No. CAMERON1880-001Australia
Gunggari Bora ceremony bullroarer
Australia · Queensland · Maranoa River district
Restricted Candidate only
Source term: use of bullroarer
In July 1880 the pastoralist A. L. P. Cameron, one of A. W. Howitt's most reliable outback correspondents, wrote to him about the Unghi — the Gunggari of the Maranoa River country in southern Queensland, whose lands ran from the Maranoa and Warrego south to the Balonne. His letter touched on the Bora initiation ground, beliefs about the dead, protective charms, and the use of the bullroarer, an instrument sounding somewhere within a men's ceremony still sealed from view.
Particulars
- Object
- No object survives: the attestation is archival. A letter from the pastoralist-ethnographer A. L. P. Cameron to A. W. Howitt, written from Mossgiel on 4 July 1880, sits in the Howitt Collection at AIATSIS (MS 69, Box 2, Folder 5, Paper 1a) under the annotation "Unghi tribe; Bora ceremony; after-death beliefs; protective charms; use of bullroarer."
- Function
- Sounded at the Bora initiation ceremony.
Source
A. L. P. Cameron to A. W. Howitt, Mossgiel, 4 July 1880: AIATSIS MS 69 (Howitt Collection), Box 2, Folder 5, Paper 1a; Museums Victoria, Howitt and Fison Archive, XM106