The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSMAIN-020 - museum specimen

Sunday Island (Bardi/Jawi), Kimberley

Western Australia - Kimberley - Sunday Islands

Sacred / spirit

Spencer's plate of six Northern Territory sacred bull-roarers — plain dark blades, cord-strung ladder-striped forms, and feather-down–spotted...
Representative image. Spencer's plate of six Northern Territory sacred bull-roarers — plain dark blades, cord-strung ladder-striped forms, and feather-down–spotted examples — illustrating the type; not the vinare from Sunday Island in the Kimberley documented here. Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory (Macmillan, 1914), Plate II Public domain Image source

Source term: vinare / bullroarer

Its whirr was the voice of Djamar, the hero who rose from the sea whirling a bullroarer and struck south. He split boards from a silver-blood tree and drove them into a creek bed as a line of sacred galaguru; on Burumar sandhill his hair-string snapped and the board shot skyward, lodging in the Coalsack near the Southern Cross, the realm of the dead. On these islands at the mouth of King Sound, Bardi and Jawi initiates were led to that creek and shown the holes where the god had planted his bullroarers in stone.

Object
Three Sunday Islands bullroarers, SMVK 1912.01.1021-.1023: painted wooden blades with transverse red, yellow, dark, or grey bands; the catalog marks the set ceremonial and .1022 secret/sacred.
Function
The whirr of Djamar, the creator-hero who rose from the sea swinging a bullroarer and drove his sacred galaguru boards into a creek bed; Bardi and Jawi initiates were shown the holes he left in the stone (Worms 1950).
Map confidence
medium - Representative Sunday Islands / Buccaneer Archipelago anchor.
Source location
SMVK 1912.01.1021-.1023; general catalog p. 245

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