Australasia > Australia > New South Wales > Sydney > Articles > Boomeranging Around Sydney

Would it whiz back around and hit me in the face? Or maybe even break my arm, like it did to that friend who was taught by the Aborigines? Or would it fly off at 100 mph and sink into the Sydney Harbour? That’s was what I was wondering as I stared at the wall of boomerangs in the renovated warehouse resounding with the eerie tones of the didgeridoo. “Rangs,” as they’re now called by ‘boomsmiths’ who make them, and the throwers who throw them, are of two kinds: returning boomerangs, and those that hit their mark like the“Kylies” used for hunting kangaroos. These rangs were painted in bold Aboriginal designs and I decided that the best thing to do was to shoot them and run.

I had to shoot fast. The Aboriginal artist attending the shop wanted to tell me all about boomerangs. How they’d been found 23,000 years ago in Poland and in the pyramids of Egypt. How they’d been made from mammoth tusk ivory, bone, hardened leather, wood, and now plastic and phenolic resin composites, and came in shapes of every letter of the alphabet, and with different gyroscopic and asymmetrical lift properties. I thought about buying one with the new plastic Australian $50 bill in my pocket. (Aussie currency is waterproof and it floats!) But I had only 25 minutes left for my shamefully superficial, one-hour racing tour of the biggest city in Australia. It felt rude, but I thanked him and dashed out into the street again.

Seeing Sydney in sixty minutes before sundown, en route to Kuala Lumpur, and without a kangaroo, was crazy. Fortunately, my plush Orient-Express lodgings for the night - The Observatory Hotel at 89-113 Kent Street - were on The Rocks. Not as in smashed-up love or whiskey on ice, but as in the Sydney Harbour area, the oldest and saltiest sector of this exotic South Pacific port of 3.5 million souls in New South Wales - where the whole post-Aboriginal history of Australia is squeezed into a few blocks.

After the American Revolution of 1776, Merry Old England was forced to find a new dumping ground for the hoodlums and ruffians and bedraggled classes that it had been in the habit of exiling to the North American colonies. The south-eastern corner of the unconquered continent of Australia proved the perfect place.

On January 26, 1788, the motley First Fleet of 11 shiploads of exiled convicts landed under the rocks and bluffs of Sydney Cove. At what is now First Fleet Park, Captain Arthur Phillip, first governor of New South Wales, established a penal colony of tents and bark shacks on the edge of the wild Australian bush, tidily away from King George III’s England. Somehow this unruly settlement of 753 petty thieves and prostitutes, cons and cutthroats, and 257 military officers, and their wives and offspring grew into one of the most beautiful and airy ports in the world. A San Francisco Down Under. A subtropical city of lacy wrought iron and Victorian pastels, 34 pounding Pacific surf beaches (protected with shark nets), nude beaches, and parks and gardens rich with eucalypts, water gums, bangalays and Laughing Kookaburra birds.

The Rocks is renowned for its rough low-life history, when randy sailors, swaggering tattooed Maoris rattling shark-tooth necklaces, smugglers and violent gangs brawled among the grog shops and brothels, wharves and warehouses lit by the ghoulish gas lamps; when doss houses and six-penny lodging houses and establishments like ‘The Hit’ or ‘Miss Hotel’ and the ‘Live and Let Live Hotel’ overflowed with immigrants from Asia and Europe; when dark cobbled lanes stinking of beer and whale oil scurried with rats carrying bubonic plague, and clanked with convicts’ leg-irons...

Today Aussies are trendily proud of their convict ancestors. (The good ole convict days are recreated in “Old Sydney Town” where actors portraying penal colony residents of 1780-1820 confess their various crimes!) And of course, the gentrification and tourism that turns every city’s Tenderloin or Hell’s Kitchen into industrial chic has removed much of the grit from Sydney’s Rocks. But there’s still enough salt left among the old sailing ships in the harbour, old pubs like the Fortunes of War Hotel and the Hero of Waterloo, the Old Police Station, the convict barracks built in 1816, and the preserved but un-restored slum museum (circa 1844) at Susanna Place, to make The Rocks pretty tangy.

Only 35 minutes before, I’d shot out of the Observatory Hotel and run up the steep hill of Observatory Park for a panorama of the Blue Mountains and the harbour, piers, yachts and ferry boats and the Sydney Opera House billowing like a ship in full sail. Then down Kent Street where in front of the Lord Nelson Hotel I collided with a drunken English lad spending his first day Down Under upside down tasting ales. I dashed in for a peek at the old pub, and with no time to sip a “Tooth’s Old” or some other brew among the weathered wood and leather, I bought a bottle of mineral water for the road. It came elaborately emblazoned with a spread eagle and Lord Nelson’s image: The Lord’s water - Pure table water- product of Australia.

I continued my sprint, past The Illustrated Man inking salon plastered with South Pacific tattoo flash. Past an historic plaque commemorating the 1788 hanging of convict Thomas Barrett, strung up from a gallows tree for stealing pork, butter and peas from penal colony provisions. In the days when executions were a public entertainment, some Sydney pubs had picture windows from which patrons could view the hangings.

Was it only the day before that I’d eaten kangaroo enchiladas for lunch on Hayman Island in the Great Barrier Reef? As I jumped down the steps of Lower Fort Street toward the arched Sydney Harbor Bridge - known as “The Coathanger” - I noticed my jumping ability seemed greatly enhanced. I zipped across the harbour to McMahon’s Point with my 200mm zoom lens. Then swung around George Street to gawk at a shop of dazzling milky white and black opals, Australia’s “Rainbow Stone” arduously mined from the broiling earth 70 feet down.

The Royal Botanic Gardens is worth at least a day, not five minutes. The tropical gardens fronting the harbour spread over an area almost half the size of The Rocks. I got a quick whiff - a heady melange of tree fern and eucalypt, tinged with sea air - before racing back to The Observatory for obligatory pre-dinner drinks in the book-lined Globe Bar.

While my colleagues were taking leisurely baths, I’d gobbled Sydney and was now suffering from sensory indigestion. And at the very moment I spied an old leather tome on the shelf I was dying to digest from cover to cover - Life and Laughter ‘Midst the Cannibals - dinner was served!

I did not leave Sydney without a boomerang. En route to the airport, our taxi detoured to Kings Cross, Sydney’s Greenwich Village, and I ran into Duncan MacLennan’s boomerang shop at 200 William Street and bought one of his Aboriginal Returning Boomerangs - guaranteed to return if you simply followed the instructions. “Buy one, fly one and get back to Mother Nature,” was Duncan’s motto. Duncan ran ‘the world’s only boomerang school’, giving free lessons on Sunday mornings in Yarranabee Park.

Too bad I didn’t have time for a lesson. Back home in Quebec I took the rang to an empty farmer’s field outside Saint-Chrysostome near the New York border. I studied the trajectory on the diagram and read the instructions three times. “Although the boomerang is now only used for sport and pleasure, it is still primarily a weapon.... use the same motion of throwing a tomahawk into a tree trunk.”

I donned my bike helmet just in case. Then I threw it, having a split-second worry that it might sail over the border without passing through customs. Bang! It landed like a tomahawk, all right. Right into the dirt. I threw it again at least a dozen times, chased after it, and dug it out of the cornfield. Now it’s hanging on my wall, all scuffed and beaten up. But like my 60 minutes in Sydney, which wasn’t much of a visit, but gives me the right to say I was there, my battered boomerang might be just the relic I need to dream up an adventure in the Australian Bush.

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