Kidman blew feebly into a didgeridoo during a promotional appearance on Wetten, Dass …?, a high-rating German program known for its high jinks. Allen Madden, cultural and educational officer at Sydney's Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, said Kidman ought to know better. "I presume she doesn't know, otherwise she wouldn't be playing it. But [I would have thought] the women on that set would have told her. Baz should know something about it, after working with those traditional fellas on the film."

Richard Green, an award-winning actor, screenwriter and Dharug language teacher, said he was disgusted. "People are going to see Nicole playing it and think it's all right. It bastardises our culture. I will guarantee she has no more children. It's not meant to be played by women as it will make them barren." The didgeridoo, or yirdaki, is said by some to make women infertile, and Mr Green said he feared other women would imitate Kidman without realising its dangers.

It was the fear of imitation that also riled West Australian elders last month when they saw an advertisement that featured the actress Sybilla Budd swimming atop King George Falls in the Kimberley - a sacred site for the Balanggarra people and accessible only through Aboriginal land with the permission of traditional owners. Kwini elder Ambrose Mungala Chalarimeri accused Tourism Australia of "telling the rest of the world that it is OK to trample all over our culture".

In September, the publisher HarperCollins apologised for a section on how to play the didgeridoo in The Daring Book For Girls and removed it from future editions after complaints from indigenous academics. Not all indigenous communities consider the didgeridoo a danger, but many do. Although native to northern Australia, the ethnomusicologist Linda Barwick has written that the strictest restrictions on women playing and touching the didgeridoo "appears to be [in] the south-east of Australia, where … the didgeridoo has only been recently introduced".