Fast Fact Tag: Throwing stick

The remarkable sophistication of the boomerang led to significant debate among early observers regarding how such a “primitive” people could have invented it. Historical texts reviewed reveal two primary schools of thought on its origins: one attributing it to accidental discovery, and the other to a legacy of inherited knowledge from a more advanced ancestry.

Several authors speculated that the boomerang was not a product of deliberate design, but a happy accident of nature and play. Carl Lumholtz was a primary proponent of this view, stating, “we can conceive it to have been invented by accident.” He proposed several possibilities:

• A warped piece of wood, twisted by “rain and sunshine,” may have “assumed a form which revealed the striking quality of returning when it was thrown.”
• More probably, “the idea was discovered in their games.” He observed that natives amused themselves by throwing twisted palm leaves or Brigalow-acacia leaves that would “start off, but to return in the same manner as the boomerang.”
• He also suggested they “may have received a suggestion from the whirling movements described by the winged fruit of the gum-trees as it falls to the ground.”

In direct contrast, other writers argued that the boomerang was proof of a more developed past. Richard Sadleir expressed this view bluntly, claiming that the present natives “have no power of invention,” and that the boomerang, being based on “scientific principles,” must have “descended to them and not been invented by them, denoting a higher ancestry.”

Albert F. Calvert strongly agreed, contending that the boomerang’s possession “alone redeems the Australian savage from his usually assigned place at the foot of the human ladder.” This theory was often linked to a broader, unresolved debate about the weapon’s geographical origins.

Carl Lumholtz noted it “has been asserted that the Egyptians and Assyrians used the boomerang,” but he cited Mr. B. Smyth to cast doubt, as the ancient versions likely could not return. Lumholtz concluded that intermediate forms found in Australia “show a development towards, rather than a retrogression from, the present boomerang.”

 

The boomerang is often treated as though it were a universal Aboriginal implement. The historical evidence does not support that picture. Boomerangs were important in many parts of Australia, but some Aboriginal peoples did not traditionally use them at all, while other regions used different forms.

One of the clearest nineteenth-century statements comes from the Jardine account of Cape York. After describing local spears, spear-throwers and axes, the report states that among the four tribes being described “the boomerang and nulla-nulla (or club) are not known.” The following paragraph makes clear that these remarks apply to the four tribes north of the Kennedy River. MacGillivray had independently recorded a similar northern limit in 1852.

R. Brough Smyth’s 1878 The Aborigines of Victoria states that the boomerang “is not known in all parts of Australia”. Smyth cites Jardine at Cape York, an independent correspondent at Cooktown who made the same observation, and a correspondent who doubted that the Narrinyeri commonly used boomerangs as early as 1847.

Tasmania also appears to have lacked a traditional boomerang tradition. Alfred Taylor (1892) and H. Ling Roth (1899) examined the historical evidence and noted the absence of boomerangs from early records and ethnological collections.

Where boomerangs were used, form and function varied. Eyre distinguished the eastern wangn or wangno from the western kiley and described different flight according to angle; Dawson later distinguished a lighter returning “toy boomerang” from a heavier non-returning war form in western Victoria.

The safest conclusion is therefore that boomerang technology was ancient, widespread and highly developed, but not pan-Australian. Its modern use as a generic symbol of Aboriginal Australia compresses substantial regional differences.