On secret men’s business in outback Queensland
Their key initiation rite, circumcision with a sharp stone — including the variation known as subincision, or “whistle cock”
By ROSS BILTON
THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE 5 April 2014
SPENDING 10 days out bush with a secret society of Marrinyama men was an eye-opener for photographer Brook Mitchell, a white city boy.
He was taken around their dreaming places, and watched them wake up the ancestors with sacred dances. He saw ritual blood-letting and scarification. And he learned of their key initiation rite, circumcision with a sharp stone — including the variation known as subincision, or “whistle cock”, in which (cross your legs now, fellas) the underside of the penis is split wide open.
Tradition is everything to the group’s leader, Lance Tjupurrula Sullivan, 43, pictured painting an acolyte. Anyone who breaks the rules — who drinks or smokes weed, for instance — gets a spear in the leg, he says. That’s their justice. And their medicine? Red ochre mixed with the ashes of burned corkwood and ti tree is the only antiseptic a man needs, Sullivan insists. The father of five, who has a degree in archaeology and anthropology from James Cook University, says he eschews modern materials in the making of those magnificent dhoeri hats, too, relying only on paperbark and feathers.
Mitchell got on well with the group, even after learning that the name of their camp — surrounded by silver and copper mines hard up against sacred sites — translated as “Big Tallman Flesh Eater Place”. (He’s 1.85m.) And that wasn’t all. “They kept saying they should circumcise me because they were showing me all this secret stuff,” says the photographer, 35. His girlfriend Jessica, in a phone call, put her foot down in no uncertain terms. That was a relief. “Because they really would have done it,” he says.
Original article here
Boundaries of the Western Desert and the circumcision/subincision lines.
In the early years of the twentieth century, anthropologists recorded evidence for the movement of the circumcision rite into the non-circumcising southwest region of Western Australia. Archaeological and linguistic evidence from central Australia suggests that this may have been a continuation of an expansion of the boundaries of the Western Desert. (ie subincision occurs East of the line) More here