MUS2026-225 - museum specimen
Momba Station bullroarer with its string
Australia - Momba Station, Darling and Paroo river system, north-western New South Wales
Restricted
Source term: bullroarer
moola-uncka: carried here as a cross-reference only. Frederic Bonney published the name in 1884 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"; no gloss is given and no literal meaning is recorded. The MAA accession card for this object does not carry the term, and it is not claimed as this specimen's recorded name.
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. A published account from the same country describes the moola-uncka humming near a secluded initiate while women listened from a distance and kept clear of the sound. No local name or use is recorded for this exact blade, but it anchors that published practice in a surviving Momba object. 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
- Object
- A plain wooden blade with string attached. The museum publishes no dimensions and records no decoration or incision.
- Function
- No use is recorded on the accession. The museum adds only its standing note that bullroarers are the churinga subtype pierced for a cord and that whirling them produces a sound understood as spirit talk.
- Source
- Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, accession 1922.281. Description: "Plain, wooden bullroarer, with string attached." Place: "Oceania; New South Wales; Darling River; Momba Station". Source: "Bonney, Thomas George (Rev. Professor) [donor]; Bonney, Frederic [collector]". Material: Wood; Chronology from the page: collected by…
- Source location
Page references
MAA 1922.281 (object 492390)
- Source confidence
- medium Momba Station anchor on the northern Darling, the locality the museum records, and deliberately the same anchor already carried by BONNEY1884-001 so that Bonney's object and Bonney's published account resolve to one place. Neither a collecting spot nor a place of manufacture is recorded.
- Snake-linked