bones had been dug out of mounds near these circles. The Aborigines had no traditions respecting them, and they invariably denied all knowledge of their origin." Mr. Johns pursued his enquiries, and on referring to Mr. Philip Chauncy, a District Surveyor, and to Mr. Peter Manifold, of Purrumbete, a well-known settler in the Western district, he ascertained their real character;—they are shelter-circles, erected in situations where neither brushwood nor bark can be obtained for building miams.
No doubt many of the heaps of stones have been erected for shelter; but when the natives had to perform certain ceremonies, to prepare themselves for their dances, and to use the strange rites elsewhere referred to, they must necessarily in such places have built up stones for the purpose of exhibiting the rude figures before which they danced, and going through the several parts of their mysteries.
In Mr. Howitt's notes on the Aborigines of Cooper's Creek these stone-circles are mentioned. He found them in many places where the ground was bare, as, for instance, on extensive clay-flats. The stones were of various sizes, but generally about eight inches in diameter. The natives would give no satisfactory account of them, and Mr. Howitt regards them as worthy of investigation.
Mr. Giles, in his overland expedition, found in a glen near the Rawlinson Range several small mounds of stones, placed at even distances apart; and though the ground was all stones, places like paths had been cleared between them. There was also a large piece of rock in the centre of most of these strange heaps. They were not very high—not more than two and a half feet. "I have concluded," says Giles, "it may be said uncharitably, that these are small kinds of Teocalli, and that on the bare rock already mentioned the natives have, and will again perform their horrid rites of human butchery, and that the drippings of the pellucid fountains from the rocky basins above have been echoed and re-echoed by the dripping fountains of human gore from the veins and arteries of their bound and helpless victims."[1] A minute description of these mounds would have added much to the value of Mr. Giles's narrative, if, as he supposed, they were the work of the natives. Were not these stones only natural out-croppings of the rock, and no more? It does not appear that they were pyramidal buildings; and it is not yet ascertained that the natives of the interior of Australia follow the religious observances of the ancient people of Mexico. Careful notes respecting the character of these stone heaps, information as to the kinds of stones used, and rough measurements, would have been valuable.
Grey found heaps of stones of a different character in North-West Australia. One heap was twenty-two feet five inches in length, thirteen feet ten inches in breadth, and four feet three inches in height; and another was twenty-two feet five inches in length, sixteen feet in breadth, and five feet ten and a half inches in height. They are represented in the drawing given in his work as symmetrical heaps. Grey says:—"They were both placed due east and west,
- ↑ Geographic Travels in Central Australia, 1872-4, by Ernest Giles, p. 171.
