The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-256

Yuendumu Warlpiri ornamented blade

West of Yuendumu mission station, Northern Territory · Central Australia

Function not recorded

The Warlpiri svingtræ I.5625 from Yuendumu: a curved brown wooden blade tooled across its face with concentric rings.
Plate I. The Yuendumu svingtræ I.5625, tooled over with concentric rings. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Image source
The reverse face, split and worn, numbered I.5625.
Plate II. The reverse face, split and worn, numbered I.5625. CC BY-SA 4.0

Source term: svingtræ

Gently curved along its length and worked with ornament, this forty-six-centimetre blade left Warlpiri country west of Yuendumu in 1955. Warlpiri men also whirled the sacred board for love. Spencer and Gillen counted the Warlpiri — their ‘Walparri’ — among the peoples who swung a small churinga to win a wife: its hum was believed to carry to a far-off woman and compel her, sooner or later, to come. The charm kept the marriage law; it could call only a woman a man was entitled to marry. Warlpiri practice sorts ceremony by who may be present: the tarruku events tied to male initiation cannot be witnessed by women, though senior women know their content and their purposes.

Particulars

Object
Gently curved wooden blade worked with ornament, 46 × 6 cm.
Function
Not recorded.

Sources

  1. Nationalmuseet (National Museum of Denmark), I.5625, Jens Bjerre collection, 1955. View · archived
  2. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 541-542 (Walparri use of namatwinna-type churinga in love magic). View

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.