MUS2026-204 - museum specimen

Table-land, inland Pilbara (people not recorded)

Pilbara - Western Australia

Sacred / spirit

A short zigzag-cut blade, thirty-five centimetres long and pierced at one end for its cord, labelled only "Table-land" — somewhere up on the Pilbara plateau, and Clement never wrote down where. What it was for he did write down. The cora was the devil-scarer: the djuno caused every illness and every death, and the answer was to make a noise at it. Blades like this one were set going over a sick man while the doctor circled him and finally pounced, rubbing the sore place, then putting his mouth to it and drawing out one or two semi-transparent pebbles the size of a hen's egg, which he carried off and buried in the sand. They were swung again over the dead. And at the circumcision camp, when the boys were seized and their arms bound to their bodies with human-hair string, the blades were swung violently in the camp to keep the djuno out of it.

the "boonangharries" or "Devil-scarers" are violently swung in the camp, to keep the "djuno", or Evil-spirit away.

Emile Clement, "Ethnographical Notes on the Western-Australian Aborigines," Internationales Archiv fuer Ethnographie 16 (1904), p. 10

Object

Item 144 (inv. 1207/17), 35.5 x 4.5 cm. An elliptic slat of hard brown wood like item 143, one side convex and one flat, but with the ornament pattern less visible and most of the grooves zigzag-shaped. Pierced at one end.

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

low - Broad Hamersley Range tableland centroid; a regional gesture, not a located point.

Source location

printed p. 26, item 144

• Initiation rite
• Death and rebirth

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