SAC BED STICKS OB BULL-BO ABEBS. — EAMLYN-EABBIS. 
25 
SACRED STICKS OR BULL-ROARERS. 
As exemplified by specimens in the Queensland Museum Collections. 
By R. Hamlyn-Harris, D.Sc., &c. (Director). 
(Plates XII to XVII.) 
So much has been published about Bull-roarers that it is quite superfluous 
to reiterate all that has been written or even give a brief summary of their 
significance. My object here is rather to assist the student who may some day 
feel disposed to bring all our knowledge upon this subject up to date and 
incorporate it in a useful whole. I thus place on record illustrations of our 
principal bull-roarers, all, with the exception of two New Guinea specimens 
(the two last noted), coming from (Queensland, and bearing a very marked 
and general resemblance to whirlers from other parts of Australia. 
The ethnological student is constantly made to realise that the various 
divisions of Australia into States are only arbitrary, and have nothing whatever 
to do with the distribution of tribes, clans, &c., since the natives knew no bounds 
except the bounds produced by distance and by inability to cover the enormous 
•distances on foot. 
Even the most casual glance at the plates (Nos. XII to XVI) will convince 
the reader of this ; indeed, so remarkably similar are some of them ( see Plate XII, 
fig. 1) to the wooden Churingas described by Spencer and Gillen, # that one might 
almost suppose the Queensland specimens to have come from the same localities. 
Bull-rearers are universal throughout Queensland. The belief in them as 
sacred objects seems to have been comparatively simple, though as objects of 
tabu to women, children, and perhaps to the uninitiated they have ever been 
regarded as mysteries calculated to give their owners, using them, increased power 
and privilege. 
t Dr. Both, speaking of North-West- Central Queensland, tells us that 
the smaller whirring boards of about 4 inches in length and no gravings on 
them, sometimes red-ochred, are used as toys or playthings indiscriminately by 
either sex and at any age. 
The graved and larger varieties of about 8 inches are used in the 
initiation ceremonies, and in the Yaroinga tribes of Queensland are put to the 
special use of love-charms. 
* Spencer & Gillen: The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899, chap, v.; also Across 
Australia, 1912, vol. 1, p. 208. 
t W. E. Both : Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland 
Aborigines, p. 129, Brisbane, 1897. 
