AUSMAIN-021 - museum specimen
Roebourne bullroarer (SMVK)
Western Australia - Roebourne - Kimberley
Restricted
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 not the people who made it, and no account of its use came to Stockholm with it. The museum itself, though, now treats the set as restricted: in 2004 the Kimberley material-culture specialist Kim Akerman, reviewing the Stockholm collections, identified these Roebourne bullroarers as secret/sacred, and in 2019 the museum withdrew Australian objects of this kind from its Ursprungsfolk exhibition on its Oceania curator's advice.
- 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
- Held by the museum as secret/sacred: the Roebourne set was identified as secret/sacred material in Kim Akerman's 2004 review of the Stockholm collections, and in 2019 Australian objects including this one were withdrawn from the museum's Ursprungsfolk exhibition on the recommendation of its curator for Oceania. What ceremony the blades served was never recorded.
- Map confidence
- medium - Representative Roebourne locality anchor.
- Source location
Page references
SMVK 1912.01.1031-.1038; general catalog pp. 248-249