STANNER1959-001 - ethnographic attestation
Nanggumiri (Nangiomeri)
Australia - Flora River - central Daly River, Northern Territory - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Karwadi English
Source term: bullroarer / Karwadi
Karwadi: the name by which the bullroarer, the symbol of the All-Mother, had long been known on the Daly River; also the local name of the cult the young Nanggumiri brought back from Victoria River country.
In the 1920s the people of the Daly River became convinced that Angamunggi the All-Father — their form of the Rainbow Serpent — had deserted them. Barren women, spreading sickness, dwindling game: proof, people said, that he no longer looked after them; Stanner was told simply that Angamunggi had “gone away.” Into that vacancy came Kunabibi, the All-Mother, whose cult arrived, Stanner wrote, “at a beautifully appropriate time.” On the Daly it took the form of the cult of Karwadi — the name by which the bullroarer, symbol of the All-Mother, had been known even in the days of the All-Father. Young Nanggumiri men carried the rites home from Victoria River country: a secret wisdom, a power, and a dream shared by no one else on the river. One of the three men at its heart was Durmugam. In 1978 Stanner returned to Peppimenarti with three bullroarers collected in the 1930s — one of them Durmugam’s own gift — so they could serve again in a Punj ceremony.
It was this that the young Nangiomeri brought back from the Victoria — a secret wisdom, a power, and a dream shared by no one else on the Daly River.
Stanner, 'Durmugam: A Nangiomeri' (1959), in White Man Got No Dreaming (1979), p. 84
- Object
- The Karwadi bullroarer, symbol of the All-Mother; no Nanggumiri specimen is figured. The exact object trail is the three 1930s bullroarers Stanner returned at Peppimenarti in 1978, one originally given to him by Durmugam.
- Function
- Karwadi, the name of the All-Mother's bullroarer, named the secret cult that young Nanggumiri men brought back from Victoria River country in the 1920s.
- Map confidence
- high - South Australian Museum (Tindale) Nanggumiri tribal-area reference coordinate 131deg20'E x 14deg40'S ('South of central Daly River; along Flora River to its junction with Daly River'); not a ceremony site.
- Source location
- p. 84 (White Man Got No Dreaming, 1979 printing); On Aboriginal Religion 2014 introduction p. xxxiii
- Women-linked