The Bullroarer Atlas

SG1904-001 - ethnographic attestation

Warumungu (Warramunga)

Australia - Tennant Creek district, Northern Territory - Northern Central

Restricted

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. Erhard Eylmann, Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Südaustralien (1908), Plate XXXI 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. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), p. 276, Fig. 93 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.

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

View source Open this point on the interactive map