AUSMAIN-009 - secondary catalog
Ngarigo
Australia - Monaro - Snowy Mountains (Cooma, Bombala) - Southeast Highlands
Restricted
Mudji
Mudji: the Ngarigo name for the bull-roarer, whose roaring was the voice of the sky-being Daramulun, heard in thunder.
Among the Ngarigo of the Monaro tableland and Snowy Mountains, a messenger sent to summon people to the Kuringal initiation carried a bull-roarer, the mudji, together with a spear, boomerang, and shield; these were his token, the proof that the call was genuine. The instrument was carefully wrapped in a skin and concealed from women and children. Its roaring was the voice of Daramulun, the sky-being who had instituted the rites: as Howitt recorded it, the sound represents the muttering of thunder, and the thunder is the voice of Daramulun. Working on the Maneroo in the 1880s as magistrate and mines warden, Howitt noted that the Ngarigo called a message Mabun and a messenger Gunumilli. A related coastal Yuin bull-roarer he collected, labelled the voice of Daramulun, passed through E. B. Tylor to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
In relation to the initiation ceremonies the token was a bull-roarer (Mudji) and also a spear, boomerang, and shield.
Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), ch. 11
- Object
- Whirled slat carried by Kuringal messengers with spear, boomerang, shield.
- Function
- Initiation voice; credentials for the messenger summoning the Bunan/Kuringal.
- Map confidence
- high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
- Source location
- ch. 11
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women