MUS2026-271 - museum specimen
Hackett's four Musgrave–Mann blades
South Australia - Musgrave and Mann Ranges - Central Australia
Function not recorded
Source term: Bullroarer
In the winter of 1933 Cecil Hackett went out on camels with Norman Tindale and spent two months in the Mann and Musgrave Ranges, travelling with some forty Pitjantjatjara who were moving east to a gathering at Ernabella. Four blades came back with him. The best described is pocket-sized at 15.7 centimetres, incised and pigmented, its brown cord tentatively read as wool. Géza Róheim, who worked among the Pitjantjatjara of these same ranges in 1929, recorded what a roarer is for here: put into a youth's hands at the close of circumcision, smeared with blood, with the instruction to keep it off the women's road and swing it only in thick scrub.
- Object
- Four related wooden blades in one donation; the fully indexed exemplar is a 15.7 cm incised and pigmented slat with brown wool(?) cord.
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Source
- British Museum Oc1981,15.9–12; one Cecil John Hackett donation in 1981; four twentieth-century wooden bullroarers; .12 is 15.7 × 2.7 × 0.5 cm with incised design, pigment, and brown wool(?) cord
- Source location
Page references
Oc1981,15.9; Oc1981,15.10; Oc1981,15.11; Oc1981,15.12
- Source confidence
- low Broad Musgrave–Mann Ranges anchor for a group whose records vary in geographic precision.