Bullroarer beneath the engraved tree

Source term: bull-roarer

clever man: a man of high degree, a doctor with magical powers. clever ropes: invisible magic cords that live in clever water-holes (Bundjalung nandiri). Biruganba: the sky cult-hero who taught clever men.

Near the end of a Bundjalung boy's initiation, the novices were led to a bare tree on a peak. Two clever men, held up by invisible "clever ropes", had engraved its trunk and limbs with animals, weapons and symbols, and one now sat high on the bare trunk with his arms folded and his legs wrapped round it. At a signal the boys rushed the heap of shavings at the foot of the tree and threw them up at him. Then the bullroarer was swung and they were shown stones of symbolic meaning. A clever man warned them to tell no one, and drew from his stomach a large, pretty white stone that would know if they did; then he swallowed it again. Those ropes came out of clever water-holes. A clever man of Tabulam told how, in his own making, a carpet snake coiled on the water of a cave carried him under the water and up to a mountaintop.

The bull-roarer is swung and they are shown stones of symbolic significance.

A. P. Elkin, Aboriginal Men of High Degree, 2nd ed. (1977), p. 140

Particulars

Object

A bullroarer; its form and local name are not recorded.

Function

Swung near the close of boys' initiation at a bare, engraved tree on a hilltop, as the novices were shown stones of symbolic significance and warned by a clever man, on pain of death, never to tell what they had seen.