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YELLOW PATCH – EXPLORING THE DUNES...continued |
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Suddenly I stopped and looked around. The surface of the blow was dotted with stones, yet there were no rocky outcrops in the area, only sand. How could this be? Closer inspection revealed the amazing truth. We were standing in the middle of a vast Aboriginal stone tool factory. |
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As many of you would know, I have spent much of my life travelling by 4WD all over the Australian Outback. During these travels I have come across many spectacular Aboriginal sites including stone tool factories, but never any toolmaking site approaching this kind of scale. |
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The variety of stone tools also exceeded my previous experience. There were tools for cutting and tools for scraping. There were mortars and pestles. There were arrow heads. They ranged from roughs knocked off the parent block by a single blow, through to finished tools made by dozens of strikes in carefully placed positions. |
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The presence of charcoal in the sand at various levels indicates cooking fires, so the place would have been lived in as well as used for tool making. Not surprising given the richness of the ocean and estuary waterways and adjacent bushland. |
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The ceaseless SE trade winds are gradually lowering the sand level through the blow. As the sand moves before the wind, it leaves the stone tools behind, sitting on the surface. The exposed tools cover an area at least 100 meters long by 50 metres wide, but who knows how far they extend below the sand and to either side under areas still covered by vegetation. |
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We spent far too long exploring this amazing site. The heat of the sun eventually forced us to continue out the back of the blow and into the bush, headed for the ocean beach. We pushed through scrubby forests of teatree and wattle – slow going with lots of fallen timber, entwining vines, spider webs, green ants and soft, sandy footing. Occasionally this gave way to a wonderfully open understorey below a forest of huge, ancient paperbarks, tall banksias, and the occasional palm tree. |
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Leanne wasn’t happy as she was bitten several times by the highly aggressive green ants that swarm over just about everything. I escaped this fate, which is lucky since I have a nasty allergy to ant venom. After about an hour we burst out onto the white sand of the ocean beach. We turned north and walked up the beach to a rocky headland, from which we gained good views of the Cape Capricorn Lighthouse. |