The Bullroarer Atlas

TORRES-001 - museum specimen

Meriam (Mer / Murray Island), Eastern Torres Strait

Australia - Mer (Murray Island), Eastern Islands, Torres Strait, Queensland - Melanesia

Weather / fertility magic

Line drawings of miniature bigo — flat ellipsoid discs on cords, mounted on crossed sticks for display: three used in Meriam rain-making rites...
Line drawings of miniature bigo — flat ellipsoid discs on cords, mounted on crossed sticks for display: three used in Meriam rain-making rites (left) and two bound into a turtle-ceremony frame (right). Haddon, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. IV (1912), figs. 235-236 Public domain Image source

bigo

Meriam Mir name recorded for the bullroarer on Mer (Murray Island); given on the Australian Museum catalogue cards as "bigo (DRM)", the indigenous term supplied by curator David R. Moore. The cognate Western-island (Mabuiag) form is bigu.

Etymology. Bigo is the Meriam Mir word for the bullroarer, glossed in the Cambridge expedition vocabularies as a small bull-roarer and equated with Mabuiag bigu, the deep-noted instrument of the Western Islands. On Mer, Haddon knew it chiefly from the doiom rain-makers' kit and from turtle ceremonies, and by 1898 it survived mainly as a child's toy; nothing further is recorded about the word itself. (medium confidence)

In the Eastern Torres Strait the bullroarer was an instrument of the weather. The Australian Museum holds two small wooden examples from Mer (Murray Island), each catalogued under the Meriam Mir name bigo: one a softwood slat with a black band, its braided palm-fibre cord mounted to a notched bamboo stick (25 cm long), the other a small oval blade knobbed at one end (22.5 cm). Both were "swung in rain-making rituals." They were collected on Mer for the Museum by Charles Hedley and Allan R. McCulloch in 1907, on an expedition that followed Haddon to a "locality rendered famous by Professor Haddon"; the two slats are display models, mounted to show how the cord and handle worked. Where Haddon's western islanders whirled the bigu and wanes for turtle and wind, on Mer the same kind of whirled blade was turned to calling the rain.

Mounted model of small bullroarer carved from softwood, with black band across one surface. One end has a projection with a braided palm fibre cord; the other end is attached to a bamboo stick with small cuts around its diameter. It was swung in rain-making rituals.

Florek 2005, The Torres Strait Islands Collection at the Australian Museum, Technical Reports of the Australian Museum No. 19, p. 89 (catalogue no. 160, E.17230).
Object
Two small wooden bullroarers in the Australian Museum (E.17230 and E.17231), each catalogued "BULLROARER, wood — bigo." E.17230 is a mounted model carved from softwood with a black band; one end carries a braided palm-fibre cord, the other is fixed to a notched bamboo stick (L 25 cm, W 6 cm). E.17231 is a mounted model carved as a small oval, one end with a knob and plant-fibre cord, the other fixed to a bamboo stick (L 22.5 cm, W 5.7 cm). Both are flat slats whirled on a cord.
Function
Whirled in rain-making rituals (weather magic).
Map confidence
high - Representative island-centroid anchor for Mer (Murray Island), where the Hedley-McCulloch 1907 collection was assembled and within whose catalogue section these two bullroarers fall; no sub-island provenance is recorded.
Source location
p. 89, catalogue nos. 160 (E.17230) and 161 (E.17231)

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