The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-222 - museum specimen

Charlotte Waters emu churinga

Australia - Charlotte Waters and Hermannsburg, Northern Territory (both places named in the museum's locality string) - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

Arandic comparison: an Aranda churinga from the Baldwin Spencer collection, not MAA E 1909.933.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Arandic comparison: an Aranda churinga from the Baldwin Spencer collection, not MAA E 1909.933. Image source

Ilia; Namatuma English

Source term: Emu churinga or bullroarer

Ilia and Namatuma: two local terms recorded together on the MAA record for this one blade, in the Local Term field and without translation. The museum supplies no gloss for either and no published Arandic vocabulary has been matched to them here; both are carried as the record gives them.

A wooden blade cut over with the design of a totemic ancestor, an emu, and pierced at one end so a cord could be knotted through it. It came from somewhere between Charlotte Waters and Hermannsburg in the southern Northern Territory in 1908, and reached Cambridge the following year. What the record preserves that few do is the object's own names: Ilia, and Namatuma. Two words for one blade, set down without translation, and no one since has published what either of them means.

Emu churinga or bullroarer, inscribed with designs representing a totemic ancestor. Hole in end.

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, catalogue description for accession E 1909.933
Object
A wooden blade inscribed with designs representing a totemic ancestor, with a hole in one end for the attachment of a cord.
Function
The museum records the object as a churinga inscribed with sacred designs and notes that wooden examples pierced at one end for a cord produce their characteristic sound when whirled; the designs are recorded as not to be seen by uninitiated people.
Map confidence
medium - Charlotte Waters telegraph station, southern Northern Territory, the first of the two localities in the museum's place string and the same anchor already carried by AUSMAIN-023. The record also names Hermannsburg, some 300 km to the north-west, and does not say which of the two is the collecting place.
Source location
Page references

MAA E 1909.933 (object 492195)

View source Open this point on the interactive map