Chapter 18. Cardboard Boomerangs

Owing to the prevalence of untuned, Styrofoam toy-store boomerangs, generations of American children wrongly grow to believe that building and throwing boomerangs is very difficult. This flies in the face of reason: Using less-than-ideal materials, human beings have been building, throwing, and catching returning boomerangs for more than 11,600 years. The oldest boomerangs found thus far were recovered from the Wyrie Swamp in Australia—but boomerangs aren’t unique to Australia. And despite the impressions you may have gotten from Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee, returning boomerangs were never used as weapons; they are, in fact, among humanity’s longest-standing ways of showing off.

Boomerangs are absurdly easy to make—this is an ideal project to keep kids busy in a pinch. Learning to throw one is just a little tricky, but most of the trick is in properly tuning the boomerang. The easiest boomerangs for beginners to craft and throw are quad-bladers. This project includes two quad-blade designs. The first is a poster board Fast-Catch Boomerang. Fast-catch boomerangs usually have more than three wings and are characterized by a tight flight pattern and quick return. This design is ideal for indoor boomerang play and also good for juggling (catching and tossing two boomerangs in sequence so that one is aloft at all times). The second design is a slightly heartier cardboard Cross-Stick Boomerang, suitable for outdoor use. Cross-stick boomerangs, as the name suggests, are made from two separate wings connected at the hub, rather than being cut in a single piece.

Boomerang Hunting

Although returning boomerangs are crummy weapons—they’re generally too light to kill anything and far too hard to aim—they are used for hunting birds. Hunters erect broad, low nets near large flocks and then approach from the other side. They throw boomerangs over the flock, which mistake the gyring toys for swooping birds of prey. The panicked flock flees low across the meadow and gets snared in the nets. Incidentally, bats can often be goaded into attacking tri-blade boomerangs, as the sound of the spinning blades can be similar in frequency to that of large moths’ wings.

Many cultures, including Australian Aborigines, do use non-returning boomerangs for hunting. These heavier tools are more often (and less confusingly) called rabbit sticks, throw sticks, or, in Australia, kylies. They are heavy and have a biconvex airfoil—that is, both the top and bottom of the wing are curved; our Cardboard Boomerang wings, on the other hand, are only curved along the top, as are most conventional airplane wings. Thrown parallel to the ground with a spin, throw sticks are stable in flight and can go a long way, with the intent of crippling an animal’s legs so that the hunter can capture and bludgeon it. The oldest known throw stick was discovered in Poland’s Oblazowa Cave. Made from a split mammoth tusk, it was more than 20,300 years old.

The finished boomerangs: the indoor Fast-Catch Boomerang on the left, and the outdoor Cross-Stick Boomerang on the right

Figure 18-1. The finished boomerangs: the indoor Fast-Catch Boomerang on the left, and the outdoor Cross-Stick Boomerang on the right

Tools

  • scissors or a hobby knife

  • a ruler

  • a pencil or pen

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