The Bullroarer Atlas

FRAZER1913-012 - ethnographic attestation

Binbinga / Binbinka

Australia - Western Gulf of Carpentaria

Restricted

An oval red-brown board incised along its length with three large concentric-circle motifs separated by small hatched panels, photographed...
Representative image. An oval red-brown board incised along its length with three large concentric-circle motifs separated by small hatched panels, photographed beside its 1881-5 museum tag — a generic Aboriginal Australian stand-in, not the watanurra (watamura) of the Binbinga. Wereldmuseum / NMVW (acc. TM-1881-5) Image source

watanurra / watamura English

Source term: sacred stick / bull-roarer

watanurra (also watamura): the Binbinga name for the sacred stick or bull-roarer twirled at circumcision; the Anula called the equivalent object mura-mura.

Etymology. Watanurra is the Binbinga name for the sacred stick or bullroarer twirled while a boy is circumcised; women and children were told its roar was the voice of the spirit Katajalina (Katajina), who lives in an ant-hill and comes out to eat the boy, later restoring him to life. The word itself has no recorded literal meaning; the newly initiated boy carried a small watanurra, kept from the sight of women, until his wound healed. (high confidence)

Among the Binbinga of the western Gulf of Carpentaria, the women and children were told that the roaring at a boy's circumcision was the voice of Katajalina, a spirit who lived in an ant-hill, came out and ate the novice, and afterwards restored him to life. The sound came from a sacred stick, the watanurra, twirled steadily while the operator cut — an instrument with its own beginning, for by Binbinga tradition the watamura was first made by two men of the wild-dog totem, the same ancestors who originated the ceremony of circumcision itself. After the cutting the boy was shown one of the sticks, laid on the palms of his hands, and given a smaller one to carry into the bush until his wound healed, warned that if any woman or boy caught sight of it both he and they would die. Spencer and Gillen, who recorded the rite on their 1901-1902 expedition across the continent, set Katajalina alongside Twanyirika of the Arunta and judged both "merely bogeys to frighten the women and children"; among the neighbouring Anula the noise was the spirit Gnabaia, who swallowed the boys and afterwards disgorged them as initiated youths.

The women and children on their part think that the noise of the bull-roarer is made by a spirit whom they call Katajalina, who lives in an ant-hill and comes out and eats the boy up, restoring him subsequently to life.

Spencer and Gillen 1904, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 501
Function
Initiation spirit-voice bullroarer with swallowing/restoration belief.
Map confidence
medium - representative western Gulf of Carpentaria/McArthur-region anchor; source does not give a ceremony locality
Source location
pp. 366-367, 501

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