HAD1898-035 - secondary catalog
Dieri / Diyari
Australia - Central
Restricted
yuntha English
yuntha — the Dieri bull-roarer, a hair- or flax-corded wooden blade given to a youth at the end of the Wilyaru initiation and whirled while hunting reptiles.
Among the Dieri of the Lake Eyre country in central Australia, a young man was handed his yuntha at the close of the Wilyaru ceremony, the rite that completed his initiation. He was told to whirl it around his head while out hunting: inspired by the Mura-mura of the ceremony, he was held to have the power to draw a good harvest of snakes and other reptiles into reach. The piece was a thin blade of wood, six to nine inches long, swung on a string of human hair or native flax ten to twelve feet in length. The settler S. Gason, who recorded the Dieri in the early 1870s, was shown a yuntha only after promising never to let a woman see it or even learn that he had seen it. The belief was that should a woman set eyes on one used in the ceremonies and learn its secret, the Dieri would be left forever without their snakes, lizards, and other such food. Gason's account reached A. C. Haddon's survey of the bull-roarer through Howitt.
The belief is that if a woman were to see a Yuntha which had been used at the ceremonies, and knew the secret of it, the Dieri tribe would ever afterwards be without snakes, lizards, and such other food.
Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), Chapter X (after Gason)
- Function
- Secret bullroarer for Wilyaru youth; women seeing it would cause loss of snakes, lizards, and food.
- Map confidence
- medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Haddon
- Source location
- Gason in Woods 1879, pp. 253-307 (Dieyerie chapter); yuntha passage as carried in Howitt 1904, ch. X (after Gason). Survey row: Haddon 1898, p. 315.
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women
- Weather / fertility magic