Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/43

I In 1896 an important find of aboriginal stone hatchets was made at Shea's Creek, near Sydney, at a depth of 11 feet below water-level, together with bones of dugong, bearing such cuts and scratches, not recent, as would be made by direct blows of a sharp-edged stone tomahawk. There were also several standing stumps of Eucalyptus botryoides, including a land surface, and the whole was covered by estuarine beds of marine shells. The total alteration in the level of the land and sea was about 15 feet below high water.

Mr. R. Etheridge, junior, Professor T. W. Edgworth David, and Mr. J. W. Grimshaw, the authors of the account of this discovery, say that the date of the "aboriginal feast upon dugong" cannot be much below the limit of Post-Tertiary time, and it is even doubtful whether it is likely that the date can be carried back into Pleistocene times.

There may be added to this evidence the discovery of the crown of a human molar by the late Mr. Gerard Krefft in the Wellington Caves. As to this discovery, Mr. Etheridge, junior, says that the tooth appears to be completely fossilised, for on comparing it with the teeth of the larger marsupials from the Wellington Caves, the normal condition is without question similar. Yet its position in the cave, and association with the other organic remains entombed there, is open to doubt; and as no other human remains have been found at Wellington under similar circumstances, its precise age must remain uncertain.

If any reliance may be placed upon aboriginal tradition, the affirmative belief in the presence of man in Victoria during the Newer Volcanic Era is strengthened.

It is said that there was a tradition to the effect that Mount Buninyong had at a distant time thrown out fire.

Mr. Dawson reports a tradition among the aborigines of the western district of Victoria that fire came out of a hill near Mortlake, and of "stones which their fathers told them had been thrown out of the hill by the action of fire."