Currie's station, near Mount Elephant. Mr. Currie, in reply to Mr. Aplin's enquiries, stated that the mounds were eight or nine in number, in close proximity to each other, and on the edge of a large marsh. At the time they were last examined by Mr. Currie they were much reduced in size, by the trampling of cattle and sheep. The material being light, and the surface being broken by the hoofs of the cattle, much of it was blown off in clouds of dust in summer. The largest was about thirty or forty yards in length by about fifteen or twenty yards in breadth, and from ten to twelve feet in height. They were nearly twice as high when Mr. Currie first saw them, and at a distance looked like hay-stacks. They are composed of the sort of ash and soil commonly found in Mirrn-yong heaps, and there is mixed with the ashes a good deal of wood-charcoal—although there are no trees at the present time within three miles of the spot. A human skeleton and the bones of the native cat and other animals were found in one of the heaps. Mr. Currie thinks that the blacks who resort to the marsh in the season when swans' eggs are abundant may have lost a companion by death and disposed of his remains in the mound, as offering a burial-place where an excavation could be made with the least labor. The bones of the animals, he supposes, are those of creatures that had burrowed in the mounds.
Some human bones were found by Mr. Currie's gardener in his garden at Lara, near Cressy (the same district), under rather peculiar circumstances. In digging, the man came upon a trench, about nine inches in width and twelve inches in depth, in which were several human bones, disposed in order, and covered to the depth of four or five inches with small round stones. The trench seemed to be of considerable length, but it was not farther explored. This is not a mode of sepulture common to the natives; and perhaps was not their work at all. It does not appear that the matter was investigated.
When Mr. Reginald A. F. Murray, Geological Surveyor, was in the Cape Otway district, he made careful enquiries respecting these mounds. Mr. Henry Ford found three Mirrn-yong heaps between the Lighthouse at Cape Otway and the Parker River—two about twelve feet in diameter and three feet in depth, and one thirty feet in diameter and five feet in thickness—all on the open dunes (grassed) overlooking the coast. Mr. Ford opened two, and found in them one stone tomahawk, about four inches in length and three inches in breadth, and one, one inch in thickness, sharpened at one end, and composed of hard, fine-grained siliceous sandstone; numerous chips of chert or flint, black and white, such as occur along the coast, and used probably for cutting, skinning animals, cleaning skins, &c.; bone-awls, six inches in length, some round and some triangular, carefully ground and smoothed; bone nose-ornaments (apparently), about two inches in length, round and polished, and bluntly pointed at both ends; charred bones of the wallaby, opossum, kangaroo-rat, birds, fish, seal (ribs, vertebræ, and jaw-bone), dog (jaw-bone); mutton-fish shells; fresh and salt water mussel-shells; and limpet, whelk, periwinkle, and buckie shells.
The stones that had been used for the oven were hard siliceous pebbles from the coast.
