The Bullroarer Atlas

No. LOEB1929-002

Bunurong Victoria child-play bullroarer

Australia · Victoria · Southeast

Play / practical

A long red-brown bull-roarer blade incised from end to end.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. A long red-brown bull-roarer blade incised from end to end. Image source

Source term: bullroarer

Across most of Aboriginal Australia the bullroarer was held sacred and kept hidden from women and the uninitiated, its roar taken for the voice of thunder or of a high god who presided over the men's initiation rites. Among the Bunurong of Victoria's coast it was none of these things. Edwin Loeb, drawing on Howitt, records that here the instrument was well known and served as a child's plaything, in a country where boys underwent no initiation beyond being released from their food restrictions.

Among the Bunurang tribe of Victoria, however, the bullroarer is well known and is used for a child's plaything. In this region there is no initiation other than the freeing of the boy from food taboos.

Loeb 1929, Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, UCPAAE 25(3):250 (citing Howitt 1904:613)

Particulars

Function
A child's plaything among the Bunurong, though elsewhere regarded with reverential awe.

Sources

  1. Loeb, Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 25(3) (1929):249–288, p. 250, citing Howitt (1904), p. 613 View · archived
  2. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), p. 613, via Loeb (1929), p. 250

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.