Fast Fact Tag: conch

Early European writers often called the didgeridoo a “trumpet”, “horn”, “pipe” or even a “conch”. They were using familiar European words to describe an Aboriginal instrument for which they did not yet have a common English name.

Herbert Basedow, writing in 1925, called it a “bamboo trumpet”, a “drone-pipe” and a “didjeridoo”. Alice Moyle later noted that Baldwin Spencer had called the Australian wooden trumpet a “conch” when making his 1912 sound recordings.

These descriptions were based on how the instrument looked and sounded: a hollow tube played by blowing with vibrating lips. They did not mean that the instrument was literally the same as a European brass trumpet.

Old references to a “trumpet” can therefore be important evidence for the didgeridoo. But context still matters — not every hollow tube, horn or trumpet-like instrument recorded in Australia was necessarily a didgeridoo.