The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-037 - museum specimen

Martuthunira

Pilbara coast - Western Australia

Restricted

Clement 1903 Plate IV; figs. 12/12a and 4 are the two recorded forms added to this row. The complete plate and caption are shown.
Clement 1903 Plate IV; figs. 12/12a and 4 are the two recorded forms added to this row. The complete plate and caption are shown. Emile Clement, Ethnographische Beobachtungen in Nordwest-Central-Australien (1903), Plate IV; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek scan Public domain Image source
A board carved edge to edge with a herringbone zigzag pattern — an Aboriginal Australian bull-roarer held by the Wereldmuseum, shown for the...
Representative image. A board carved edge to edge with a herringbone zigzag pattern — an Aboriginal Australian bull-roarer held by the Wereldmuseum, shown for the general form; not the Martuthunira boonangharry from the Pilbara coast documented here. Wereldmuseum / NMVW (acc. RV-2306-7) CC BY-SA Image source

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; like Aboriginal bull-roarers generally it was a men's restricted thing, kept from women and the uninitiated. 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
The museum's own per-object record classes it 'Ritual and Ceremonial / Religion / Ceremonial Object / Religious Object' and carries a cultural-advice warning (hasCulturalWarning); a men's-restricted ceremonial object.
Map confidence
high - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
1901.58.22 | Clement 1903 Plate IV figs. 12/12a and 4

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