Gazelle: General

On the Gazelle Peninsula — heartland of the Duk-Duk and Tubuan, the masked men's societies whose spirits police New Britain village life — the bullroarer holds no such office. When Richard Parkinson catalogued the region's instruments around the turn of the twentieth century, he found the whirled slat here only in the hands of children: a plaything with no secret name, no forbidden ground, no death owed by a woman who saw it. The awe belonged to the masks; the roarer, for once, was left to the young.

Particulars

Object

Both the bullroarer and the slit-gong are in use here.

Function

On the Gazelle Peninsula the bullroarer was known only as a children's toy — unlike western New Britain and Buka, where Parkinson found it still a sacred instrument.