Author Description

As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains of Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of grey-blue gum trees, heoccasionally hears a singular sound. Beginning low, with a kind of sharp tonethrilling through a whirring noise, it grows louder and louder, till it becomes a sortof fluttering windy roar. If the traveller be a new comer, he is probably puzzled tothe last degree. If he be an Englishman, country-bred, he says to himself, 'Why, thatis the bull-roarer.' If he knows the colony and the ways of the natives, he knowsthat the blacks are celebrating their tribal mysteries. The roaring noise is made towarn all women to keep out of the way. Just as Pentheus was killed (with theapproval of Theocritus) because he profaned the rites of the women-worshippersof Dionysus, so, among the Australian blacks, men must, at their peril, keep out ofthe way of female, and women out of the way of male, celebrations.The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain afar is atoy familiar to English country lads. They call it the bull-roarer. The common bullroarer is an inexpensive toy which anyone can make. I do not, however, recommend it to families, for two reasons. In the first place, it produces a mosthorrible and unexampled din, which endears it to the very young, but renders itdetested by persons of mature age. In the second place, the character of the toy issuch that it will almost infallibly break all that is fragile in the house where it isused, and will probably put out the eyes of some of the inhabitants. Having thus, Itrust, said enough to prevent all good boys from inflicting bull-roarers on theirparents, pastors, and masters, I proceed (in the interests of science) to show howthe toy is made. Nothing can be less elaborate. You take a piece of the commonestwooden board, say the lid of a packing-case, about a sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight inches long and three broad, and you sharpen the end