The Bullroarer Atlas

AUSMAIN-024 - ethnographic attestation

Bunganditj / Meintangk / Tanganekald, southeast South Australia

Southeast of South Australia (Mount Gambier, Lacepede Bay, lower Coorong); southern Ngarrindjeri-family country - Oceania - Sahul

Function not recorded

A wide, leaf-shaped wooden board scored all over with a crosshatched lattice pattern and a cord looped through a hole at the narrow end —...
Representative image. A wide, leaf-shaped wooden board scored all over with a crosshatched lattice pattern and a cord looped through a hole at the narrow end — Howitt's plate of Kurnai (Gunai) bull-roarers, shown for the general southeastern Australian type. No physical mimikur survives for this page: the attestation is Clarence Long's wax-cylinder recordings of the bullroarer songs. A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), fig. 37 Public domain Image source

Mimikur

Source term: Mimikur (glossed "bullroarer" by Tindale); English "bullroarer"

Bunganditj / Ngarrindjeri-family term for the bullroarer, recorded by N. B. Tindale as the native name of the instrument whose song was sung.

In the far southeast corner of South Australia the bullroarer was the mimikur, and by the 1930s its songs were nearly all that remained of the local ceremony when Norman Tindale set up his recording gear. His informant, the Tanganekald man Clarence Long, known as Milerum, carried the song repertoires of several neighbouring peoples in his memory: onto wax cylinder in 1932 he sang a "Mimikur (bullroarer) song of the Meintangk," and onto acetate disc in 1937-38 "A Bunganditj Mimikur song from Mount Gambier." The slats themselves are gone from this record; what survives is the native name of the instrument and the sung memory of its voice, captured from one man at the end of a tradition.

A Bunganditj Mimikur (or Bullroarer) song from Mount Gambier

South Australian Museum, Tindale collection AA 338/11/12, Clarence Long series (SA) 1937-38, Disc 4, Track 19
Object
No physical slat survives in this record; the attestation is sound recording. Tindale's informant Clarence Long (Milerum), a Tanganekald man fluent in the songs of the neighbouring southeastern groups, sang the "mimikur" (bullroarer) songs onto wax cylinder and acetate disc. The instrument named is the flat whirled-slat bullroarer of the southeast Australian type.
Function
The mimikur songs belong to ceremonial song repertoire recorded from a single knowledgeable man; the specific ritual context of these bullroarer songs is not detailed in the catalogue. Function not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - Representative anchor at Mount Gambier, the one named locality in the source ("a Bunganditj Mimikur song from Mount Gambier") and the heart of Bunganditj country; the Meintangk song belongs to the adjacent coastal southeast (Lacepede Bay / Kingston SE) and the singer was Tanganekald of the lower Coorong, so the point marks the regional cluster rather than a single specimen find-spot.
Source location
1937-38 series (AA 338/11/12): Disc 4, Track 19 ("A Bunganditj Mimikur (or Bullroarer) song from Mount Gambier"); Disc 2, Track 9 ("Mimikur or Bullroarer song"). 1932 series (AA 338/11/5): Song 9, AS349 ("Mimikur (bullroarer) song of the Meintangk").

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