The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSMAIN-018 - museum specimen

Ngarinyin (Ungarinyin)

Australia - Northern Kimberley, WA, wandjina country

Restricted

Hambly's plate of a Kimberley whirler: a leaf-shaped blade drawn with fine horizontal hatching around two concentric maze motifs, one square...
Representative image. Hambly's plate of a Kimberley whirler: a leaf-shaped blade drawn with fine horizontal hatching around two concentric maze motifs, one square and one long-rectangular, a third just cut off at the tip. It is region-matched to Western Australia, not the specific Ngarinyin object documented here. W. D. Hambly, Primitive Hunters of Australia (Field Museum of Natural History, 1936), plate VII, fig. f Public domain Image source

Among the Ngarinyin of the northern Kimberley, in wandjina country, the bull-roarer comes in two sexes: men distinguish a "male" from a "female" bull-roarer, an exception to the usual Australian pattern in which the whirled slat is sounded in secret-sacred increase ceremonies to separate the men's domain from the women's. Beyond that bare fact, recorded in passing by the comparative literature, little of the Ngarinyin usage has reached open sources. Helmut Petri, who chose the Ngarinyin as his subject on the 1938 Frobenius expedition to the Kimberley, did not publish his ethnography until the 1950s, and the objects the expedition collected, along with Petri's notes on the mythology, were lost in the bombing of Frankfurt in 1944.

the Ungarinyin know of "female" bull-roarers

Koepping, "Bull-Roarers," Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), via Encyclopedia.com
Object
Whirled wooden slat-on-cord; Ngarinyin specifically distinguish 'male' and 'female' bull-roarers.
Function
Used in fertility / increase ceremonies with secret-sacred character; the male/female distinction separates men's from women's domains.
Map confidence
high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
Source location
Encyclopedia.com, Bull-Roarers, paragraph on Australian increase ceremonies and Ungarinyin female bull-roarers; AUSTLANG K18

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