SCHMELTZ1896-002 - museum specimen
Port Moresby (cultural affiliation unrecorded)
Papua New Guinea - Port Moresby, British New Guinea - Oceania
Sacred / spirit
Papan German
Papan — the name recorded with the object; no gloss given.
Not every bullroarer was made to fly. The Papan of Port Moresby — an oval blade drawn over with curving lines that gather into a stylized animal, partly reddened — hung in the Eramo, the great house, as a luck symbol: the missionary James Chalmers, who knew the town well, sent it to Europe with that account. Whose hands carved it, the record never says. And the same page of Schmeltz's survey holds a second Port Moresby bullroarer, a child's: an elongated oval marked with two cross-bands and little fern-leaf figures, on a cord that ends not at a stick but in a loop for the finger. House emblem and plaything, from the same town, side by side.
- Object
- Two Port Moresby bullroarers on Schmeltz 1896's plate: fig. 20, the oval Papan with a terminal cord hole, ornamented with curved parallel lines forming a stylized animal, partly red-painted (Edge-Partington Album, 2nd ser., pl. 199 fig. 1); and fig. 27, an elongated oval child's bullroarer with two cross-bands and fern-leaf figures, its cord ending in a finger loop (Edge-Partington Album, 1st ser., pl. 309 fig. 6).
- Function
- Hung in the great house, the Eramo, as a luck symbol — per Chalmers' information as recorded by Schmeltz; the same town also yielded a child's bullroarer whirled from a finger loop, not a stick — spirit emblem and plaything side by side.
- Map confidence
- medium - Port Moresby; the maker community is unrecorded.
- Source location
- Schmeltz 1896, p. 108, figs 20 and 27
- Toy / secular survival