Upper Watut bark-fibre bullroarer

Source term: Bullroarer

Blade and cord usually part company long before a bullroarer reaches a museum shelf. This one never did: twenty-three centimetres of Anga wood from the Upper Watut, still rigged with the bark-fibre line that made it speak. The string is the cheap, perishable, replaceable half of the instrument and the half that almost never survives — and without it a bullroarer is only a shaped board. Beatrice Blackwood, who lived on the Upper Watut in 1936-37, wrote down what the string was for. In the Anga myth of the first men a man hears the bullroarer cry, goes and gets one and swings it; a woman comes close and he sends her away. The women do not know about the bullroarer; they must not see it, and if they do they will die; the men hide it in the bush, and it sounds in the bush. When that part of the story was told, the women sitting within earshot were sent away.

Particulars

Object

An Anga wooden bullroarer, 230 × 45 mm, still strung with its bark-fibre cord.

Function

Among the Anga of the Upper Watut the bullroarer was hidden in the bush and sounded there, and it was said that a woman who saw one would die.