Huon Gulf balum

The swallowing is made tangible. A long initiation lodge can become the creature’s body, high at the head and tapering toward the back, with great eyes above the entrance. Women are told it has eaten their sons, and pigs must be supplied to secure their release. The bullroarers sounding out of sight make its presence audible. Circumcision and seclusion occupy the time inside the body; the returning novices carry the wound that is explained as the creature’s bite. ^{5, 1}

Finschhafen · Bukawa / Yabim · Huon Gulf (General)

The same passage admits different enactments. Kai boys file beneath a scaffold where a man imitates swallowing and spurts water over each novice. Tami candidates pass a row of men swinging bullroarers above their heads. Inland among the Burum-Mindik, esöŋ names an ancestral cult, circumcision, the ancestral spirit and the instrument; the dictionary’s example has the spirit swallowing the boys. The shared action survives changes of language, apparatus and setting. ^{5, 6, 7, 8}

Kai · Tami · Burum-Mindik (Somba-Siawari)

On Umboi, related masked rites drew the boundary differently. Bamler’s Tami informants described the bullroarer there as the spirit’s “tongue,” still honoured as a master but no longer hidden from women. The closest female relatives of boys undergoing circumcision were said to attend the operation and see the instrument. The wooden mask represented kani. A spirit’s voice and an initiation setting could persist while the rule about who saw the blade changed. ⁷

Umboi Island

A Bukaua ruling blade remembers an individual. Its name joins the dead man’s name to lanqua, “the Old One.” At Uwaung, Wabo lanqua hangs askew on its cord and gives a rasping sound, because Wabo’s mutilated nose had made his speech indistinct. Gumba lanqua has two humps cut into its sides for Gumba’s prominent hipbones. These are portraits made to move and speak, preserving peculiarities people knew in life. ¹

Bukaua (Bukawa), Huon Gulf

The ancestral company has ranks. Below the ruling instruments are ngasengomi, the serving ones, also named for dead people but important chiefly to their descendants. A separate small class, auwi lanqua, speaks for the ruling ancestors’ wives. Its brighter pitch answers their brighter voices. The wood gives audible form to a community of the dead with its own relations and distinctions. ¹

Bukaua (Bukawa), Huon Gulf · Bukawa / Yabim · Gawac

Bukaua carvers could read a program of secrecy in the ornament. A small sea-snake and a beetle grub warned against eating those foods. A butterfly carried the balum’s message landward and seaward; a scorpion threatened the unseen sting. A spirit holding fire exposed whoever betrayed the secret, while a spiny pandanus leaf warned people to keep their distance. Lehner understood the recurring eye of the abo fruit as a sign of growth: once broken from its stalk the fruit becomes strong and seed-bearing, as circumcision separates the boys from their former condition. ¹

Bukaua (Bukawa), Huon Gulf

The first instrument repeatedly begins with a woman splitting firewood. In Lehner’s Bukaua telling, a lance-shaped chip flies off humming. The woman tells her husband; he ties wood to a cord and reproduces the sound. The men decide to keep it by killing her, and compensate him with another wife. In the Kai account, a woman near Laugube shares the discovery with her brother. He wants a great pig feast at the women’s expense; she herself tells him to kill her so the men can keep their secret. ^{1, 6}

Bukawa / Yabim · Kai

Bamler records two entrances to the Tami story. The mainland telling places the whirring splinter on the Boang islands by Nassau Bay. On Tami, the woman finds the instrument already finished, its string attached, among washed-up driftwood. She brings it to her husband; the men agree to spell her to death and replace her. The versions converge on the present ownership rule, while preserving a revealing difference: one discovers a sound, the other receives an instrument from elsewhere. ⁷

Tami

The ruling Bukaua ancestor’s name is also a cry the living use: in war, pig-netting, pig markets and girls’ consecration. It marks allegiance as well as memory. Among the Yabim, men name the dead while twirling the instruments so that taro grows. A voice that orders the initiation ground can order other parts of community life, calling an ancestor into food production or a living group into common action. ^{1, 3}

Bukaua (Bukawa), Huon Gulf · Bukawa / Yabim

On the gulf’s southern coast, Siboma gives that public force another institutional form. Bolomana is both the Numbami bullroarer and the ritual through which community sanctions are enforced. It has an enclosure, dagalawa, a word, kuma, for offence and offender, and four instrument groups in fixed precedence: wosa, bamo, yagowi and asoli. This is a locally named arrangement of the same central resources—guarded sound, ranked custodians and collective authority—without making every Huon community tell the same monster’s story. ⁴

Numbami (Siboma)