BONWICK1870-001 - historical text
Tasmania's hidden roar
Australia - lutruwita - Tasmania - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: mooyumkarr
mooyumkarr — Bonwick's spelling of a name Eyre had printed twenty-five years earlier for a South Australian bullroarer. Bonwick probably used that familiar mainland name to identify the Tasmanian instrument; he did not record it as a palawa-language word.
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
- 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.
- Map confidence
- high - Geoscience Australia's possible centre of Tasmania on the western shore of Little Pine Lagoon (42° 01′ 17″ S, 146° 35′ 36″ E), used as an island-wide representative anchor because Bonwick gives no locality.
- Source location
- pp. 175–176
- Forbidden to women