Fast Fact Tag: kangaroo hunting

The familiar cartoon image of an Aboriginal hunter throwing a returning boomerang at a kangaroo is misleading. It projects the best-known modern boomerang type into a use for which heavier non-returning forms were much better suited.

The National Museum explains that boomerangs for hunting game such as emu, kangaroo and other marsupials could be thrown directly at the animal or made to ricochet from the ground. Those were practical hunting weapons, not lightweight novelty returners.

Returning boomerangs did have hunting uses, but typically in bird hunting. A returning boomerang could be thrown above ducks to imitate a hovering hawk, frightening the birds into nets or within range of hunters using non-returning boomerangs.

So returning boomerangs were real, useful and ingenious — but the standard image of them as the normal kangaroo-hunting weapon is too simplistic.