KTBULL2026-001 - rock art depiction
Kings Tableland, Blue Mountains (NSW)
Australia - New South Wales - Blue Mountains - Kings Tableland - Oceania - Sahul
Sacred / spirit
Source term: bullroarers / stencilled bullroarers
Three red-ochre ovals pressed among hand stencils on a Kings Tableland shelter wall are bullroarers — the swung wooden voices that, in this Gundungurra country of the Blue Mountains, summoned men to the Bunan initiation. R.H. Mathews recorded that whirring roar drawing boys toward manhood; across south-eastern Australia it was heard as the sky-being Daramulan himself, an instrument no woman or uninitiated man was permitted to see. The exact ceremony these stencils mark went unrecorded, but here the hidden object was set openly into the rock in plain ochre.
the majority of the region’s art coincides with the recent archaeological evidence in the region - the late Holocene Bondaian periods
Jo McDonald 2008, Dreamtime Superhighway, ch.10, p.229; regional Sydney Basin context, not a direct date for this stencil.
- Object
- Enhanced photographs 1X3A7669_yre and 1X3A7668_yre show red-ochre oval bullroarer stencils among hand stencils and other pigment traces in Shelter 2.
- Function
- Ritual rock-art depiction of bullroarers in a sacred Aboriginal rock-art context. The source page identifies the Shelter 2 motifs as three oval-shaped bullroarers among hand stencils, but does not document the exact ceremony or use represented by the stencils.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Representative public Kings Tableland / Wentworth Falls plateau anchor, not the shelter coordinate; should not be read as exact site coordinates.
- Source location
- Shelter 2; enhanced images 1X3A7669_yre and 1X3A7668_yre; regional chronology context from McDonald 2008 ch.10 and Taçon et al. 2006