52, PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F, 
this is merely an assumption, as no fossil evidence of any kind 
is to be found. 
In 1865, the late Mr. C. 8. Wilkinson* together with Mr, 
Forde, found flint chips, a sharpened stone tomahawk, and several 
bone spikes or needles, together with bones of animals, in the sand 
dunes near Cape Otway. In the same locality they also found a 
similar bone spike with numerous seal-bones and shells of 
apparently existing species in beach material of pebbles and humus, 
resting upon carbonaceous sandstone and apparently intermediate 
between it and the overlying dunes. 
In 1870, when visiting the Upper Dargo River in Gippsland, 
I was informed by some miners that in cutting a race for mining 
purposes they had turned up a stone tomahawk at about 2 feet 
below the surface. But as the race was cut out of the shingly 
alluvium at the side of the valley the find does not necessarily 
imply any great antiquity. 
Mr. Bennett in his history of Australian Discovery,} makes 
a statement that in sinking wells and other excavations in the 
Hunter River Valley flat rocks were found with marks such as 
are made by the aborigines in sharpening their stone tonahawks. 
These were ata depth of 50 feet or more below the present surface 
and covered with a drift or alluvium. 
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, indicating a land surface, and the whole 
was covered by estuarine beds full of marine shells. The total 
alteration in the level cf the land and sea was about 15 feet below 
high-water. 
Mr. R. Etheridge, junr., Professor T. W. Edgworth David, 
and Mr. J. W. Grimshaw, the authors of the account of this dis- 
covery,{ 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. 
Jn 1897, an interesting discovery was made in the mine of the 
Great Buninyong Estate Company near Ballarat, of fossil 
marsupial bones beneath what is called by miners ‘the second 
rock.” 
At a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria, held on the 2nd 
December, 1897, Mr. T. S. Hart, M.A., of the Ballarat School 
of Mines, exhibited these, being fragments of bones of two or three 
species, among which MJacropus Anak was identified ; the bones 
# XTV. + Il, p. 263. } XVI, p 23. 
