The Bullroarer Atlas

MAT1898-008 - ethnographic attestation

Tribes between the Hunter and Macleay Rivers

Australia - Hunter to Macleay Rivers, New South Wales - Southeast

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Plate 9, fig. 9: the gonnandhakeen bull-roarer of the tribes between the Hunter and Macleay Rivers, used at the Keeparra and Dhalgai ceremonies...
Plate 9, fig. 9: the gonnandhakeen bull-roarer of the tribes between the Hunter and Macleay Rivers, used at the Keeparra and Dhalgai ceremonies (its cross-section, fig. 10, is the small lens elsewhere on the plate). R. H. Mathews, Notes on the Aborigines of New South Wales, 1907, Plate 9 fig. 9 (with cross-section fig. 10) Public domain Image source

gonnandhakeen English

Source term: bull-roarer

gonnandhakeen: the local name for the bullroarer among the tribes between the Hunter and Macleay Rivers, NSW.

Etymology. Mathews glosses the name — goonandhakeea in his Keeparra account, gonnandhakeen in 1898 — as "excrement-eater", and the word belongs to a wider complex he records around the being Goign: novices are told the roar is the voice of Goign, "who would come and eat them if he got the chance", the ceremonial ring is the goonambang or "excrement place", and the quartz crystals shown to novices are believed to be Goign's excrement. (high confidence)

Among the tribes between the Hunter and Macleay Rivers, the bull-roarer bore a startling name: goonandhakeen, glossed by R.H. Mathews as "excrement-eater" — the quartz crystals of the ceremony were held to be the excrement of Goign, the being who presided over the Keeparra initiation. At the moment the novices were led away, the mothers were covered over with rugs and made to keep up a low humming; two men on either side of the ring loudly swung their bull-roarers while the armed men beat boomerangs together, so that if a string snapped the women would not hear the instrument fall to the ground. The guardians told one another, in the boys' hearing, that they supposed Goign was killing all the women and children in the camp; later the novices were told the roar was the voice of Goign, who would come and eat them if he got the chance. The revelation came by a trick: a headman pretended to spy Goign's squirrel going into a hollow tree, the roar swelled nearer — "we told you to beware of Goign, here he comes!" — and the boys were made to raise their heads and look upon two men swinging the goonandhakeen. They were warned on pain of death never to tell the women or the uninitiated, and the instruments were placed in their hands to touch their bodies with.

The guardians tell them that these instruments represent the voice of Dhurramoolan, and that all the similar sounds which they have yet heard have been made in this way. The men now caution the boys not to reveal what they have seen to the women or the uninitiated, or they will be punished with death.

R. H. Mathews, Notes on the Aborigines of New South Wales (1907), Keeparra ceremony section
Function
Gonnandhakeen bullroarer used at Keeparra and Dhalgai ceremonies.
Map confidence
low_medium - representative coordinate for named people, ceremony, river, or region in Mathews
Source location
JAI 27:52-60; Plate figs. 9-10

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