The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG97 - ethnographic attestation

Orokolo

Papua New Guinea - Gulf - Oceania - Sahul

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An Orokolo bull-roarer.
An Orokolo bull-roarer. · Public domain Image source
An Orokolo hevehe-cycle bullroarer of the late nineteenth century, incised and painted, nearly a metre long.
An Orokolo hevehe-cycle bullroarer of the late nineteenth century, incised and painted, nearly a metre long. Image source
Orokolo bull-roarer with a crocodile carved between white zig-zag borders, bought from James Hooper in 1933 (Pitt Rivers Museum 1933.81.7).
Orokolo bull-roarer with a crocodile carved between white zig-zag borders, bought from James Hooper in 1933 (Pitt Rivers Museum 1933.81.7). Image source
One of Blackwood's three ipura imunu, wrapped together in palm spathe at Orokolo Bay, 1937 (PRM 1938.36.300).
One of Blackwood's three ipura imunu, wrapped together in palm spathe at Orokolo Bay, 1937 (PRM 1938.36.300). Image source
Second of Blackwood's trio: a crocodile stretched across the white cross-hatched field, notched teeth at the cord end (PRM 1938.36.301).
Second of Blackwood's trio: a crocodile stretched across the white cross-hatched field, notched teeth at the cord end (PRM 1938.36.301). Image source
Third of the trio: two round-faced figures flank a central eye, the butt cut into gripping teeth (PRM 1938.36.302).
Third of the trio: two round-faced figures flank a central eye, the butt cut into gripping teeth (PRM 1938.36.302). Image source

hevehe / hurava Elema (Orokolo), Papuan Gulf

Source term: hevehe

hevehe names the whole secret cycle, masks and roarers alike; the roarer itself is tiparu (Holmes 1902), the common Papuan Gulf name — Holmes's Plate XLI figures the most valued tiparu of the Moreaipi at Orokolo, carved with the ancestor pair Iva and Ukaipu Williams 1936b: the roarer specifically is be'ure hevehe, 'ground-hevehe' (bea-ure: under the ground); in Keuru and Opau hevehe is the ordinary word for 'snake', and Williams judges snake 'probably an original' meaning of the whole word-family (Orokolo's own snake word being ekaroa). kaiavuru: the generic Elema class-term for bullroarers (Marcuse 1964 after Williams, Bull-roarers in the Papuan Gulf, 1936 — bib. 201, resolved); hevehe is the Orokolo type-name, hurava a second Orokolo name from the same source, and Marcuse's 'Hevoa' is likely a hevehe variant.

Etymology. Hevehe is the common Papuan Gulf and Elema word for the bull-roarer. The term also names the cult's sea-monsters (ma-hevehe, "water hevehe"), the masks built to impersonate them (apa-hevehe, "drum hevehe"), and, among the Keum and Opau, "snake." (medium confidence)

Among the Elema of Orokolo, on the Papuan Gulf, the swung bull-roarer carried the voices of the ancestral spirits and warned women and the uninitiated to hide from the sacred procession; it was kept inside the great men's ceremonial houses, the eravo, some thirty metres long, and belonged to the same secret cycle as the towering hevehe and the conical kovave masks. The missionary J. H. Holmes, recording the same cycle in 1902, spelled out the stakes: to let the women know that the whining of the bull-roarers was "not the cry of a god but the work of a man" brought down the curse of tiparu, "equivalent to death." Twenty years on, in In Primitive New Guinea, Holmes finally set down the origin legend the Ipi elders told him. The first tiparu lay inside the body of Oalea, a cannibal god of Yule Island who had devoured his own daughter's child; when the sorceress Oripeu came to demand her slain sons, Oalea surrendered his own stomach and died, and inside it were found the eaten child, a bag, an arm-shell and the first bull-roarer — the secret of his power. His daughter Aviaru claimed it for the women, who masked themselves and whirled it at a feast to drive the men off; but the chief Jeai knew them — "only women swing their buttocks in that fashion when they dance" — and the men rushed them and took it, and Oripeu laid the taboo under which no woman has seen it since. Oalea's stolen flesh melted away in the creeks and became the first oaia fish. Williams also records the Koraguba story in which Uravu, an old woman, made the first bull-roarer. Williams heard the same monster-slaying story as Arihava and Orokolo's own — one of seven bull-roarer origin myths the two villages told him, women first in most: in one a woman bears the first bull-roarer outright, 'a thing of mere bones' that cried with a roarer's voice instead of a baby's; in another the old woman Orohahape fetches it up from her underground village. To the women listening outside, the unseen roarers were creatures — at Orokolo snakes and lizards 'from obo, the great carpet snake, downwards' — and the men liked to pretend they made the snakes howl by tickling their tails with a stick. Williams thought the word hevehe itself originally meant nothing more than 'snake,' and the two oldest relic bull-roarers, kept wrapped and polished at Muru, were said to have travelled there crookedly along the ground like snakes, carving the bed of Kiravi Creek as they went. In 1919 an old man named Evara, in a village near the Vailala River, fell into trances and prophesied that a steamer would bring back the ancestors and a cargo of European goods, setting off what became known as the Vailala Madness: the ancestors, he said, demanded that the old ceremonies be abandoned. In the eastern Orokolo villages bull-roarers and masks were dragged out of the men's houses and burned in front of the women and uninitiated boys from whom they had always been hidden. The government anthropologist F.E. Williams, who chronicled the movement and later wrote Drama of Orokolo, argued for the old ceremonies' preservation and worked to keep officialdom from completing their suppression.

Attached to a long string on the end of a stick and swung round the head, giving forth a loud humming sound, sounded to warn the women and children to 'clear' before a dance.

R. Hamlyn-Harris, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum II (1913), p. 38, on Queensland Museum E.13/219; cf. Williams, The Drama of Orokolo (1940), pp. 158-159, 204.
Object
Orokolo bullroarers include a plain RMCA wooden specimen and British Museum Oc1951,07.10, a Moreaipi/Elema board carved in relief with the ancestor pair Ivo and Ukaipu. Pitt Rivers holds exact Orokolo specimens: Hooper's 1933.81.7 (69 x 11 cm, crocodile relief) and Blackwood's 1937 trio 1938.36.300-302 (62-66 cm, ipura imunu), collected wrapped together in palm spathe.
Function
Orokolo bull-roarer sounded as ancestral-spirit voice; used to clear women and children from processions; source also records Uravu, an old woman, making the first bull-roarer.
Map confidence
medium - alias_area
Source location
Page references

Gourlay Table 1, row 97; Williams 1940b pp.158-159, 204; RMCA MO.1965.64.12; Hamlyn-Harris 1913, p. 38, pl. XVII fig. 1

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