which have been explored exhibit no other than very recent evidences of the existence of the race. All this is the more extraordinary, when we take into consideration the fact, already stated, that old tomahawks, chips of basalt, &c., are widely scattered over the surface of every part of Australia that has yet been visited by Europeans.
If only small portions of the alluvia in Victoria had been excavated—if the country had not been occupied for twenty years by many thousands of miners, who have washed the gravels down to the bed-rock in innumerable shallow gullies—the non-discovery of relics might have been easily accounted for; but in this country the spots most likely to conceal them have been laid bare.[1]
Dr. Day, of Geelong, sent me, through Mr. J. A. Panton, a collection of bone-needles found in the garden of Mr. Currie, near Camperdown. They are evidently very ancient, and it was supposed at first that they had been obtained from some one of the younger Tertiaries; but on making enquiries, Dr. Day ascertained that they had been uncovered by Mr. Currie's gardener when trenching, and that with them were numerous human skulls and other bones—proving that the spot had been an ancient burial-place of one of the Western tribes.
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| FIG. 176.—(Scale ¼.) |
The tomahawk shown in Fig. 176 (a and b) is that commonly used by the Aborigines of the Yarra. The stone is a dense quartzite, resembling
- ↑ This is true as regards Victoria—no stone implements have as yet been discovered in the drifts; but in Bennett's admirable History of Australian Discovery and Colonization it is stated that, as "a conclusive proof of the vast antiquity of this mode of making and sharpening the axe [i.e., by rubbing or grinding the rudely-formed axe on a flat stone] is afforded by the fact that, in sinking wells and other excavations in the Hunter Valley, flat rocks with these axe-marks on their surfaces have been discovered at the depth of thirty feet or more below the present surface-level, and covered with drift or alluvium, which, in all probability, must have taken thousands of years to accumulate."—The History of Australian Discovery and Colonization, p. 263. It is nowhere recorded, however, as far as I can gather, that any stone axe or chip has been found at any depth below the surface-soil in Australia.
