Mount Barnett bullroarer (SMVK)

Source term: vinare, bullroarer

Five bullroarers left Mount Barnett, in the Kimberley of Western Australia, together; this one is red-painted wood with faint black bands, held by Sweden's Etnografiska museet (SMVK) as object 1039361. The set was collected on Eric Mjöberg's Swedish expedition of 1910–11, on which Yngve Laurell served as ethnographer, and by 1912 it was in Stockholm under a Swedish name: "Vinare, bullroarer" — vinare from vina, to whine or whizz, a Swedish word and not a Kimberley one. Nobody wrote down who made these, or what they were for. In 2004 the Kimberley material-culture specialist Kim Akerman worked through the Stockholm collections and identified the Mount Barnett set as secret and sacred, and the museum keeps photographs of such ritual objects out of its public database.

Particulars

Object

Five Mount Barnett bullroarers, SMVK 1912.01.1025-.1029; .1025 is red-painted wood with faint black bands and human-hair cord, and the set is marked secret/sacred.

Function

Secret and sacred: Kim Akerman identified the Mount Barnett set as such in his 2004 review of the Stockholm collections. What ceremony it served was never recorded.