Antiquity of Man in Victoria. 129 



sharp-sighted miners. In no country in the world have the 

 gravels been seai'ched so thoroughly, or are there such extensive 

 exposures still open, as in Victoria.^ The gravels, moreover, 

 have been searched by highly intelligent observers, many of 

 whom were keenly interested in the aborigines, and on the 

 lookout for any traces of them. It is almost inconceivable, if 

 man had been living at the time when these gravels were being 

 laid down, that worked flakes and stone and bone implements 

 should not have been discovered. 



The absence of traces of aboriginal man, except from the most 

 superficial and recent deposits, is admitted by all Victorian col- 

 lectoi's. This fact is emphatically asserted by Brough Smyth. 

 He concludes : " It is remarkable that no stone hatchet, chip of 

 basalt, or stone knife has been found anywhere in Victoria, 

 except on the surface of the ground or a few inches beneath the 

 surface. It is true that fragments of tomahawks and bone- 

 needles have been dug out of Mirrn-yong heaps on the sea-coast, 

 covered wholly or partially by blown sand ; but, though some 

 hundreds of square miles of alluvial have been turned over in 

 mining for gold, not a trace of any work of human hands has 

 been discovered. Some of the drifts are not more than three or 

 four feet in thickness (from the surface to the bed-rock), and the 

 fact that no aboriginal implement, no bone belonging to man, 

 has been met with is startling and perplexing."'^ This fact is 

 still more striking now than it was in 1876, for it has been 

 confirmed by subsequent work. Thus Mr. W. H. Ferguson, an 

 enthusiastic and thoroughly reliable collector of aboriginal flakes, 

 states that the deepest level at which he has found any has been 

 the depth of 12 feet, in some of the Murray silts, near Tal- 

 garno. These silts accumulate very rapidly, and the banks of the 

 Murray were probably the first Victorian locality at which the 

 aborigines camped. There is nothing in these 1 2 feet of silt indi- 

 cating any considerable antiquity. Mr. Kenyon, the most ex- 

 perienced Victorian collector of aboriginal implements, tells me 

 he has never found them except close to the surface. He has 



1 The parts of Victoria which should be excepted from this statement are the 

 province of Croajingolons in the extreme east, and parts of the Mallee countrj' in the 

 extreme north-west. 



•2 Brough Smyth. 



9 



