Two Voices

Begin with the couple, because it is the commonest form of the pair and the plainest. Alfred Howitt’s Kurnai had two bull-roarers, a big one and a little one, and they were husband and wife: the larger Tundun, “the man,” the smaller Rukut-Tundun, “the woman.” They carry the name of the ancestral being who cut the first two and named them after himself and his own wife. When the elders swing them at the Jeraeil, the boys are not shown a spirit’s emblem. They are introduced to a married couple whose two voices they have feared since childhood.

Go north to Cape York and the couple is spelled out in a single word. The Wik-Mungkan and their Wiknatara neighbours join moiya and pakapaka into moipaka, “the two bull-roarers,” and Ursula McConnel recorded them as exactly that: a bull-roarer male and a bull-roarer female, married to each other. On the upper Bian River, in the far south of New Guinea, the Marind name the broad blade ezam — at once the chief spirit, the “husband,” and the roarer that is his voice — and its narrow companion uzum, the “wife.” On the Gazelle Peninsula the Taulil cut their pair from the one kawa tree: a male uka and a female tandaravakwe, whose voice the women outside are told belongs to the Tambuan spirit.

Four peoples on two continents, and the same design: not two identical slats but a matched pair understood as a marriage. Where Grandfather and Mother asked which relative the one roarer is, the question here is the next one over — what is the relation between the two? And the answer, over and over, is the first relation there is: a man and his wife.

The deep voice and the high

Why two, and why a couple? Part of the answer is in the wood. A bull-roarer’s pitch is set by its size: a wider, longer blade shoves more air and turns more slowly, and it sounds a lower note; a small blade sings high. (The acoustics are worked out elsewhere in the atlas — the roar is an aerodynamic scream, and its pitch falls as the blade grows.) So before anyone names them, a large roarer and a small one are already two voices: a deep one and a shrill one. The pair does not have to be invented. It has only to be heard, and then assigned.

Nowhere is the hearing plainer than in the western Torres Strait. Sidney Ray’s Mabuiag vocabulary defines the two roarers of the turtle fishery by their sound alone: bigu, “a bull-roarer with a low and deep note,” against wanes, “a small bull-roarer with a shrill sound” — the large senior voice and the small junior one, and the same word bigo carried east across the strait. The Brisbane-River Turrbal split their pair the same way: Bugerum, the larger, roared louder and deeper; Wobblekum, the smaller, sang higher — a division the Yagara dictionary still preserves as bagaram, the big bull-roarer, and wabalgan, the little one. And in the forest of Lola in Guinea the Kono named the instrument for its timbre outright: gueyoumo means “the deep, muffled sound,” and the word extends to name the paired male and female personages of the rite.

Bigu — a bull-roarer with a low and deep note; wanes — a small bull-roarer with a shrill sound.— Sidney Ray’s Mabuiag vocabulary, Torres Strait

The Wiradjuri of the New South Wales rivers make the marriage and the pitch one and the same thing. At their Burbung initiation the large bull-roarer, the mudthega, is Dhurramoolan — the dreaded being of the rite, whose deep sound, “the rumbling of distant thunder,” is his voice. The small moonibear, R. H. Mathews wrote, “has a shrill sound which is easily distinguishable from the loud humming of the larger instrument,” and “the noise made by the moonibear is said to represent the voice of Dhurramoolan’s wife.” The god answers in the deep blade, his wife in the high one. The same paired instruments carry north to the Culgoa, where the larger is the wuddoolnurran and the smaller the ghidjookumbul, “used in exactly the same way.”

Set the facts side by side and the design of the pair comes clear. The physics gives you the two voices; the culture decides whose they are. Make the deep one the man and the high one his wife, and you have the Kurnai and the Wiradjuri. Make the deep one the senior instrument and the high one the novice’s, and you have the Torres Strait. The slat of wood is the same everywhere. What is added is a relationship — and a relationship needs exactly two.

Brothers, and a pair of spirits

A couple is not the only relation two voices can stage. Where the myth’s central beings are brothers, the roarer voices a brother; where the being is itself double, the roarer voices a pair. On the Sepik the Murik hear in the swung ironwood the voice of urubaia, “the lame, eldest spirit-brother” — one of a set of brothers, the senior and the crippled one, and the men’s secret society itself takes his name. Among the Marind-anim the roarer is Sosom, a dema or ancestor-spirit expressly named as the “brother of Waba” — the voiced being is one of a fraternal pair. And in the Gulf of Carpentaria the Anula put the doubling inside the being itself: the roarer’s voice is Gnabaia, whom Spencer and Gillen record as “a pair of spirits” — two that arose together in the Alcheringa — sounded in a ceremony-cycle the tribe calls kunapipi, the country of the Rainbow-Serpent Mother.

The family can widen further. The Baining of inland New Britain keep the roarer salecha in two forms, a longer and a shorter, and call the initiation masks it summons the “children of the salecha” — the pair has grown a household. Whether the two are spouses, brothers, or a parent and its young, the grammar holds: the roarer is not an it but a who, and where there are two of them, they are a who and its relation — a second who, in answer.

The rule that breaks

From Australia and the Torres Strait one rule looks universal: the large blade is the deep, senior, male voice, and the small blade the high, junior, female one. Cross to lowland South America and it turns over. Among the Kamaiurá of the Upper Xingu, Rafael Bastos recorded two paired roarers of ywyra wood, cords tied to whirling rods and played together: parapara (the larger, 83 and 75 cm) and uriwuri (the smaller, 43 and 35 cm). In each pair the larger blade — the deeper voice — is not the man. It is the female, and she is the “conductor”; the smaller male blade is the “conducted,” the one she leads. The deep voice belongs to the woman, and the woman is in charge.

This is not a stray exception to be tucked away. It is the same template — two gendered blades, split by size and pitch, played as a relation — run with the sexes reversed and the lead handed the other way. In the Kamaiurá origin story it is the twins Sun and Moon who seize the roarers and drive the women off with them; the swingers are a sibling pair, the instruments a sex pair, and the two beings of the deeper and higher voice are wife and husband with the wife conducting. The pair is the constant. Which kin owns the deep voice, and who leads, is what a culture is free to set — and the Kamaiurá set it the opposite way to Gippsland.

The pairs, counted

Laid out together, the paired roarers make a short, consistent census. The relation shifts — spouse, senior and junior, brother, a doubled spirit — but the object is always the same: two blades, graded by size, whose two voices are cast as two beings. And where a pitch contrast is stated, the deeper voice sits with the larger blade — the man, the elder, the conductor — in every case but one.

The pairing in the ground

If the paired roarer is as old and as widespread as its ethnography suggests, it ought to leave a trace where the wood cannot survive — in the durable blades that the atlas reads, on its own hypothesis, as roarers of stone and jade. And the trace is there: the earliest candidates come out of the ground in twos.

At Xibenbaoleng, in a grave of the Xinglongwa culture on the Mongolian steppe — among the oldest worked jade anywhere — a slit ring lay at the dead man’s head and two end-pierced blades lay together at his waist: a matched pair, deposited on one body. The whole jade repertoire of nearby Beifudi is just two forms, the slit ring and the bi-shaped blade — a standing two-part set, and there the blade comes not from a grave but from a dedicated sacrificial ground. Across the sea in northern Japan, the great Jōmon settlement of Sannai-Maruyama yielded two serpentinite blades of one strip-shaped class together — a larger of about seven centimetres and a smaller of four and a half — a large-and-small pair in stone. And at Chahai the same bi-shaped blade is found graded large, medium, and small, a set stepped by size exactly as a set of roarers would be.

These are jade ornaments by the published consensus, and their reading as bull-roarers is the atlas’s open question, not a settled fact. But the deposition pattern is worth stating positively, because it is genuine: the earliest end-pierced blades recur in twos and in graded sets, on one body and in one ritual precinct. Whatever these objects were, they were made and buried as pairs. The pairing, in other words, is already in the ground — waiting for the reading that would make it a pair of voices.

The pantheon made audible

Gather the pairs and the shape of the idea stands out. A single bull-roarer can be a person; two bull-roarers are a relationship. The instrument’s genius is that its pitch is a plain function of its size, so a large blade and a small one are, before any myth touches them, a deep voice and a high one — two ready-made characters. A culture has only to say who they are. Say they are a man and his wife and you have the Kurnai and the Marind; say a senior and a novice and you have the Torres Strait; say two brothers, or a doubled spirit, and you have the Sepik and the Anula; hand the deep voice to the woman and let her lead, and you have the Kamaiurá. Whatever the myth needs two of — a couple, a pair of brothers, Sun and Moon — the pair of roarers can voice.

That is why the paired roarer belongs with the atlas’s other soundings of what the instrument is rather than what it does — the kinship of its names, the physics of its scream, and the long arc by which a sacred voice slides down into a child’s toy, a rite over weather and the harvest, a voice in the whirlwind. The roarer was never only a noisemaker. In its paired form it is a small theatre of two, a way of making a relation between beings audible — the pantheon not pictured, not carved, but heard, speaking to itself in two voices over the heads of the frightened boys.