Awarai Rum Jungle elder-restricted bullroarer making

Source term: Bullroarer / Schwirrholz (durchbohrter Corrobboreestick)

“May you make bullroarers?” Erhard Eylmann asked an Awarai man in the Rum Jungle country. Yes, came the answer — and the man’s two companions at once set him straight, citing cases in which the old men had ordered younger men to make no bullroarers at all. What punishment awaited a forbidden maker, neither could say. In the far interior a West-Arünta man had described one likely to end in an agonising death; between the north coast and the fifteenth parallel, Eylmann judged, custom was more forgiving.

Ein West-Arünta sagte mir, daß dem, welcher sich unerlaubter Weise einen Stab dieser Art angefertigt habe, der Kot mit einem Bumerang aus dem After geholt werde.

A West-Arünta told me that anyone who had made himself a stick of this kind without permission would have the dung drawn out of his anus with a boomerang.

Eylmann, Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Südaustralien (1908), p. 198

Particulars

Object

No Awarai specimen described; Eylmann's exchange concerns the class of small pierced 'corroboree sticks' he glosses as Schwirrhoelzer or bullroarers.

Function

Manufacture was elder-controlled: old men forbade younger men to make bullroarers; the penalty for a transgressor went unstated.