Sydney - Just touching a didgeridoo could make a woman infertile, an Aboriginal academic said Tuesday when calling for a ban on a book encouraging girls to take up the wind instrument.

Mark Rose, general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, said the Daring Book for Girls was blasphemous and should be pulped because in Aboriginal culture only men were allowed to play the didgeridoo, a hollowed-out branch about a metre long.

"I wouldn't let my daughter touch one," he said, warning that women who did could become infertile. "I reckon it's the equivalent of encouraging someone to play with razor blades. I would say pulp it."

Anita Weiss, an aboriginal writer and head of the Australian Society of Authors, told Australia's AAP news agency that telling girls to take up the instrument was a "slap in the face to indigenous people and to indigenous writers who are actually writing in the field so that this sort of shit doesn't go to print."

Shona Martyn of publisher HarperCollins said Aborigines had encouraged her own daughter to play the didgeridoo during a trip to Uluru. She said that when African-American singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman had visited what used to be called Ayers Rock during a concert tour of Australia, she too had been taught how to play the didgeridoo by local Aborigines.

"We would only ever pulp a book if it was a very genuine reason, and I'm not convinced that we've offended all Australian Aborigines," Martyn said. (dpa)