G'day yet again,

Whilst looking for something else, quite unrelated, I came across this article printed nearly 40 years ago in the Bush Music Club's magazine. It is an interesting view of the didgeridoo (however you spell it ...) by someone who was in the area of its prime use ... at the time that the name was first used.
Regards

Bob Bolton

(From: Singabout, volume 5, number 1, January 1963, p. 4)

In the introduction, we read: " Frederick T. Macartney, who wrote the article for us on Didjeridoo, says: "it is intended to correct some misunderstandings among the relatively few people interested in such subjects."

DIDJERIDOO Frederick T. Macartney

Apart from the boomerang, which has become almost an emblem of Australia, nothing in the vanishing tribal life of our aborigines has attracted so much attention as the didjeridoo. It is their only musical instrument, unless you include sticks beaten together or against a hollow log to keep time. There is, of course, the churinga or "bullroarer", a slab of wood whirled round and round on a string to make a loud buzzing noise, but it is a sacred object, used only in tribal rites and kept out of the sight of the uninitiated.

The word "didjeridoo" is possibly not an aboriginal one, or if it is, it is apparently of recent rather than traditional origin, for I have not come across it in the vocabularies in authoritative books. Different tribes, with their sometimes vastly different dialects, use other names — for instance "yiraki" in East Arnhem Land and "ulpirra" or "ulbura" in Central Australia.

I first heard the didjeridoo mentioned by this name in 1921, while watching the last initiation ceremonies of the Larrakeyah tribe of the Darwin region, before their detribalization put an end to such occasions; so perhaps it is one of their words, though (Sir Walter) Baldwin Spencer, during his investigations there a decade earlier, does not seem to have known it. It is obviously an imitation of the sound that the instrument makes — four syllables of a rhythm accented at the end. There are performers whose special skill varies its accent and tone, but its recurrent sound is that of the name by which it is now generally known.

Another possibility not usually recognized is that the didjeridoo, like so much else in primitive art and ritual, had its origins in the food-quest. Walter E. Roth, whose book records his close knowledge of the natives of North-West Queensland in the 1890s, mentions their use of a "call tube" to lure emus into a snare by imitating the bird's cry, which has a booming sound. So, very likely, a hunter's trick, when he found it could be varied to please the ear, became the first wood-wind instrument.

The didjeridoo is made either of a hollow bough or of bamboo. The bough is frequently one obligingly eaten out by the so-called white ants, which, being careful to avoid the light, leave a substantial casing intact. Sometimes the hollowing is completed by the aborigine with a fire-stick, and by this means, when bamboo is used, the partitions at the nodes are removed.

The average length is four or five feet, and the width externally is about 1½ inches at the top, widening towards the base according to the growth of the bough or stem chosen, and occasionally a bent bough is used. These differences do not appreciably change the sound, which is made in the player's mouth and merely amplified by the tube.

As bamboos do not grow in arid country, didjeridoos of that make are not often seen except in the more coastal areas. They are customarily ornamented with a pattern of criss-cross lines cut or burnt in lightly. The more common hollow-bough sort are mostly left plain and may even have the bark still on, but they are generally smoothed, and some are decorated with symmetrical patterns in red and white. A specimen in the National Museum in Melbourne is there described as "used for charming women" — a misleading limitation oddly worded. For the purpose of this sorcery the native holds the didjeridoo over a fire of green bushes until the smoke penetrates it and him too, and that night he plays at the corroboree ground. The right girl succumbs to the spell, for you may be sure she knows what he has been up to, and the intimidation of magic does the rest.

In another instance of magic, a didjeridoo made from a bent bough figures as an ancestral snake in an initiation ceremony. The youth who is "being made a man" is held from behind while it is poked vigorously against his stomach, supposedly biting him to instill the myth. The involuntary grunts that this treatment evokes, though not unlike the sound the instrument makes when used ordinarily, are not regarded as attuned in any such way, being a mere by-product.

But the didjeridoo in its native setting has magic in a more comprehensive sense, especially when heard at night and from a distance. Whether played alone or with a clicking of "clap-sticks", or to the wailing of an aboriginal song, or as an undertone of wild dance-choruses, it seems the mysterious heart-beat of a land where, throughout uncounted centuries, man and earth were united by a dream-time tradition now forever lost.