The boomerang is the most Australian object ever made. Aboriginal innovation, tens of thousands of years old, a uniquely Australian piece of engineering: throw it, it comes back. The whole world knows it as ours. It is in our coat of arms, on our coins, in every souvenir shop in the country. Aboriginal people made it first and made it best.
Aboriginal Australians have used boomerangs for at least 20,000 years and developed both returning and non-returning forms with extraordinary technical refinement. The thing they did not do is invent the throwing stick. Curved wooden hunting sticks have been found in Predynastic Egypt (in King Tutankhamun's tomb, in fact, around 1330 BCE), in Bronze Age Poland (a 30,000-year-old mammoth-tusk specimen from Oblazowa Cave), in pre-Columbian North America (Hopi rabbit sticks), and in Stone Age Europe. Throwing sticks were independently invented in at least four continents because pretty much any culture that hunts small game with a stick will eventually shape it for better aerodynamics. What is genuinely Australian, and unique, is the returning boomerang. That is a specifically Aboriginal innovation, found nowhere else on Earth in pre-contact form, and a far cleverer piece of engineering than the souvenir-shop versions suggest. The wider category is universal. The returning version is ours. Both things can be true.
Reception
Sources
- Australian Museum: Boomerang REFERENCE
- Oblazowa Cave Mammoth Boomerang Study REFERENCE