The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSMAIN-007 - secondary catalog

Tjingilli (Jingulu)

Australia - Newcastle Waters - Elliott (Barkly) - Northern Territory

Restricted

Spencer and Gillen's Fig. 94, the wooden purtuli of a snake-totem waterhole.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Spencer and Gillen's Fig. 94, the wooden purtuli of a snake-totem waterhole. · Public domain Image source

Purtiili

Purtiili: name recorded for the Churinga — the wooden bull-roarer, no stone churinga being used by these tribes — among the Tjingilli (Jingulu) and neighbouring Umbaia; Spencer & Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), glossary of native terms.

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. (medium confidence)

The Tjingilli of the Newcastle Waters country, on the southern edge of the Barkly Tableland, appear in Spencer and Gillen not for a rite of their own but 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
Object
Whirled slat in Warramunga-northern-style initiation cycle, restricted to senior initiated men.
Function
Initiation voice; cult-totem revelation.
Map confidence
medium - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
Source location
p. 275

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