Milingimbi blade with human-hair cord

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, bullroarers sounded the voice of the great ancestral python.

The bull roarer is attached to a human hair cord on a small stick before it is ready for whirling.

W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization, rev. ed. (Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 281

Particulars

Object

Leaf-shaped wooden blade, 86 cm long and 8 cm wide, pierced at the rounded end for a human-hair cord about 10-12 ft long, and paired with a cylindrical wooden handle 52.1 cm long and 1.91 cm in diameter.

Function

At Milingimbi itself the roarer was the voice of the ancestral python in Yolngu men's initiation rites. No ceremony is recorded for this piece.