The Yeenma Isogloss

From the Bight to the Murchison

An isogloss is normally drawn as an edge: people on one side of the line say a word that people on the other side do not. The yeenma line is drawn instead through the middle of the country it crosses. It runs from Eucla on the Great Australian Bight, inland through the eastern Goldfields, up the western lip of the Western Desert, and out onto the Murchison at the Sanford River — 1,350 kilometres from end to end, measured between the two furthest speaker-places Bates recorded.

On the map below, the dark-red disc at Southern Cross is the one place where Bates equates yinma directly with “bullroarer.” The open rings are the places where the same word names the long sacred board that the roarer belongs beside. The two grey squares are the districts where the roarer answers to something else entirely.

Where yeenma is recorded

Eight speakers in eight places gave Bates the word: Karnduing at Eucla; Beedee, Bailberin and Gweea at Karratjibbin near Southern Cross; Thuradha north-east of Laverton; Jinguru at Lake Way; Bilbil in the Peak Hill district; Wajida of Waianwonga; Karreedee and Bindaweeree at Weld Range; and Kondebomur at the Sanford River.

Swipe sideways to see all three columns.

Karratjibbin, between Southern Cross and Mount Jackson

Beedee, Bailberin — Billy Wilson — and Gweea, also called Minalla, worked through Bates’s vocabulary at Karratjibbin, and their folio does the whole job in three entries. “Bullroarer | Yinma.” “Sacred Totem board long | Goondain, Yeenma.” “Sacred Totem board small short | Jilberee, yeenma.” The same folio carries vocabularies from Norseman, 250 kilometres south-east, where the entry reads “Bullroarer = Yinma” again. A photograph caption in Bates’s papers at the State Library of Western Australia records the object itself: “Stone yeenma, bullroarer from Southern Cross district.”

So in this country the word runs across the whole class: the whirled slat, the long board, the short board, wood and stone. Bates elsewhere equated these boards with Spencer’s churinga, and the physical grounds for the equation are visible in any of them — flat, pointed at the ends, incised on one face, pierced at one end for a cord. Yeenma can name the bullroarer at Southern Cross because at Southern Cross the bullroarer is one of the sacred boards.

The board, the blade and the novice

What the word carries with it, from one end of the corridor to the other, is a rite. At Eucla the yinma bears the eaglehawk’s heart and belly — kurdudu and mugula in Karnduing’s telling. At Thuradha, north-east of Laverton, the yeenma is a sacred board pushed through the novice’s mouth and down into his stomach, and Bates’s note on it is flat: it must not be seen or touched by women or uninitiated men. At the Sanford River the yeenma is shown to the boy after he is made a man, drawn across his breast, and afterwards given into his keeping; the women cover their faces while it passes, and only the old women may look.

Beside that board, in the northern half of the corridor, stands a second object with a name of its own. Wajida of Waianwonga gives Mirudi for the bullroarer and Yinma for the long narrow board pointed at both ends. Bilbil in the Peak Hill district gives Meerudi, “magic board (bullroarer),” and Yeenma for the long board carved with totem markings, along with Jewurarra for the wood the yeenmee were made from. Kondebomur gives Mirroodee for the bullroarer and Yeenma, or Eemerree, for the board revealed after initiation. At Weld Range the small bullroarer is Nyanēr’se and the large board Eemarree.

That is the shape of the borrowing. A word taken up loosely for a noisemaker would attach to the thing that makes the noise. Here the borrowed word settles one level up, on the class of boards the roarer belongs to, while the roarer itself keeps whatever the local language already called it. The whole two-part kit moved: a long incised board hidden from women and novices, a smaller sounding blade beside it, a revelation at man-making, and a place in the sky.

Inma on the Western Desert margin

The word did not stop at the object. Bates’s “Central Districts” compilation folds three English glosses into inma — totem object, totem ceremony, totem songs — and lists inma among “all sacred boards — bullroarers, etc.” The same pages use it for a carved sacred board, for dances, and for the cleared ground a performance is held on. In Western Desert communities today inma is still song and ceremonial performance: an Australian Government account of an Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara language project describes children’s inma as “stories sung and danced.”

That spread is what a borrowed word looks like at the receiving end. It arrives with the board, and in the language that takes it in it widens to cover the ceremony the board belongs to, the songs sung over it, and the ground it is shown on. Jinguru at Lake Way, well inside the Western Desert network, still gives the older, narrower sense first: “Inma, yinma | Long carved sacred stick.”

And it is the pairing, not the syllables, that settles the matter. A long incised board with a separately named roarer beside it, revealed to a novice at man-making and answered by a dark shape in the Milky Way, is not a thing reconstructible for a Pama-Nyungan ancestor; it is an institution with parts, and it rides with the object. Where the object went, so did its name — from Eucla to the Sanford River, through Mirniny, Ngadju, Wati and Kartu speech.

Eucla and Weld Range look into the same dark spot

Bates’s Eucla star list names the dark patch in the Milky Way — the Coalsack — as the shadow of the sacred long Yinma. Karnduing’s vocabulary from the same country explains the markings on that board: they are the heart and belly of the eaglehawk. In the star myth Bates took from the Willilambi people near Twilight Cove in 1924 the two accounts join: the old men, having killed the eaglehawk Walja who had been taking their boys, cut his heart, ribs, stomach, entrails and tail into the long yeenma boards, and made boorbing bullroarers from the same hardwood, which was moodiji — forbidden to the eaglehawk people and reserved to the hardwood totem.

Some 1,100 kilometres away at Weld Range, Karreedee and Bindaweeree gave Bates the dark spot in the Milky Way as a sacred board too: Yeemeree, also eendeeree, with the main vocabulary adding yeemerree, yeenma. On the ground that district keeps the small bullroarer apart from the large Eemarree; in the sky it is the large board that appears. Two peoples at opposite ends of the corridor, in different languages, look into the same hole in the Milky Way and see the same class of board.

A traded object can carry its name and nothing else. A shared sky-placement is heavier freight: someone had to be told what the board is and what stands for it overhead. The Coalsack reading travels a third time north of the corridor, among Kaberry’s Lunga informants in the Kimberley, for whom the dark patch simply is the bullroarer and Orion’s belt the stick the bird Batiaga threw after it when it broke off the string.

Mirniny at Norseman, Wati at Thuradha, Kartu on the Murchison

The Karratjibbin folio is headed as a Mirniny vocabulary, and that heading is itself the corridor working. Mirniny is the language of the Bight coast, nine hundred kilometres east of Southern Cross — and Sue Hanson’s 2013 report on the South West Goldfields languages places West Mirniny, or Marlpa, inland around Norseman, precisely where the same folio’s “Bullroarer = Yinma” was taken down. Hanson describes pre-contact speech here as language webs rather than the hard-edged territories of later administrative maps, with the Goldfields tongues facing both toward the Wati chain of the Western Desert and toward Wadjuk in the south-west. The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages recovers a Ngadju–Mirniny–Nyungar grouping in the same country.

Across that web the word crosses real linguistic ground. It begins in Mirniny on the Bight; it is taken down in the Goldfields at Karratjibbin and Norseman; it reaches Thuradha and Lake Way, which the Oxford Guide places in the Wati network of the Western Desert; and it ends among the Kartu languages of the Murchison, Wajarri country, at Weld Range and the Sanford River. Tim McCabe, reporting on the Noongar dialect bloc for the Single Noongar Claim, used Bates’s Southern Cross vocabulary as his illustration of a wordlist that is not Noongar, and his map puts Ngadju and its neighbours outside the Noongar enclosure. The corridor stops short of the Noongar southwest; its western end is Kartu country on the Murchison.

At Duketon the roarer has another name

Duketon sits between Laverton and Lake Way, in the middle of the run, and Bates’s vocabulary from there gives “Bullroarer | ulleeree, nganeeree.” No yeenma. What Duketon does give is the two-part kit a third time: Kenneth Young’s Duketon note keeps the large sacred board, Milyabil, apart from the small bullroarer board. The same division that pairs Yeenma with Meerudi at Peak Hill and Yeenma with Mirroodee on the Sanford River is in force at Duketon under wholly local names — which is the institution arriving intact and the vocabulary staying home.

Five hundred kilometres north-west of Weld Range, at the mouth of the Gascoyne, the same kind of blade was catalogued in 1886 under a third name again, Mooryumkarr, glossed “spirit-chaser.” Between Southern Cross, where yinma is the roarer, and the Murchison, where the roarer is mirudi and yeenma is the board beside it, the lexical arrangement is reorganised locally at every stop. The ceremonial technology is not.

Wanderwörter

Historical linguists have a name for words that travel this far: Wanderwörter. Comparing Australia with the Americas, Hannah Haynie, Claire Bowern, Patience Epps, Jane Hill and Patrick McConvell found that the terms most prone to long-distance borrowing are exactly these — material culture, technologies, ritual objects, the vocabulary of things that change hands. The mechanism is plain: a new or prestigious object arrives inside a transaction, and the people receiving it learn what it is called in the same hour they learn how it is made, who may see it, and what is sung over it.

Yeenma behaves that way in every particular. The phonetic shell moves within the range an early English ear and typewriter could hold — yinma, yeenma, inma, eemarree, yeemeree. The referent shifts between the whirled blade, the long board, the carved stick, the ceremony and the song. What does not shift is the company the word keeps: initiation, restricted sight, revelation to a novice, patterned carving, paired boards, a place in the Coalsack.

The word and the board occupy the same corridor across four speech worlds. Which end sent it is a smaller question than that it moved.

The Murchison end of the line

Follow the word back through the eight vocabularies. At Karratjibbin the roarer is Yinma and the boards, long and short, are Yeenma. At Eucla the yinma is cut with the eaglehawk’s heart and belly and answered by the Coalsack. At Thuradha it goes into the novice’s mouth and is kept from women and uninitiated men. At Lake Way and Peak Hill it is the long carved stick, with Meerudi beside it. At Weld Range it is the large board and again the dark spot in the Milky Way. At the Sanford River it is drawn across a new-made man’s breast and then handed to him for good.

Where the word does not reach, the object does. Duketon calls the roarer ulleeree and nganeeree and still keeps Milyabil, the large board, apart from the small one; the Gascoyne calls it Mooryumkarr, the spirit-chaser. Between them and Southern Cross lie eight speaker-places in which the borrowed name and the borrowed institution arrive together — Mirniny on the Bight, Ngadju and its Goldfields neighbours, Wati on the desert margin, Kartu on the Murchison — over 1,350 kilometres of country.

One word for the bullroarer, yeenma, was borrowed from language to language across some 1,350 kilometres of Western Australia, from the Bight to the Murchison, and it carried the object, the initiation and the sky-story with it.