MUS2026-031 - museum specimen
Algamurra (Aboriginal Australian)
Central Australia (1889 label 'Algamurra')
Function not recorded
Wilmurra English
Source term: bull-roarer
Wilmurra: recorded native name for the bull-roarer (Algamurra, central/northern Australia), Metropolitan Museum of Art 501354, Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, 1889.
Etymology. Wilmurra is recorded as the native word for the bull-roarer among the people the Metropolitan Museum labels 'Algamurra,' from central/northern Australia. The 1889 collection register gives the name and glosses it 'bull roarer' but records no further meaning, and the ethnonym is not otherwise attested. (medium confidence)
A bull-roarer of gidya wood — the dense inland acacia of Australia's arid country — fourteen and five-eighths inches long, entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1889 with the Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments under the name "Wilmurra." The Met places it in the Northern Territory and records its makers as the Algamurra, though neither the name "Wilmurra" nor the group "Algamurra" resolves cleanly to any documented language. The catalogue notes no rite, no occasion, no use; the record runs to the wood, the measurements, and the year it was given.
Wilmurra — Culture: Algamurra — Medium: Wood (gidya) — The Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, 1889
Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession no. 89.4.738 (object record)
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Algamurra (Aboriginal Australian), in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met 501354 'Wilmurra (bull roarer)').
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Map confidence
- low - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
- Met 501354 'Wilmurra (bull roarer)'