The Bullroarer Atlas

SG1904-001 - ethnographic attestation

Warumungu Tennant Creek murtu-murtu initiation bullroarer

Tennant Creek district, Northern Territory - Central Australia

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Eylmann 1908 Plate XXXI in full. Figures 7 and 8 are Warumungu bullroarers; one remains inside its bast-fibre case.
Eylmann 1908 Plate XXXI in full. Figures 7 and 8 are Warumungu bullroarers; one remains inside its bast-fibre case. · Public domain Image source
Spencer and Gillen’s Fig. 93, a wooden churinga owned by a Warumungu man who said he had received it from a Kaitish man.
Spencer and Gillen’s Fig. 93, a wooden churinga owned by a Warumungu man who said he had received it from a Kaitish man. · Public domain Image source

murtu-murtu English

Source term: murtu-murtu / churinga

murtu-murtu: Warumungu name for the wooden churinga/bullroarer and for the ancestral spirit in its origin account.

At dawn, after hours of ceremony and ancestral songs, the exhausted novice heard the murtu-murtu roar behind him and was “too frightened to do anything.” Men pinned him across two bodies, pressed a fur-string tassel into his mouth, and circumcised him with a stone knife; his blood was caught in a shield and taken to his mother to drink. The following night his father revealed the marked wooden instrument by firelight. The youth carried it through a full moon of secluded healing, under threat of death if any woman or child saw it, while men bit his scalp and chin to make his hair grow. Its origin story is equally savage: wild dogs tore the ancestor Murtu-Murtu apart; his flying flesh roared through the air and became the Grevillea trees from which the instruments were cut. The ceremonial world around it was ruled by snakes: Spencer and Gillen record that in Warramunga myth the snake ancestors themselves possessed churinga and swung them as bull-roarers, and the tribe's most elaborate ceremonies honoured the Wollunqua, the giant mythic water-snake regarded as the father of all snakes.

too frightened to do anything

Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), p. 351
Object
Marked wooden murtu-murtu, cut from Grevillea and revealed to the novice after circumcision. A museum specimen from the Tennant Creek district survives in Stockholm (SMVK 1916.01.4084): a slender 21.6 cm blade carved with circles and stripes on both faces, its dark plant-fibre cord 184 cm long.
Function
Roared immediately before circumcision, revealed by firelight afterward, then carried throughout a month of secluded healing.
Map confidence
high - Tennant Creek, core Warumungu country; not a mythic or ceremony coordinate.
Source location
Page references

pp. 275-276, 351-353, 434-435, 500-501; Fig. 93 | Eylmann 1908 Plate XXXI figs. 7-8

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