One of the Oldest Sound Making Instruments Known

The bullroarer, a flat blade of wood or stone attached to a cord and whirled through the air to produce a distinctive low roaring or humming sound, is among the oldest attested sound producing instruments in the archaeological record, with examples identified at sites many thousands of years old and independent, unrelated traditions of use documented across Aboriginal Australia, the Americas, Africa, and ancient Greece, where it appears in connection with mystery cult ritual.

Berndt and Berndt's survey of Aboriginal Australian traditional life situates the bullroarer among the instruments whose sound carries deep ceremonial significance across many, though by no means all, Aboriginal language groups and regions, without describing the specific ceremonies in which it is used, since that ceremonial content belongs to restricted, gender and initiation specific knowledge that is not appropriate to detail outside the communities that hold it. This entry accordingly describes the object and its documented cross cultural distribution rather than any specific ceremony, consistent with the closed and protected status the instrument holds within the Aboriginal Australian traditions from which its most extensively documented ritual use is known.