AUSMAIN-010 - secondary catalog
Wolgal (Walgalu)
Australia - Upper Murrumbidgee - Tumut - Kiandra - Southeast Highlands
Restricted
Mudji
Mudji (also Mudthi): the Wolgal/Yuin name for the bull-roarer, whose roar was held to be the voice of Daramulun.
Among the Wolgal of the upper Murrumbidgee and the neighbouring Yuin and Ngarigo, the whirled slat was the Mudthi, and its roar was the muttering of thunder, which was the voice of Daramulun, the being who was said to have first made the Kuringal initiation and taught it to their fathers. When Howitt helped stage a Kuringal in the 1880s, the old Wolgal singer Mragula was not satisfied with the sound of the bull-roarer Howitt had supplied, so he made another from the wood of a native cherry-tree growing nearby. The instrument also carried the summons that drew the tribes together for the rite: a messenger, always an initiated man chosen as a good speaker, bore a bull-roarer given him by the head Gommera, wrapped up with a belt of opossum-fur string, arm bands of ringtail opossum skin, and a forehead band. The proceedings were carefully concealed from the women, and at the camp where the figure of Daramulun was made the boys were told plainly that if they made anything like it after returning home they would be killed.
The roaring of the Mudthi represents the muttering of thunder, and the thunder is the voice of Daramulun, and therefore its sound is of the most sacred character.
Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), ch. 9
- Object
- Whirled slat carried by Kuringal messengers along with kilt and head-string.
- Function
- Initiation summons and voice-of-spirit transmitted between confederated southern tribes.
- Map confidence
- high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
- Source location
- p.565
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women