MUS2026-203 - museum specimen

Ngarluma / Kariyarra (Sherlock River district)

Pilbara - Western Australia

Sacred / spirit

Eighty-three centimetres of hard brown wood, zigzag bands crossing each other down more than half its length: the largest bullroarer Emile Clement took out of the Pilbara came from the Sherlock River, the seam between Ngarluma and Kariyarra country. Two smaller blades came with it from the same district, one stained red and cut with a spine of eight branching grooves, one carrying three twice-curved incisions in the shape of a U beside a figure Clement's cataloguer could only describe as resembling a swastika. All three answered to the same double name, cora or bonangharry, and Clement translated the second word as devil-scarer. The djuno was the evil spirit, and it caused every illness and every death; there was no dying of natural causes. So the blades were set roaring over a sick man while the doctor stalked him in narrowing circles, and roaring again over a corpse, and roaring through every night of the month-long circumcision camp while the men danced the una and the old women danced the hibageh. Clement never says the women were kept from seeing them.

The boonangharrie's are swung to drive the djuno away, as he is the cause of death. They do not believe in death by natural causes.

Emile Clement, "Ethnographical Notes on the Western-Australian Aborigines," Internationales Archiv fuer Ethnographie 16 (1904), p. 8

Object

Three cora from the Sherlock-district in Clement's Leiden collection. Item 147 (inv. 1207/14) is 82.6 x 5 cm, the longest of the eleven, its zigzag bands crossing each other over more than half the blade; Plate IV fig. 17. Item 143 (inv. 1207/16) is 39.5 x 4.5 cm, an elliptic slat of hard brown wood, one side convex and one flat, stained red and grooved all over, the grooves forming a median band with eight branches running out to the edges. Item 145 (inv. 1207/15) is 36.5 x 4 cm, its grooves mostly zigzag and the pattern meanderlike, the convex side carrying three twice-curved incisions that form the letter U and, beside them, 'an incised figure similar to a svastica'.

Function

Swung over the sick while the taketa circled the patient; swung at a death to drive off the djuno, held to be the cause of every death; and swung violently in the camp through the buckli circumcision gathering, roaring incessantly beside the nightly una and hibageh dances.

Map confidence

medium_high - Mouth of the Sherlock River, the named collection locality; the river itself is the Kariyarra/Ngarluma seam.

Source location

Page references

printed pp. 26-27, items 143, 145, 147; Plate IV fig. 17

• Initiation rite
• Death and rebirth

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