The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-135 - museum specimen

Milingimbi Island / Yurruwi

Australia - Milingimbi Island (Yurruwi), Crocodile Islands, Northern Territory - Arnhem Land

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Northern Territory bull-roarers figured by Spencer (1914, Pl. II): two long, leaf-shaped wooden blades with a raised midrib, shown suspended by...
Representative image. Northern Territory bull-roarers figured by Spencer (1914, Pl. II): two long, leaf-shaped wooden blades with a raised midrib, shown suspended by their cords. The Milingimbi object documented here has no published photograph of its own. Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory (Macmillan, 1914), Plate II Public domain Image source

Source term: Bullroarer and cylindrical handle

At Milingimbi, the whole apparatus survives: an 86-centimetre leaf-shaped wooden blade, a cord of human hair, and the slim half-metre handle from which it was swung. Most museum bullroarers have lost their working tackle; this one still shows how blade, cord, hand, and air were joined. Milingimbi was one of the camps where Lloyd Warner gathered A Black Civilization, and in the rites he recorded there the roarer sounded the voice of the great ancestral python.

Bullroarer and Cylindrical Handle

Smithsonian NMNH anthropology object nmnhanthropology_8421502.
Object
Leaf-shaped wooden blade, 86 cm long, pierced at the rounded end for a human-hair cord and paired with a 52.1 cm cylindrical wooden handle; NMNH E387549.
Function
Of the Yolngu men's ceremonial complex Warner recorded at Milingimbi itself, where the roarer voices the ancestral python of the initiation rites (Warner 1937). No ceremony is recorded for this piece.
Map confidence
high - Northern Territory Place Names Register: Milingimbi Island, -12.0931, 134.8885.
Source location
Smithsonian object nmnhanthropology_8421502 / E387549-0

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