Momba Station bullroarer with its string

Source term: bullroarer

moola-uncka: Frederic Bonney's 1884 name for the Bungyarlee and Parkungi bullroarer of the River Darling, "a flat and oval-shaped piece of hard wood tied to the end of a long piece of twine".

A plain wooden blade, undecorated, with its string still knotted on, survives from Momba Station on the northern Darling, gathered sometime between 1865 and 1881 and reaching Cambridge in 1922. Here the moola-uncka hummed near a secluded initiate while women listened from a distance and kept clear of the sound. The country this blade came out of is the Kurlawirra's. Frederic Bonney's own papers record the ancestor — a snake who became a man — filling a kangaroo-skin waterbag with the water of Peri Lake and the ngatyi together and letting them out again at the head of the Darling, and in George Dutton's telling of the same journey the water is mustered into that bag with a little bullroarer swung at the waterholes.

Plain, wooden bullroarer, with string attached.

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, catalogue description for accession 1922.281

Particulars

Object

A plain wooden blade with string attached.

Function

Not recorded.