The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-188 - museum specimen

Daly Waters (people unrecorded)

Australia - Daly Waters, Northern Territory - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

Black-stained Victoria River bullroarer with a pierced end.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Black-stained Victoria River bullroarer with a pierced end. · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: vinare / bullroarer / churinga

vinare: Swedish catalog term for a bullroarer; not an Indigenous name.

Five roundels ringed in concentric circles cover both faces of the Daly Waters blade — over two feet of carved wood on a long plant-fibre cord. It was collected by Robert Pulleine, an Adelaide eye-and-ear doctor who also gathered shells, succulents and Aboriginal ethnographica, and reached Stockholm in 1916 through Heinrich Rudolph Wahlen, Sweden's consul in the German South Seas. The museum now holds it as secret and sacred and keeps its photograph out of view.

Tunn platt träskiva, på båda sidor ornerade med fem rundlar, inneslutna i koncentriska cirklar.

Thin flat wooden board, ornamented on both sides with five roundels enclosed in concentric circles.

SMVK Etnografiska museet, object record 1916.01.4080
Object
Thin flat wooden blade, 68.5 x 11.7 x 1 cm, both faces ornamented with five roundels enclosed in concentric circles; a long plant-fibre cord (128 cm) passes through a small hole at one end.
Function
Identified as secret/sacred in the museum's 2004 review; no ceremony or particular use is recorded.
Map confidence
high - OpenStreetMap Daly Waters locality anchor matching the museum's place field; not a collection or performance site.
Source location
SMVK 1916.01.4080

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