ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA ART & CULTURE CENTRE - ALICE SPRINGS
100% Aboriginal owned & operated

10 DIDGERIDOO FACTS
1. Possibly the world's oldest musical instrument
2. A wind instrument originally found in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia.
3. Is made from limbs and tree trunks hollowed out by termites (insects).
4. Is cut to an average length of 1.3 metres and cleaned out with a stick. or hot coals.
5. Was used as an accompaniment to chants and songs.
6. Produces a low-pitch, resonant sound with complex rhythmic patterns.
7. In sure tribal groups only played by men but in most groups by men, women and children.
8. Traditional various forms at the didjeridoo where found in Central Australia around Alice Springs.
9. The Didgeridoo is the sound of Australia.
10.If the earth had a voice it would be the sound of the Didgeridoo.

HISTORY OF THE WORD DIDGERIDOO
Didgeridoo - Also didjeridu, didjiridu and didjerry.
1919   Huon Times (Franklin) 24 January 4/3
The nigger crew is making merry with the Diridgery doo and the eternal ya-ya-ya- ye-ye-ye cry.
1919   Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 5 April 15/1
The Northern Territory Aborigines have an infernal and allegedly musical instrument, composed of two feet of hollow bamboo. It produces but one sound - 'didjerry, didjerry, didjerry' and so on ad infinitum.. When a couple of niggers started grinding their infernal 'didjerry' half the hot night through, the blasphemous manager decided on revenge.
1925   M.TERRY Across Unknown Australia 190
The didjiri-du.. is a long hollow tube, often a tree root about 5 feet long, slightly curved at the lower end. The musician squats on the ground, resting his instrument on the earth. He fits his mouth into the straight or upper end and blows down it in a curious fashion. He produces an intermittent drone.

ABORIGINAL NAMES
Aboriginal names for the instruments as there are identifiable language groups. Some of its names, more especially those which suggest routes and directions of the spread of this aerophone within Australia, are given below.
In T.B. Wilson's Narrative of a Voyage Round the World (1835) there is a drawing of an Aboriginal man of Raffles Bay, Coburg Peninsula, playing the instrument. Several different observers at Raffles Bay described it as being of bamboo and about three feet long. Names obtained (obviously different spellings of the same Aboriginal word) were eboro, ebero and ebroo.

WHERE DOES THE WORD DIDGERIDOO COME FROM?
The fact that bamboo didjeridus were quite common among northerly groups in the Northern Territory during the last century is confirmed by the word 'bamboo' which is still used in the lingua franca by some Aborigines when referring to the instrument, though 'didjeridu' may be gaining ground.

The suggestion here is that the first didjeridus were of bamboo; and that because of the availability of bamboo in the north-western region of the Northern Territory, the first didjeridu players may well have belonged to that region. Some observations on 'three very curious trumpets' made by R.Etheridge Jr. in 1893 are quoted for consideration in this context as they refer particularly to instruments of bamboo. Etheridge writes that '[the trumpets] are made from bamboo lengths, the diaphragms having been removed, probably by dropping live coals down the tubes.
The bamboo, I am informed by Mr Stockdale, grows about the Adelaide River over an area of about one hundred miles by fifty, and reaches to a height of eighty feet, Mr J.H. Maiden tells me there are two bamboos indigenous in Australia, Bambusa arnhemica and B.moreheadiana, the latter a climbing species and only one or two inches in diameter.

WHAT ARE OTHER DIDGERIDOO NAMES?
According to Prof Trevor Jones, (Monash University) there are at least 45 different synonyms for the didgeridoo.
Some are bambu, bombo, kambu, pampuu, (may reflect didge origins from bamboo), garnbak, illpirra, martba, Jiragi, Yiraki, Yidaki, (seem close dialectically and which means "bamoo" although no longer commonly made from bamboo).

TRIBAL GROUP REGION NAME FOR DIDGERIDOO