Busacca Gallery

An example of a rare an unusual tribal wooden carved weapon. A superb, painted, Australian boomerang, 19th century, Australia, signs of use, minor chips and wear to painted surface. This boomerang, is finely carved with remains of painted red ochre. A Great example with the dark patina. This example looks to be a Inland Kimberley, boomerang. They tend to be symmetrical. They often have red ochre and white pipe clay stripes. The most collectible form has a tight zigzag or La Grange style of fluting on the reverse. Boomerangs come in a large variety of sizes, forms, and decoration. Different boomerangs had different functions. A boomerang is a thrown tool, typically constructed as a flat airfoil, that is designed to spin about an axis perpendicular to the direction of its flight. A returning boomerang is designed to return to the thrower. It is well known as a weapon used by Indigenous Australians for hunting. Boomerangs have been historically used for hunting, as well as sport and entertainment. They are commonly thought of as an Australian icon, and come in various shapes and sizes.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang

Tribal boomerangs may be inscribed or painted with designs meaningful to their makers. Most boomerangs seen today are of the tourist or competition sort, and are almost invariably of the returning type. Depictions of boomerangs being thrown at animals, such as kangaroos, appear in some of the oldest rock art in the world, the Indigenous Australian rock art of the Kimberly region, which is potentially up to 50,000 years old. Stencils and paintings of boomerangs also appear in the rock art of West Papua, including on Bird's Head Peninsula and Kaimana, likely dating to the Last Glacial Maximum, when lower sea levels led to cultural continuity between Papua and Arnhem Land in Northern Australia. The oldest surviving Australian Aboriginal boomerangs come from a cache found in a peat bog in the Wyrie Swamp of South Australia and date to 10,000 BC.



No one knows for sure how the returning boomerang was invented, but some modern boomerang makers speculate that it developed from the flattened throwing stick, still used by the Australian Aborigines and other indigenous peoples around the world, including the Navajo in North America. A hunting boomerang is delicately balanced and much harder to make than a returning one. The curving flight characteristic of returning boomerangs was probably first noticed by early hunters trying to "tune" their throwing sticks to fly straight.



Traditionally, most boomerangs used by aboriginal groups in Australia were 'non-returning'. These weapons, sometimes called "throwsticks" or "kylies", were used for hunting a variety of prey, from kangaroos to parrots; at a range of about 100 metres (330 ft), a 2-kg (4.4 lb) non-returning boomerang could inflict mortal injury to a large animal. A throwstick thrown nearly horizontally may fly in a nearly straight path and could fell a kangaroo on impact to the legs or knees, while the long-necked emu could be killed by a blow to the neck. Hooked non-returning boomerangs, known as "beaked kylies", used in northern Central Australia, have been claimed to kill multiple birds when thrown into a dense flock. Throwsticks are used as multi-purpose tools by today's aboriginal peoples, and besides throwing could be wielded as clubs, used for digging, used to start friction fires, and are sonorous when two are struck together.