A Better Boomerang

Lorin Hawes started out as a U.S. nuclear physicist, but in 1956 he emigrated to Australia because, he says, "I was fed up with warmongering, hillbilly officers, the CIA, the Pentagon, the whole damn lot." He lectured in Australian universities, but by 1965 found Australian society also becoming too militaristic for his liking. He then turned for his living to what had become his hobby: making and throwing boomerangs. Says the 39-year-old Hawes, a sardonic, 280-lb. mountain of a man: "I decided to join the select group of people who work less and earn more by being unproductive. What could be more unproductive than throwing boomerangs? If you want the damn thing back, why throw it in the first place?"

Retreating to a farm near the tiny town of Mudgeerebar in the northeastern state of Queensland, Hawes designed a boomerang that incorporated modern principles of aerodynamics. He insists that his boomerang comes reliably back to the thrower, whereas the aboriginal product often does not. Be that as it may, Hawes has become Australia's boomerang king. He employs seven workers, who turn out 60,000 boomerangs a year. Most are sold in gift shops in major Australian cities, but a quarter of the output is shipped to North America and Europe for sporting clubs and wives whose husbands have everything else. In addition, about 150,000 paying tourists a year turn up at Hawes' bushland farm, which he calls a "boomerangery." Those who buy boomerangs get free usage lessons from Master Thrower Hawes. Altogether, Hawes estimates his sales at "somewhere under" $1,000,000 a year. Profits? Hawes replies with a typically atrocious pun: "Let's just say it is a booming business with good returns."

All this is too much for Hawes' biggest competitor, the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Island Affairs, which every year sells 40,000 boomerangs made by aborigines living on missions. Department spokesmen insist that only aboriginal boomerangs can make two complete circles in the air before dropping at the feet of the thrower. Senator Neville Bonner, an aborigine, has introduced in the Australian Parliament legislation that would in effect restrict boomerang making to his race. It has got nowhere--partly because Bonner had no success trying to demonstrate the superiority of the aboriginal product. At a press showing in Canberra, he scaled a boomerang that got stuck in a tree; the embarrassed Senator had to shinny up to retrieve it. In other words, the demonstration--er-- boomeranged.

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