CALGA2026-001 - ethnographic attestation
Calga Daramulan thundering-voice bullroarer
Australia - Calga Aboriginal Cultural Landscape - Peats Ridge songline - Central Coast - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: bullroarer
At Calga on the Peats Ridge songline, boys were called to initiation by the bullroarer, its sound the thundering voice of Daramulan. Darkinjung and Guringai knowledge holders hold this sandstone amphitheatre to be the very place where Daramulan came into being: the one-legged son of Baiame, the all-father who came down from the sky, and Bootha, the emu-mother. R. H. Mathews recorded that Daramulan had a voice like the rumbling of distant thunder, and that it fell to him to separate the youths from their mothers and teach them the Law. A one-legged figure pecked into the rock holds a large ovoid shape that may be the instrument itself. Here boys were parted from their mothers and came back as men.
Boys are called to initiation by the sound of the bullroarer, which represents Daramulan's thundering voice.
Heritage NSW 5064142 (Hodgetts 2018)
- Object
- No surviving object is documented. A one-legged Daramulan engraving holds a large ovoid form that the listing says may be a bullroarer; the identification is not certain.
- Function
- Called boys to initiation as Daramulan's thundering voice within the Calga ceremonial landscape.
- Map confidence
- high - Official Heritage NSW coordinates for the Calga Aboriginal Cultural Landscape.
- Source location
Page references
Historical notes: Ancestral Beings; Physical description: eastern ridgeline
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Death and rebirth