Thursday, January 14, 2021

Early Settlers of Australia Engaging in Loanshifting: The Boomerang as a "Wooden Sword"

The earliest settlers of Australia, when encountering the boomerang for the first time, engaged in “loanshifting” by calling it a “wooden sword”:

 

It is a myth that it was Captain James Cook who recorded the name ‘boomerang’ for the first time. In fact, there is no record that he ever used the term or even saw a returning boomerang being thrown, though he did take one back to England, thinking it was a primitive wooden sword. When he arrived in Botany Bay in 1770, he recorded that the Aborigines were ‘all arm’d with darts and wooden swords’. His botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, also likened the devices to ‘Arabian scymetars’ when he saw them in their hands and fibre belts, as William Dampier had done when he saw them on the west coast of Australia in 1688. All of these early explorers thought that boomerangs were swords and none of them ever saw a boomerang being thrown, nor did any of them ever record the term boomerang.

 

Indeed, boomerangs continued to be referred to as ‘wooden swords’ for a couple of years after settlement, in the journals of Governor Arthur Phillip (1789), Captain Watkin Tench (1789) and surgeon John White (1790). (What is a Boomerang)

 

The use of the wooden-sword appears to be very partial, and confined, according to Mr. Oldenfield, to the eastern natives § Dampier, indeed, says that the natives of the mainland visited by him had the wooden-sword (i, p. 467), but he may have mistaken the boomerang for this weapon. (Journal of Anthropology [1870] Issue 1, xviii)

 

[The] boomerang, which the settlers often took for a wooden sword. (Samuel Sidney, The Land of the Kangaroo and the Boomerang [Hurst & Company, 1899], 37)

 

Such is further evidence of (in this case, relatively-recent) people engaging in "loanshifting" when encountering new material objects. On loanshifting and the Book of Mormon, see:


Neal Rappleye, “Put Away Childish Things”: Learning to Read the Book of Mormon Using Mature Historical Thought