How to recognize didgeridoos
made in Australia?

It is a very hard question to answer in a couple of sentences. My experience is, that some people cannot tell wood apart from plastic. So, where to start?

First of all, you have to look at the whole picture:

•   If it is a perfectly shaped/moulded piece of tube, then step 100 meters away from it. This is the closest an Aborigine ever been to it! (I assume, you are after an Aborigine of Australia didgeridoo, not one made by an 'Aborigine of Indonesia'. Unfortunately, even in Australia, some shops are selling the dirt cheap Indonesian fakes.) Usually, these imported 'didgeridoos' are painted in darker colours all over, inside and out, to hide the material they made of.



•   If you see a nearly perfect shape with nodes at about 20cm-s apart then it is bamboo didgeridoo: a woody material with good resonance, but plain sound quality. They can be perfectly authentic (maybe more so than the termite hollowed eucalyptus didgeridoos, see Modern didgeridoo history), crafted and painted by local Aborigines and sold as such: as bamboo didgeridoos. Unfortunately, it is easily forged, because the bamboo is freely available in many third world countries.

Now you are standing in front of a hollow stick, a bit crooked, bent. There are a couple of them on a stand and they all differ from each other, like the branches of a tree.



•   If you can see the grains of the wood, some odd nodes of side branches, year-rings around a side branch node, or at the base of the didgeridoo, bark or some other traits of real wood and you cannot make a dent into it with your fingernails, than there is a good chance you're looking at an eucalyptus didgeridoo (Australia has more than 600 species of eucalyptus).
  If in Australia, than the didgeridoo is made of a genuine termite hollowed stick, because there is no cheaper way to hollow a crook, bending, 1 - 1.5 meter (3 - 5 feet) long hardwood stick, but to harvest it when it is already hollowed by the termites.

  I was wrong! After a complain from a Dutch friend that the cheap Indonesian fakes flooded Holland I did find out that some shops in Cairns are selling them as well. And, when you think about it, those fakes are not cheap either, because you do not get with it the spirituality nor the genuine aboriginal artwork which brands an original aboriginal didgeridoo!

  Especially where such hardwood is readily available, like in the Savannah of North Australia.(OK, there are some technics to forge a hardwood didge, but the effort and cost involved is prohibiting in the areas where termites do the job for free!)

Of course, you've needed some craftsmanship to bring out the potential the stick received from Nature and from the termites' hunger for good quality wood and make it into an instrument.
Original aboriginal, the online boutique of BushCrafts, sales only genuine, termite hollowed didgeridoos from local (Cairns area) aboriginal craftsmen and artists.(These are real Aborigine of Australia didgeridoos!)