MUS2026-352 - museum specimen
Wallaby-fur cord, whirlwind markings
Central Australia - historic South Australia attribution - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: Bull-Roarer
Churinga: museum-supplied native name; collector's alternate 'peeta' is flagged by Penn as incorrect.
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. An old catalogue card, written after the object reached the Penn Museum in 1907, reads: 'Cord of wallaby fur markings represent whirlwing.' 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
- 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.
- Source
- Penn Museum P1848; gift of J. T. Huston, 1907; late colonial period attribution
- Source location
Page references
exact object page and catalogue-card transcription
- Source confidence
- low Deliberately broad Central Australia anchor; museum's South Australia attribution is historical and no people/locality is recorded.