Fast Fact Tag: boomerang myths

No. The popular idea that a boomerang is a curved object that automatically comes back is historically misleading. Returning boomerangs were only one part of a much wider technology.

This distinction was already explicit in nineteenth-century ethnography. R. Brough Smyth’s 1878 account separates the returning play boomerang, or Wonguim, from the war boomerang, or Barngeet. He notes that the war form does not return, while the returning form was designed around a very different flight.

Threlkeld described the returning flight as an amusement or display and distinguished fighting throws intended to injure. Independently, Dawson described a heavier war boomerang that did not return, while Eyre recorded forms whose different angles produced markedly different flight paths.

Modern museum collections confirm the same broad picture: the vast majority of Aboriginal boomerangs were non-returning. The returning kind became disproportionately famous because it fascinated settlers, scientists, tourists and souvenir buyers.

So the historically accurate statement is not “boomerangs came back”, but rather: some specialised boomerangs returned; many hunting and fighting forms were designed to travel forward and strike with force.