The Bullroarer Atlas

No. CAPELL1956-004

Gurrgoni wubar

Australia · Cadell River, south-east of the Tomkinson River headwaters, north-central Arnhem Land, Northern Territory

Sacred / spirit

Mathews’s outline of a Shoalhaven mooroonga, a long flat blade with a round hole near one end and a deeply forked notch at the other.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Mathews’s Plate 9, fig. 11: Shoalhaven mooroonga bullroarer Public domain · Image source

wubar

Source term: BULLROARER: wubar

wubar: the name of the Ubar ceremony, given in answer to 'bullroarer' (Capell 1956, p. 18; Capell & Hinch 1970, wuwar 'Ubar ceremony')

Gurrgoni speakers on the Cadell River answered a request for the bullroarer's name with wubar, the eastern form of the Ubar, the sacred ceremony of west Arnhem Land. Their Ndjébbana neighbours on the coast gave the same word. Gurrgoni is a small inland language, its country south-east of the Tomkinson River headwaters, between Burarra to the north and the Kunwinjku stone country to the west.

Particulars

Object
A bullroarer, called wubar; its form is not recorded.

Sources

  1. Arthur Capell, A Vocabulary of 600 Words in Forty North Australian Languages (typescript, Sydney, 1956), State Library of New South Wales A 6929, p. 18 View
  2. Arthur Capell and Heather E. Hinch, Maung Grammar, Texts and Vocabulary (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), vocabulary, wuwar 'Ubar ceremony' View
  3. Murray Garde, 'The Forbidden Gaze', in Martin Thomas and Margo Neale (eds), Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition (ANU Press, 2011), pp. 403–407 View
  4. Ronald M. Berndt, Kunapipi (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1951)
  • Amurdak uwarAustralia · Eastern shores of Van Diemen Gulf, Murgenella and Cooper creeks, Northern Territory · Sacred / spirit
  • Gunavidji wubarAustralia · Liverpool River mouth around Maningrida, north-central Arnhem Land, Northern Territory · Sacred / spirit
  • Kunbarlang uwarAustralia · Coast between Hawkesbury Point and Junction Bay, inland toward Table Hill, western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory · Sacred / spirit
  • Marrku uwarAustralia · Croker Island and the facing shore of the Cobourg Peninsula at Raffles Bay, Northern Territory · Sacred / spirit
  • Mawng uwarAustralia · Goulburn Islands and the mainland coast opposite, east to the King River, Braithwaite Point and Junction Bay, Northern Territory · Sacred / spirit
  • Mengerrdji uwarmAustralia · Alligator Rivers country around Gunbalanya (Oenpelli), western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory · Sacred / spirit

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.