Captain Cook's boomerang has returned - and could bring its owner £60,000.

The explorer collected the strange, crooked stick in 1770 while surveying Australia, but he had no idea what it was for, or even what it was called. He thought that it was a wooden sword; his botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, believed it to be a short scimitar.

Captain James Cook returned to England with the boomerang in 1771, and was still ignorant of its secrets when he was killed eight years later. He left it, and two wooden Aboriginal clubs also collected on the expedition, to his wife, Elizabeth, who in turn bequeathed them to her friend Joan Leach Bennett, in whose family they have remained.

Next month the previously unrecorded boomerang and the clubs will be auctioned at Christie's exploration and travel sale. The boomerang is expected to fetch up to £60,000 and the clubs up to £30,000.

Aboriginal objects of this vintage are unusual, but the boomerang has extra value because it is thought to represent one of the first points of contact between Aborigines and Europeans. Cook relics are also rare, and in 2004 his pocket hammer sold for £71,700 - nearly three times more than expected.

Although Captain Cook wrote that the Aborigines were “all arm'd with darts and wooden swords”, there is no record of him seeing a boomerang in flight, or using the term. The first written record of a boomerang in action is believed to be by Francis Louis Barrallier, a French surveyor and engineer. In 1802 he wrote about a “piece of wood in the form of a half circle” that is thrown “on the ground or in the air, making it revolve on itself, and with such a velocity that one cannot see it returning towards the ground; only the whizzing of it is heard”.

Aerodynamically shaped throwing sticks dating from prehistoric times have been found across the world. Unlike returning boomerangs, these hunting sticks are larger and capable only of a long, low elliptical trajectory. The oldest returning boomerang was found in the Polish Carpathians and is thought to be more than 18,000 years old. The returning boomerangs that the Aborigines developed were probably used more for sport than serious hunting.

The auction takes place in London on September 25.

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