The Bullroarer Atlas

FRAZER1894-002 - ethnographic attestation

Turrbal / Brisbane River allied tribes

Australia - Queensland - Brisbane River

Restricted

An Aboriginal Australian bullroarer densely engraved with crosshatched diamond patterning, cord looped through the perforated end — a generic...
Representative image. An Aboriginal Australian bullroarer densely engraved with crosshatched diamond patterning, cord looped through the perforated end — a generic stand-in, not the Bugerum or Wobblekum of the Turrbal and allied Brisbane River tribes. Wereldmuseum / NMVW (acc. TM-2562-4) Image source

Bugerum / Wobblekum English

Source term: bull-roarer

Bugerum and Wobblekum: the two Turrbal bull-roarers, Bugerum the deeper-voiced and louder, Wobblekum the smaller.

Etymology. Elsewhere in the same East-Queensland coastal complex Howitt glosses Bugerum as 'the medicine-man.' Since the bull-roarer's sound was held to be the medicine-men's voice swallowing the novices, the instrument plausibly bears the same word, though Howitt does not say so outright. (medium confidence)

In the Turrbal Kurbin-aii initiation on the Brisbane River, the women and children were told that the unearthly droning carried out of the bush was the sound of the medicine-men swallowing the novices. Two bull-roarers produced it. The larger, Bugerum, made a louder and deeper-sounding roar; the smaller, Wobblekum, was about four inches long by an inch wide and perforated. The rite ran for never less than three weeks and often much longer, and a woman who tried to spy on it would certainly have been killed. The boys who passed through it were afterward called Kippur, a word that white settlers later took up for any young Aboriginal man. A. W. Howitt recorded the account in The Native Tribes of South-East Australia in 1904.

The unearthly sounds made by the bull-roarers were believed by the women and children to be made by the medicine-men when swallowing the novices during the ceremonies.

Howitt 1904:596 (The Native Tribes of South-East Australia)
Function
Restricted initiation sound identified with a death-and-return drama.
Map confidence
medium - Brisbane River / Brisbane regional anchor for the Turrbal Kurbin-aii source passage; source does not give a ceremony site
Source location
Howitt 1904, pp. 596-597 (Bugerum/Wobblekum and the swallowing-the-novices belief, p. 596); Frazer 1894 II:344 and 1913 Balder p. 233 preserve the earlier leads.

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