There is really no guideline for differentiating between a continent
and a big island. Geographers just decided that Australia should
be a continent. In fact, Europeans consider the New World (North
and South America) to be one continent, not two, because it is
one land mass. Why they don't use the same logic and consider
Europe and Asia to be one land mass and therefore one continent,
is baffling.
Sixteenth-century
sailors found it difficult to plot their courses on a chart because
early maps did not take into account Earth's spherical shape.
On Earth, the lines of longitude converge on the poles. A man
named Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) found a way to put segments
of this sphere on a flat paper so that sailors could lay out their
compass course by a straight line. Mercator imagined them on 2-D
paper. To make the segments fit onto a flat square, the northernmost
and southernmost regions had to be exploded or expanded to larger
than their actual proportions. A map of this type is called a
"Mercator projection." This is why the island of Greenland
and the continent of Antarctica look much larger on a map than
they do on a globe. Australia
is actually three and a half times the size of Greenland.
Now
about boomerangs ... the word is Australian, but the boomerang
is not exclusively an Australian device. Boomerangs are simply
a curved version of the old throwing sticks that have been around
for about fifteen thousand years in various ancient cultures.
The Hopi Indians of North America used them to hunt rabbit; the
ancient Egyptians and Australian natives hunted and fought wars
with them. The returning boomerang —
the type you and I are most familiar with — was specially
invented by Australian aborigines.
How
could aborigines get their boomerangs to return to them if they
actually hit something while hunting? They didn't. As you would
suspect, if a returning boomerang actually makes contact with
something, its flight is cut short and it won't return to the
thrower. It is believed by some experts that the device was used
to scare birds out of their nests and into the hunters' nets.
The notion that an Australian aborigine can kill a large animal
with a boomerang that returns obediently to its owner is quite
false. The boomerang used for this purpose, sometimes called the
war or hunting boomerang, is not designed to return to the thrower,
nor is it thrown in the same fashion as the return, or "sporting,"
boomerang. When thrown with serious intention by an expert, it
is indeed a weapon. But its flight is straight, not curved; thus
it doesn't come back but must be retrieved. Today, returning boomerangs
are used as toys or sport devices around which there have developed
some quite sophisticated clubs and tournaments.
~Sources:
"Thoughts for the Throne" by Don Voorhees
"Just Curious about History, Jeeves" and
"More Misinformation" by Tom Burnam
