MUS2026-226 - museum specimen
Mer bullroarer mounted on its stick
Australia - Mer (Murray Island), Eastern Islands, Torres Strait, Queensland - Oceania
Weather / fertility magic
bigo English
Source term: Bullroarer
bigo: Meriam Mir name for the bullroarer on Mer (Murray Island), recorded in the museum's own Local Term field on Haddon's accession. No literal meaning is recorded. The cognate Western Torres Strait form is bigu.
A small pear-shaped blade of brown wood, bound with fine strings of coconut fibre to a stick - not a loose slat but the whole working arrangement, blade and line and handle together. Alfred Haddon brought it back from Mer in the eastern Torres Strait, and the Cambridge record keeps the island's own word for it: bigo. Of what it was for the museum will say only that it was probably used in rainmaking. On Mer that is a reasonable thing to say. Every rain-maker there owned a doiom, a rudely carved stone man, and each was dressed for work with a small bigo hung at its neck on coconut-fibre line.
Bullroarer. Small pear shaped bullroarer of brown wood attached to stick with fine strings of coconut fibre. Probably used in rainmaking rituals.
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, catalogue description for accession Z 9702 A
- Object
- A small pear-shaped blade of brown wood, attached to a stick with fine strings of coconut fibre. The museum publishes no dimensions.
- Function
- Probably used in rain-making rituals.
- Map confidence
- high - Island-centroid anchor for Mer (Murray Island), the only locality the record gives, and the same anchor already carried by TORRES-001. No sub-island provenance is recorded.
- Source location
Page references
MAA Z 9702 A (object 484649)
- Weather magic