The Bullroarer Atlas

No. PNG144

Baluan Island

Papua New Guinea · Manus · Oceania · Sahul

Function not recorded

A plain, unengraved New Guinea bull-roarer blade with two holes near its rounded end.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Manus-area bullroarer from Papua New Guinea. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Image source

Baluan, the southernmost island of the Admiralty group in Manus Province, is known above all for the garamut, the slit-gong hollowed from a single log and beaten to carry messages and drive dances; the rapid, complex garamut playing of Baluan is comparatively highly developed. The bullroarer is the quieter presence: known on Baluan, but never described in use.

Particulars

Function
Not recorded.

Source

K. A. Gourlay, Sound-Producing Instruments in Traditional Society: A Study of Esoteric Instruments and Their Role in Male-Female Relations (New Guinea Research Bulletin 60; Canberra and Port Moresby, 1975), Table 1, entry 144, p. 17 and fig. 2

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