MUS2026-243 - museum specimen
Tempe Downs churinga ilkinia
Australia - Tempe Downs - Northern Territory
Function not recorded
Churinga ilkinia
Source term: bull-roarer
churinga ilkinia: churinga is an Arrernte term for something sacred or secret, applied both to an object and to the quality it possesses; ilkinia are the sacred designs emblematic of the different totems.
Churinga names a thing and a quality at once: something sacred, something secret. The ilkinia are the design series that belong to a totem, so the name points at the marking as much as at the board. Among the Arrernte such boards were kept out of the camp in an ertnatulunga, a storehouse no woman dared pry into at risk of death. One of them lay beside the only gap through the ranges south of Alice Springs, and rather than walk through it a woman climbed the steep declivities well to one side.
- Object
- Red-ochred wooden board, 44 × 7 cm, terminally perforated and etched on both faces; old card says Kangaroo totem.
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Source
- historic Arrernte/Tempe Downs attribution; J. T. Huston gift, 1907 register
- Source location
- P1855
- Source confidence
- medium Tempe Downs regional anchor; exact collecting spot absent.