Tasmania's hidden roar

Source term: mooyumkarr

mooyumkarr — the name Eyre had printed twenty-five years earlier for a South Australian bullroarer; Bonwick gave the mainland word to the Tasmanian instrument.

A healer pressed and rubbed the painful place, whispered a charm, and drew out the bone or stone believed to be lodged inside. But the same doctor could also send illness. That double power had a sound: an oval wooden blade whirled on a string, hidden from women’s sight. James Bonwick, an English-born teacher and amateur historian who had lived in Hobart, published this account in 1870. By then invasion, warfare, disease and forced removal had devastated Tasmania’s Aboriginal nations; at putalina/Oyster Cove, survivors continued ceremony and passed on culture.

They twirled round the magic mooyumkarr, an oval piece of wood with a string.

Bonwick 1870:175

Particulars

Object

An oval wooden blade attached to a string and whirled through the air.

Function

Used by doctors and exorcists in healing and harmful magic; women were forbidden to see it.