Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/147

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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II. THE BOOMERANG.
119

he might do as he pleased, and encroached on a cultivated part of his land, which Arthur had no idea of suffering. (After vain expostulation, Arthur employed a surveyor.) This operation proved that Arthur was right, and that he knew his proper boundaries quite well. When he saw that his opponent was satisfied, he said: ' Well, Mr.———, though you have tried to wrong me, I will treat you differently from what I believe you would have done to me if I was in your place. You can come on my land and remove your crop when it is ripe.'"[1]

Mr. Bonwick adds that Arthur had not thoroughly adopted the civilization of his conquerors, for "such conduct was scarcely that generally adopted by our enlightened countrymen." Mr. Bonwick knew the hero of this tale, and declared that "his face presented no aggravation of the native features, though sufficiently betraying the black man. If standing on the steps of the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, he would have been often selected as a model for his magnificent head." Such was one of the pure blood of the vanished tribes of Tasmania.

APPENDIX.

There was, in 1883, a collection of weapons called boomerangs in the South Kensington Museum, and the description in the catalogue spoke of the curved throwing-sticks for killing game as the returning boomerang of the Australians. The explanation of the returning movement was stated (p. 29) to be due to the continuance of rotation "after the forward movement has ceased by which means the axis of rotation continuing parallel to itself, and the fore-part of the weapon being tilted upwards, in falling, it glides backwards on an inclined plane."

This description is true of a card struck upwards so as to make it rotate. It will return on an inclined plane to the person who sent it, but it will return almost as if pulled back by a thread. So will three thin pieces of wood fastened cross-wise. Neither the card nor the wood will return if projected almost perpendicularly. In some tribes a toy-boomerang was made which was thrown almost horizontally, but upwards and its path was, though it went far, somewhat similar to that of

  1. ↑ "The Last of the Tasmanians." p. 353. James Bonwick. London: 1870. Arthur was married to a half-caste. They had no children. Mr. Bonwick sadly records the fact that Arthur became dissipated, and while plying as a boatman between Hobart Town and Oyster Cove, was drowned by the upsetting of a boat in 1861.
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