MUS2026-037 - museum specimen
Martuthunira bull-roarer (Pitt Rivers)
Pilbara coast - Western Australia
Sacred / spirit
Boonangharry English
Source term: bull-roarer
Boonangharry: the collector Émile Clement's phonetic rendering of a Martuthunira name for this bull-roarer; not attested in the published grammar.
A bull-roarer of the Martuthunira, the people of the lower Fortescue River and the Pilbara coast of Western Australia, collected by the dealer-naturalist Émile Clement under the name Boonangharry and sold to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where it was accessioned in 1901. The museum classes it as a musical instrument and a religious and ceremonial object, and attaches a cultural-advice warning, though it records nothing of what the thing did. Clement, who collected it, does: across the Pilbara he heard the boonangharries roaring over the sick, over the newly dead to drive off the djuno, and through the month of dancing that follows circumcision - and he never once says the sound or the sight was kept from women. Whatever rite it once served is no longer recoverable from the Martuthunira themselves. The linguist Alan Dench, who began work on the language in 1981, found that the Martuthunira did not practise circumcision initiation but had sent their young men east, to the Yinyjiparnti and Kurrama, to be initiated; the memory of male initiation, and of the songs and dances that went with it, was gone, and from his principal informant Algy Paterson, one of three remaining speakers and soon the last, he could record only a few secular songs of two types, jalurra and thawi.
Together with any memory of male initiation, any knowledge of the songs and dances accompanying that ritual has been lost.
Dench 1995, Martuthunira: A Language of the Pilbara Region of Western Australia (Pacific Linguistics C-125):16
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Martuthunira, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1901.58.22). Clement nos. 152-153, 41 x 4 cm and 44 x 3.5 cm, are shown on Plate IV as figs. 12/12a and 4.
- Function
- A ceremonial object of the Martuthunira, sounded in men's ritual. The museum's per-object record classes it 'Ritual and Ceremonial / Religion / Religious Object' and carries a cultural-advice warning, but records nothing about its use and does not say it was withheld from women; the collector's own account of this collection says the opposite for the Pilbara.
- Map confidence
- high - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
Page references
1901.58.22 | Clement 1903 Plate IV figs. 12/12a and 4