The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSMAIN-021 - museum specimen

Roebourne, Western Australia

Western Australia - Roebourne - Pilbara-Kimberley edge

Function not recorded

Spencer's plate of plain, ladder-striped, and dotted sacred bull-roarers from the Northern Territory, illustrating the type rather than the...
Representative image. Spencer's plate of plain, ladder-striped, and dotted sacred bull-roarers from the Northern Territory, illustrating the type rather than the vinare recorded at Roebourne, Western Australia. Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory (Macmillan, 1914), Plate II Public domain Image source

Source term: vinare, bullroarer

A carved wooden bullroarer collected at Roebourne, on Western Australia's Pilbara coast, and held by the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. It reached the museum in 1912 through the Swedish expedition to Australia of 1910–11 led by the biologist Eric Mjöberg, on which Yngve Laurell served as ethnographer and under whose name the collection is filed. The catalogue lists it as a "vinare" — the ordinary Swedish word for the instrument, from vina, to whizz or whine — paired with the English "bullroarer." The expedition recorded the town, but the museum holds no note of the people who made it or what it was sounded for.

Object
Eight Roebourne bullroarers, SMVK 1912.01.1031-.1038, ranging from ornamented and red- or white-banded blades to unpainted or formerly painted examples.
Function
Function not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - Representative Roebourne locality anchor.
Source location
SMVK 1912.01.1031-.1038; general catalog pp. 248-249

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