Flint knapping

["Simon Brown" <moonsong@zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz>]

Where I used to live in Western Queensland, wherever there is a watercourse
you will find evidence of Aboriginal campfires along the claypans beside it.
Although their traditional way of life ceased in the 19th century, there
still remain small scattered piles of charcoal with shards of buff-coloured
flints (silcrete) from the making of cutting tools.

My grandfather used to tow a 3' diameter steel tyre rim behind his Landrover
to keep the roads flat after rain, and I recently found a stone axe head
embedded in dirt scraped from the road caught in the rim. The rim had been
abandoned forty years previously, and the axe head was exposed after the
dirt had washed away - it took my notice because it was the only black rock
in a sea of red outback dust. Aboriginal people used to trade in flint, and
it is likely that this tool had originated on the southern coast, a thousand
kilometres away. It was wrong to take the tool from its resting place, but I
figured it had already travelled far caught in the tyre rim.

After we shifted 900 km east to Brisbane, I found an Aboriginal Bora ring
(ceremonial site) in the scrub behind my dad's chook farm (oops, sorry...
chicken farm!) at Anstead. Near the Bora ring was a ridge of rock
overlooking an idyllic watercourse, and thousands of pieces of
hand-shattered stones lay all around. I imagined early people chipping stone
into tools ready for a feast - I returned years later to show my wife and
daughter, but the site had been entirely built over with a housing estate.

Simon