Wallaby-fur cord, whirlwind markings

Source term: Bull-Roarer

Churinga: the Arrernte word for the sacred carved slab of wood or stone, bullroarers among them.

A cord of wallaby fur still hangs from this narrow blade, thirty-two centimetres long and three wide, its wood coated in red ochre. Four evenly spaced spirals run down the front, joined by chevrons; four more run down the darker back, linked by diagonals that meet at the spirals' centres. The markings, says an old catalogue card written after the object reached the Penn Museum in 1907, represent a whirlwind — a 'whirlwing,' as the card spells it. The misspelling has outlasted almost everything else — no people, no locality finer than Central Australia, and no word about what the spirals were for.

Cord of wallaby fur markings represent whirlwing.

Penn Museum P1848, catalogue-card transcription

Particulars

Object

A narrow red-ochred wooden bullroarer, 32 by 3 cm, with a wallaby-fur cord and four linked spirals on each face; now in the Penn Museum as P1848.

Function

Not recorded.