (Jingulu)

Purtiili

Purtiili: the Tjingilli (Jingulu) and Umbaia name for the churinga, the wooden bull-roarer; these tribes use no stone churinga, and Spencer and Gillen give the Warramunga name for the same board as murtu-murtu.

Etymology. Purtiili is the name Spencer and Gillen (1904) record for the Churinga among the Umbaia and Tjingilli (Jingulu). In these northern tribes there are no stone churinga; the Churinga is the wooden object they describe as 'shaped like a bull-roarer,' so Purtiili is in effect the Tjingilli word for the bull-roarer. The source records no further meaning for the word.

The Tjingilli of the Newcastle Waters country, on the southern edge of the Barkly Tableland, appear in Spencer and Gillen as one of a cluster of tribes sharing the Warramunga-type ceremonial pattern. With the Warramunga, Worgaia, Umbaia and their allies they put boys through both circumcision and subincision, and the whirled slat sounded as the voice of initiation, a thing of senior initiated men alone. As the bull-roarers were swung in the dark around the ground, the women and children were told that the roaring was the voice of a great spirit come out of the bush to carry the boy away; only afterward was the youth shown that it was the sacred wood, never to be named to the women, that had made the sound.

The wooden object shaped like a bull-roarer — that is, the true Churinga — is called murtu-murtu. No stone ones are met with in these tribes, and the markings upon the wooden ones are precisely similar to those of the Arunta.

Baldwin Spencer & F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), pp. 275-276

Particulars

Object

Whirled slat in Warramunga-northern-style initiation cycle, restricted to senior initiated men.

Function

Initiation voice; cult-totem revelation.